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Our Purpose and Missions
Our Purpose is why we exist. It’s what drives us to do what we do. And even though we might not be thinking about it specifically every day, it is there in all our aims and actions.
Our Missions are how we go about pursuing our purpose. It’s what we do day to day, month to month and year to year consistently. They are also commitments we make that guide the decisions we make and the aspirations we set ourselves.
Our Purpose
Animas exists to help more people find the courage and openness to look at their lives, work, relationships and themselves and to make changes that bring them greater happiness, meaning and fulfilment.
As grandiose as the statement above might sound, we believe that everybody struggles to a greater or lesser extent with the choices and challenges posed by everyday life.
We don’t mean the big questions around the meaning of life (though they matter too!) We mean the daily challenges of creating a life they enjoy – at home, at work, in relationships, in parenting, in business, in health and wealth. People are often overwhelmed by choice, uncertainty, self-doubt, fear, difficult conversations and challenges of every shape and size.
There’s a word for this.
It’s called being human!
We also believe that one way to deal with these challenges and questions is through purposeful conversation.
Not just any conversation. Not the kind that reinforces your limited thinking, or leaves you feeling just as stuck, just as hard-done by, just as powerless as before.
But instead a conversation with someone who believes that change is always possible, who trusts that you can find the right answer for yourself through the power of a challenging but compassionate exploration, who doesn’t claim to have all the answers for you, who cares and is interested and who holds up a mirror for you to see where you are part of your own problem, who helps you think through with clarity and determination what you really want and how you can move towards it.
We call that coaching.
And that’s where we believe coaching can serve a life-changing purpose by enabling someone to find greater self-awareness, explore alternative perspectives, achieve clarity of vision, gain accountability and make progress towards their vision.
Our Four Missions
1. To develop and support unique, authentic and highly-skilled coaches grounded in humanistic practice, and to support them throughout their professional lives.
With our core purpose in mind, our key aim as a school is to train, develop and support coaches to make an impact in the world through coaching. We believe the ripple effect of coaches supporting their clients to change their lives in big and small ways will have immeasurable benefits to the world.
We also believe that being a coach is a journey of a lifetime not a one-step training process. As a coach, you don’t step out of initial training fully formed. It’s the beginning of a journey of constant learning and reflection which is why we create multiple ways for coaches to broaden and deepen their knowledge, skills and practice.
Whether through our further training, content, talks, interviews or events, we aim to support coaches in their ongoing development and the expansion of their mental maps for the work they do.
2. To nurture a vibrant, diverse, international community of coaches that enables social connection, peer learning and lifelong engagement with coaching.
Alongside continual development, we know that coaching can sometimes be a lonely profession. When you’re out in the world working with clients it can be one of the greatest feelings ever, but you’re often doing it alone – you and your clients – and it’s easy to lose connection with the wider profession.
That’s why one of our aims has always been to nurture a lively, welcoming and supportive community of coaches who stay connected in-person and virtually.
We want coaching to be more than just the activity you do with your clients but to be something you belong to, thrive within and connect to for the rest of your life.
3. To harness coaching and related skills for social impact and to develop and promote a new coaching paradigm with this area of work.
Social impact has been on our agenda for many years and our community is passionate about doing meaningful work that makes an intrinsic difference to people’s lives.
The senior team at Animas has donated supervision and coaching hours since the school’s inception and actively supports Animas alumni in their own social impact projects such as MyLife with Age UK and Support Haven set up for people struggling with the impacts and challenges of the pandemic.
We’ve a history of running our own in-house impact initiatives with partners such as The Wilderness Foundation to provide transformational coaching outdoors to young people as well as working with St Christopher’s Hospice to develop Coach4Care, a unique training programme for carers.
In October 2020, we hired a Head of Social Impact to drive positive social change within the industry. This is believed to be one of the first roles of its kind within the coaching community, and we’re proud to be at the forefront of this wave.
4. To champion, influence and challenge the coaching profession and to help promote and grow it across the world.
Animas is not alone. We are part of the wider coaching profession that has grown up over the last 40 years and taken a respected place in the spectrum of personal and professional change practices alongside psychotherapy, mentoring, counselling and related practices.
The profession is still in its formative years and we aim to be part of the process of shaping and influencing it for the better both by supporting it where we can and challenging it where needed. Few things are ever perfect or complete and that’s part of the joy of an evolving profession such as coaching.
Our aim is to ensure that coaching continues to evolve as a theoretically sound, yet passionate, flexible, creative space for human dialogue to unfold and for the profession as a whole to make an impact in the world through the coming together of shared values.
