What is Team Coaching Outdoors?
Quite simply, Team Coaching in an outdoor environment. Bringing Team Coaching together with Nature to enhance the experience and connection with both. You can read more about my Coaching Approach and Practice Here.
Distinguishing between Team Coaching Outdoors and Team outdoor activities can seem a little like splitting hairs, but I feel is important and useful none the less. A Team Coaching Outdoors experience focusses primarily on the Team, your challenges and goals. We take this focus outside into the natural environment and use our surroundings as a way to disconnect to reconnect, and use the power of being grounded in Nature and the Outdoors to enhance our thinking and connections with each other.
Using all of the elements available out in the natural mountain environment, there is something that makes it easier than normal to disconnect from the everyday, and to reconnect with ourselves, the people we are with, and Nature. This allows us to disrupt our patterns of thinking in order to open our horizons, change our thinking focus, and look at our goals and challenges in a completely different light. It works! It’s rare people say they felt worse after spending some quality time in the Outdoors with Nature….. and it’s an fantastic experience to share at the same time!
Our Team Coaching Outdoors services are designed as a completely bespoke package for your individual and team requirements. The majority of our programmes however will include a mixture of 1-2-1 Leadership Coaching time and Team Coaching time. This can be a mixture of remote access conversations via video link, Team time at your location and Team time in the outdoors environment. We work collaboratively with all of our Clients to ensure we can offer you the most effective combination of these elements.
Why ‘Team’?
I focus on ‘Team’ Coaching Outdoors because, whether you are turning up as a Team or not, when we engage in activities that have a common goal, that makes us a Team. Specifically the common goals are on collective and individual learning and development, and also on being safe, together, out in the mountain environment.
If you recognise yourselves as a Team when you arrive so much the better, and my hope is that you learn more about that Team and being a Team whilst you are here.
If you are turning up as an individual, you will still be taking part in activities with us and others around the same common goals of learning together and being safe as a Team in the mountains. This will be part of the experience of Coaching Outdoors.
Why Coaching ‘Outdoors’?
The wonders of this natural mountain environment and the Outdoors here offer us the opportunity to find complete Disconnection from your daily interferences, the grind, your current thinking, your challenges, problems and barriers. We find places of peace and tranquillity that allow you to escape from the normal, allow you to sit, to listen to the wind, the trees, the birds, and sometimes the gentle cowbells that ring in the background. This, coupled with the enormity of the environment gives us the opportunity to move away from the emotion, the perspective and the thinking you may arrive with. I always think of humility when I step out into this space. An immediate shift in perspective of everything else that is going on in life.
This opportunity to disconnect is something that can be hard to find by just stepping into a conference or meeting room, even if it is off-site. However, it is a vital start to a process of thinking differently, shifting perspectives and creating an opportunity to learn and engage with others around us in a way we wouldn’t normally.
Once we’ve left our day to day baggage behind, new thinking, new strategy, new opportunity, new solution, all seem to appear just through having a more open-minded approach. One of the best bits for me however is how this can apply to our relationships in the moment.
As we go through a process of disconnection in conjunction with others, there is something about this amazing outdoor environment that also seems to support us being able to start the reconnection process with more humility, more acceptance and more appreciation, creating deeper bonds and ultimately a better working connection.
A word on Safety and Well-Being
Of the utmost importance when using the natural mountains environment as part of our Coaching is understanding both the Physical and Psychological aspects of safety, before, during and after our time together. This is at the forefront of our minds when designing and delivering your Team Coaching Outdoors services.
All of our Outdoor Coaching activities based in the Mountains are supported by at least 2 members of the Team. One will be a qualified Outdoor Mountain Leader, the other an experienced and qualified Team and Leadership Coach. The numbers of the Team will however be entirely dependant on the group size and activities.
We undertake a full safety risk assessment, as any professional organisation would do when taking a group out into a mountain environment. On top of this, due to the nature of Coaching Conversations, we also acknowledge the Psychological safety of the group and the Coaches and Leaders taking part. As part of this element of the process, where necessary, we will have contracting conversations both on a 1-2-1 and a Team basis before activities are undertaken. This is an important aspect of ‘getting ready’ for your Team Coaching Outdoors, and in a large part will be incorporated into any pre-programme engagements.