Leading From The Heart: The Royal Society of Arts Coaching Network

Coaching Network lead and Founder Dr Amina Aitsi-Selmi outlines the Fellow-led Network’s mission and invites FRSAs to participate in its latest project, Coach-Link.

The RSA Coaching Network was created to promote Fellows’ activities in alignment with the RSA’s value of social progress by:   

1. offering educational and experiential coaching events  
2. providing a platform to link coaches and Fellows who may want to work together to catalyse projects that support wider communities and realise the RSA vision. 

A nucleus of committed Fellows – mostly coaches – have become the Network’s steering group and worked to shape the mission, events and a new initiative called Coach-Link over the past few months.  

Coach-Link is a Fellow-to-Fellow initiative aiming to give access to pro bono coaching to FRSAs whose work aligns with the RSA's mission. The initiative is led currently by: Stephen Burt, Hélène Seiler and Amina Aitsi-Selmi (as Network lead). 

If you’re a social entrepreneur, find out more about Coach-Link here and below—and get in contact with one of the coaches before 15 September to take part. 

Since its launch at the second Network event on 27^th June 2017, Coach-Link has garnered much interest and now includes a wide range of coaches ready to offer support to Fellows through a limited number of pro bono sessions in the following areas: 

1. Organising and clarifying business/project goals and strategies 
2. Managing relationships/partnerships 
3. Delivering pitches, presentations and other marketing activities to generate business/project growth and investment. 

It aims to tap into the magic of social enterprise aligned with the RSA mission. This is mostly through addressing the challenges of the uncertainty of entrepreneurship and running your own project by providing encouragement, thought provoking dialogue and strengthening of your entrepreneurial mindset.  

Network Mission and objectives 

The RSA Coaching Network’s overarching mission is to turn coaching into a social contribution. It aims to engage fellows in personal and social development as follows: 

Mission statement: Supporting the RSA mission one coaching conversation at a time. 

Objectives 

1. Being a resource for the RSA community and the projects that Fellows are involved in through different means including pro bono coaching; and enabling access to coaching for social impact; 
2. Providing opportunities to learn about coaching and raising awareness of coaching across the Fellowship; as well as providing a forum for coaches to develop their own coaching approach. 

The Network plans to tap into and promote the diversity of coaching approaches and specialities. It also hopes to expand the impact of coaching by exploring how it can empower diverse groups including vulnerable groups across all ages, ethnicities and gender.  

Background: what is coaching and why is it useful?  

With alarming economic, environmental and social trends globally (unregulated economic activity; climate change and growing inequalities), an urgent need exists to re-evaluate and align with more compassionate and progressive values. Yet, many of us find it difficult to move beyond survival thinking and society still reflects historical imperatives of an industrial age that hampers creativity, collaboration and deep fulfilment.  

Coaching is a blend of different disciplines and fields. Research findings from positive psychology and neuroscience as well as ancient principles from spiritual traditions point to our endless potential for growth and transformation and the advanced human cognitive faculties of reflexivity, empathy and creative intuition that can facilitate our personal and collective evolution.   

Network Activity to date  

To give those of you who haven’t attended previously a sense of what to expect at future meetings, here’s a summary of the Network’s first two events.  

The launch took place on the 3rd of November 2016 with an all-women panel (Cathy Presland; Joella Bruckshaw; and Kerry Dorman) speaking on leadership coaching before diving into small group coaching.  

On the 27^th of June 2017, a second Fellows’ event took place, focusing on social entrepreneurs – it was a great success in taking ideas forward through the magic of coaching conversations. 
  
A Steering Group intensive event with Rich Litvin contributed to developing the Group bond and vision.  

Working with the RSA community 

The RSA Coaching Network seeks to explore how to work closely with sister networks engaged in related themes of better living and enabling access to tools that help individuals tap into greater presence/self-awareness, intuition and wisdom to find creative solutions to personal and collective problems.   

As such, the RSA Coaching Network has a natural affinity with the Conscious Living Network; Reinventing Work Network, Mindfulness Network and Sustainability Network.  The network would also ensure it does not duplicate the work of other coaching networks outside the RSA and look for ways to mutually support each other’s missions.  

Get involved

The Coaching Network is a growing community and we welcome innovative ideas. There are three main ways to get involved with the RSA Coaching Network:  

1) Coach-Link: If you are interested in benefitting from pro bono coaching to boost success in a project, business or vision, click here and follow the instructions to choose a coach.  

We invite you to signal your interest before the 15 September even if you haven’t made a final decision about which coach you’d prefer to work with. Your work with the RSA is important and we encourage you to find the right coach for your needs through a conversation with two to three coaches. 

2) Updates: If you’d like to receive updates from the RSA Coaching Network including interactive events, email networks@rsa.org.uk to be added to the Network mailing list  

3) Events: Keep an eye out for the next networking event in the RSA newsletter and meet us!  

We look forward to continuing this journey with you!