So you’re looking at Animas as a place to undertake training as a coach. With several coaching schools out there, you are might ask the question:
“What makes Animas different?”
It’s a great question to ask but it can be tricky for us to answer because we live and breathe Animas and we can’t pretend to know what it’s like to be part of another coaching school – their culture, their trainers, even what they teach. Often the difference is the feeling you get when you’re with us, that sense of knowing you’re in the right place.
That said, we believe we stand out from the rest in a number of important ways and here’s where we think the difference lies:
Coaching Across The Spectrum From Performance To Transformation #
Coaching has moved a long way since the early days of simple goal-setting and achievement, as represented by models such as GROW and the performance coaching approach. Coaching offers a transformational space for people to explore how they respond to the challenges, complexity, choice and speed of the 21st Century.
Sometimes, clients do indeed come to coaching to gain focus and clarity in order to take steps towards their goal. In these instances, models like GROW and SMART are ideal for supporting this. More often, though, people come to coaching confused, stuck, and feeling a little lost. They don’t need therapy but they do need to go deeper than simply focusing on steps and goals. At such times, performance coaching can be counter-productive, risking reinforcing a sense of inadequacy. The journey needed here is one of uncovering and exploration for greater self-awareness and the emergence of possibility. This is the fertile ground of transformative coaching.
We believe that Animas is the only school that fully explores, develops and teaches the transformative approach. Our aim is to develop coaches who are able to work across the coaching spectrum, from performance to transformative coaching, depending on what is needed by the client. Life today is complex and the demands on coaches have moved far past the basics of goal-setting and accountability. We recognise this and have created a programme to meet this head on.
An Integrative Approach That Moves Beyond One-Size-Fits-All #
For many coaching schools, the focus of coaching becomes their model – a single approach to coaching in which the model dictates the coaching far more than the human relationship does.
The best-known example of this, of course, is the classic GROW model. But there are many others.
These models can be very useful and we ourselves teach them. But (and it’s a big but!) we believe that coaching is first and foremost a collaborative conversation. It’s a very particular kind of conversation, to be sure, but it’s a conversation and not a process that a model can dictate. A key difference between us and many coaching schools is that we deliver an integrative framework for coaching that draws from a range of influential schools of psychology and philosophy whilst encouraging you to discover ideas and practices you can integrate into the coaching conversation.
The analogy we like to use to explain this is that of the optician who drops their lens-frame onto your nose and then slots in different lenses, asking, “is that clearer or less clear?” We aim to offer that same ability to take different lenses and integrate them in your practice so that you have the greatest range and flexibility for helping clients gain clarity.
Often called integrative, this approach is the one we believe creates coaches fit for the challenges faced in the early 21st century.
We Help You Find The Unique Coach Within Yourself #
Related to the integrative approach is our belief that the best coach is the person who is truly themselves whilst authentically inhabiting and practising the coaching principles.
Our aspiration for you as a coach is not to become a predefined thing in which you demonstrate a particular model or style that we dictate is coaching. We want to see YOU as a coach. You are unique and you as a coach should be unique.
When our founder, Nick Bolton, originally qualified as a coach, he vividly remembers being told that if he did not complete a full GROW model process with the client, he would not qualify. It wouldn’t have mattered what the client needed or how Nick best coached – it was the GROW model that was the priority! For us, this is back to front. The client must come first and you as a coach must respond to the client and from a place of being YOU living out the principles of coaching not the models of coaching.
There is a saying in coaching which we love but which many coaching schools seem to ignore. It’s this: “Who you are is how you coach”.
Our aim is to help you become the best coach only you can be.
Developmental Support from the Training Room to a School-Wide Community #
We are obsessed with providing ways in which our students and qualified coaches can continue to grow and be supported. During the course itself, your coach training course includes one-to-one support from a personal coach-mentor, group supervision calls, observed practice and a range of online and offline spaces where our coaches can share their challenges or celebrate their successes.
Moving beyond the qualification phase, we ensure that every coach can benefit from free lifetime group supervision meaning that you know you always have a space to bring your challenges.
Unlike some schools in which time-limited membership means you lose access to materials after a certain time, once you join Animas you have lifetime access to the materials, online forum, on and offline community events and much more.
We often joke that when you join Animas, you never leave!
We also have a vibrant community who connect online and in-person at our coaching events, social meet-ups, and coaching circles. We welcome you when you join as a student, and people stay throughout their professional life as a coach for the network and support of like-minded coaches.
We Never Stop Learning And Improving How We Do What We Do #
Quite frankly, it always amazes us how some coaching schools teach the same things in the same way seemingly forever, with no change.
Coaching is an ever-evolving field constantly influenced by the demands of society and the individuals within it, and constantly shaped and formed by our emerging understanding (predominantly through coaching psychology) of how and why coaching works.
As a school, we are always alive to what needs to change and improve in our work to respond to the needs of our customers, the profession and potential clients – personal and organisational. Clearly, we don’t simply change with the wind but we tune in and talk about what’s happening, who’s writing what and how it impacts coaching, what are customers saying and what does the profession see ahead. We then adapt our content in subtle and not so subtle ways. We rejig how we deliver something or we create learning spaces to meet new needs.
For us, creating the best coaching school means listening, learning, and changing. It’s an ever-evolving, living and breathing space. And we love it!
We Nurture A Vibrant, Active Community #
One of the biggest differences we hear from our students and alumni is that no-one else provides a community in the way we do. That’s always great to hear as we put a lot of work into it.
We think community is vital to learning. It creates a space for ongoing connection from which comes motivation, learning, momentum, shared opportunities, friendships and the rich encounters between coaches from many years apart.
Recognised Professionally in the UK and Across the World #
Most coaching courses are professionally recognised otherwise they would be unlikely to survive. So we can’t claim that recognition alone is a difference. However, we have deliberately chosen to be accredited by the International Coach Federation, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, and the Association of Coaching since they are the three largest coaching professional bodies in the world. This makes us one of only a very small handful of schools to hold accrediations with all three bodies.
The ICF is by far the largest coaching body in the world meaning you know your course will be recognised internationally, the EMCC is dominant throughout Europe, and the Association of Coaching is the largest in the UK meaning you have immense credibility across the baord.
The Voices Of Our Students #
We also hear from our students what they find the difference to be when they research and experience other schools so we’ve listed a few of these too. We can’t vouch for these though as they are clearly subjective and anecdotal and we don’t want to judge other schools for things we don’t know.
Integrity #
Many of our students say they chose us because of our integrity – that we weren’t just about signing up another student, or making the training as easy as possible to deliver with a single model, or pretending that coaching will easily make you a big income! We don’t know what other coaching schools say but we are absolutely committed to sharing the reality of the experience of becoming a coach, not just the dream.
Depth #
The word depth is metaphorical, of course, so it’s hard for us to say that depth is one of our differences. But we know precisely what our students mean when they say that we are “deeper” than most other coaching schools. It’s not that we set out to be “deep” for the sake of it but rather that we respect and value the reality of what people bring to coaching and what they need from us rather than forcing the client to work only at a more surface level of action-orientation.
Friendships #
An interesting one for us (and one we love!) is how many students say that the community we have created has allowed them to meet, become friends with and even form business partnerships with people they would never otherwise have met. Unlike some courses where you rarely meet someone who’s not in your group, Animas creates the space for you to meet fellow coaches and students from across the years of our existence!
Entrepreneurial #
We have heard this a number of times – that Animas feels entrepreneurial and encourages students to consider how they are going to create their coaching practice. We don’t consciously build this into the course itself but we certainly create structures to think about, plan and take action on creating a coaching practice. We have a free business community exclusively for Animas coaches, Coaches Uncaged, dedicated to the art of starting and growing a practice, and we encourage conversations and spaces that support coaches to step outside their comfort zone and begin the business building part of their journey.
Finally #
No doubt there are many more differences, and many which will be personal to how you experience us.
We aim to be different not for the sake of difference but rather because we believe the coaching world needs us to be different. Many of the points addressed here are expanded elsewhere in this site and this page is designed to give you an overview. Do dive into the site if you want to explore further.