Existential Coaching

What is Existential Coaching?

Existential Coaching is an approach to coaching that enables people to get clarity about their lives and make decisions about the practical ways in which they may want to change their behavior, beliefs and values.

The main assumption of Existential Coaching is that life is a journey of uncertainty.

As humans we will be confronted at some moment in life with a challenge of unpredictable results. These challenges may be related with our personal (health, expatriation or romance) or professional lives (promotion, new management, new project, etc…) and they will have an impact on each other. Whatever the uncertainty we face our experience of it may provoke a felt sense of unease, or anxiety.

Existential Coaching does not consider anxiety as "a bad thing" or a problem to be eliminated. The feeling of anxiety provide us with the opportunity to understand better our own individual way of living and is the source of our creativity, our way of relating with others and our decision-making.

“… a life that was anxiety-free would be empty of meaning, enthusiasm, curiosity and the urge to advance itself.” (E. Spinelli)

Existential Coaching aims at assisting clients to more effectively respond to the dilemmas and challenges of living and act in greater harmony with their chosen goals and aspirations.

Our approach is fundamentally based on and aims at mirroring the work and understanding of existential coaching and psychotherapy developed by Ernesto Spinelli and Emmy Van Deurzen

Main Principles of Existential Coaching

• Regardless the type challenge that a client might be facing Existential Coaching addresses the whole worldview of the person; needs, beliefs, relationships, etc… Only by exploring deeply the implications and consequences of our behavior, the ambiguities and contradiction of competing desires, a person can reach self-acceptance and responsibility of any chosen course of action.

• Unlike many other coaching approaches, Existential Coaching does not only focus on positive qualities of the client persona and context. Existential Coaching does not see conflict as a problem, but as a partial successful attempt of expression our individual worldview, and therefore a source for greater understanding and development.

• The worldview of each of us is not developed within us but the emergent result of our relationship with others, and it is in relationship with others that it takes shape and it is enact.

• The value and expertise of coaches is not that of supplying the solutions to clients' problems but in creating a space for the clients to explore, challenge and better understand their worldview and its expression outside the coaching relationship, in the “real world”.

If you want to know more about our approach and see whether it is for you or not contact us as coaching@ease-echanove.com