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Episode 144: Climate Consciousness Through Coaching with guest, Charly Cox

• Garry Schleifer

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Award-winning climate coach Charly Cox opens up about the transformative intersection between professional coaching and environmental action. As Executive Director of Climate Change Coaches, she challenges the misconception that addressing climate concerns violates coaching ethics or requires specialized environmental expertise. Instead, she reveals how coaches' existing skills—building strong relationships, asking powerful questions, and creating safe spaces—make them uniquely qualified to facilitate meaningful climate conversations.

The conversation explores a surprising paradox: while research shows most people deeply care about environmental issues, many remain silent because they believe they're alone in their concern. This silence prevents the collective action necessary to address climate challenges. Coaches can break this cycle by creating opportunities for authentic exploration without judgment or moralization.

Charly shares practical strategies for integrating climate consciousness into coaching practices—from adding legacy questions to intake forms to modeling sustainable choices in everyday life. She emphasizes finding climate-positive actions that align with personal joy and values rather than forcing oneself into unpleasant changes. "Pick the things that bring you joy and that also have a positive environmental benefit," she advises, noting that sustainable behaviors are more likely to stick when they enhance rather than diminish quality of life.

Perhaps most powerfully, Charly reveals how coaches can influence change simply by demonstrating that they care. One long-term client recently joined an environmental protection group despite climate never being discussed in their sessions, explaining: "I wouldn't have done that if you hadn't become a climate change coach." This ripple effect illustrates how individual actions gain power through connection and visibility, creating the "social proof" that influences broader change.

Ready to explore the power of coaching in climate action? Download a free chapter of Charly's book "Climate Change Coaching" at climatechangecoaches.com or join their periodic insight sessions to connect with like-minded professionals making a difference through the power of coaching.

Watch the full interview by clicking here.

Find the full article here.

Learn more about Charly Cox here.

Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/

Garry Schleifer:

Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where we bring you amazing insights and in-depth features that you just won't find anywhere else. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, and I'm excited to expand your learning as we dive into the latest articles, have a chat with one of the brilliant authors behind one and uncover the learnings that are transforming the coaching world. When you have a chance, join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we explore groundbreaking ideas, share expert tips and techniques and make a real difference in our clients' lives. Remember, this is your go-to resource for all things coaching, and let's dive in.

Garry Schleifer:

In today's episode, I'm speaking with Climate Change Coach Charly Cox, who is the author of an article in our latest issue Climate Consciousness and Coaching ~ Making the Connection. Her article is entitled Coaching for Change ~ How Coaching Can Create Common Ground and Collective Action on Climate Change. A little bit about Charly. She has an MA. She's a PCC and a CPCC, which I was too. She's the Executive Director of the Climate Change Coaches, a B Corporation based in the UK. She's an award-winning climate change coach and co-author of the first book on this subject, published in 2022 by Open University Press. She is a seasoned public speaker and has given keynote speeches to executive coaches in conferences around the world, including speaking at the COP27 in Egypt. She's also an entrepreneur in residence, that's an interesting title, at Oxford Brookes University. Charly, thank you so much for joining us today. What's the name of the book?

Charly Cox:

The book is imaginatively called Climate Change Coaching, with the tagline The Power of Connection to Create Climate Action.

Garry Schleifer:

Well then, it's no coincidence that we're saying making the connection on our title. So that's excellent. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for writing for us.

Charly Cox:

You're so welcome. It was really lovely to get the chance to write for our friends across the pond, so it was nice.

Garry Schleifer:

Yes. Thank you so much. That's an interesting point. A lot of the people that wrote and that I interviewed are from over on your side of the pond. Any particular reason, or is that because this Climate Coaching Alliance started over there and that's where it rippled from. Like what? Any ideas?

Charly Cox:

I think it probably comes from the fact that our policies are a little bit further ahead Uh, at . Certainly, certainly UK the uk is target, on target more less, or less for its net zero Europe europe, has European a european Union as a governing body, is very far ahead. So that's what I understand from talking to colleagues in America and in Canada. So I may be wrong on that, but my impression from speaking to them is that we have just embraced the policy needed, not enough, not entirely, but to a greater Also that also that climate yet, isn't yet let's hope it stays way, this way a political football over here, so it makes it easier for people to engage with it. It makes it easier for companies, for example, to engage with it.

Charly Cox:

that's probably more of a reason than the Climate Coaching Alliance, who one of their founders is based in Australia, so they're not an internally British entirely entity and we were in existence about a year before the Climate Coaching Alliance was formed, and I think that probably is a reflection of the fact that we were seeing net zero banded around.

Charly Cox:

And the final thing to say is that very many coaches got on the pitch about the 2018, late 2018, when the IPCC published quite a strongly worded report unusually for them about the climate crisis, and that was the first time people said, well, they're really not pulling their punches this time. This is really going to be bad. So a lot of people got involved at that stage who maybe hadn't turned their attention to the environment, and they suddenly said, wow, hang on. And so when we founded the Climate Change Coaches, suddenly, as soon as our website existed, people just started bringing us, the coaches just started bringing us from all over the world, who said I Googled climate change coaching last year and I found nothing. I googled it this year and I found you. Please, can I do something with you? And so that was sort of a starting point for us way back in 2018.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, you know, interesting you should say that because I think it's called the EUDR and, as a publisher, even though I'm in Canada and we print out of the US, there was a webinar for us publishers on the impact of that on us, because, of course, our magazine is delivered around the world, so we want to know, be in compliance with and hopefully be a little bit ahead of the curve on being climate conscious.

Charly Cox:

Yeah, we work with a big publishing house here in the UK, Cambridge University Press and Assessment, and they were talking to us about exactly that actually, about even if you're a UK publisher and you want to publish into Europe, you have to comply with European regulation. Which is one of the really great things about European regulation is that anybody that wants to trade with the EU needs to comply with it. So it doesn't necessarily mean that your country has to create the laws. Companies that want to engage with the European Union, which is a huge territory, need to comply in order to trade. So sometimes, when we think about climate action, we get quite black and white. You know, it's going to be all or nothing. In actual fact, that's a great example of how it doesn't have to be. It can be some places, and then you know other people have to fall in line.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, no, that's great.

Garry Schleifer:

I want to go back to something else you said. You were doing this before the Climate Coaching Alliance. What had you come to the realization that coaching and climate consciousness could work together, and like what drove you to that point?

Charly Cox:

Well I do want to make it clear that people like A lison Wybrow, who was just absolutely lovely, and Joseph McLean, who's brilliant, and Eve Turner, who's really inspirational, who are the founders of the Climate Coaching Alliance. They were all in and around this, you know, longer than me. You know t hey were around these top working on this stuff.

Charly Cox:

People in my team were coaching people around this before I started the Climate Change Coaches, but there was a general feeling, I think, that unless you had some kind of environmental education, a Master's Degree or a science background, this was not your place. And when I had my first daughter in 2016, I had this huge kind of reckoning with the climate crisis. I sort of stood back, realized what was going on, having no background in environmental work whatsoever, and thought I've got to do something and immediately assumed I had to give up coaching because no one in coaching was modeling doing something about climate. And you know, I had a friend who's now a team member, who was an ex-sustainability professional, who had gone into coaching and she was coaching people in sustainability, but that's because she was an ex-sustainability professional, so she was allowed.

Charly Cox:

We'd made up these false rules in coaching, I think, and so I talked to people and I said I want to do something about climate change. And they immediately assumed that I would be aggressive, that I would be moralizing, that I would be forcing an agenda on my coaching clients because that's what people see in activists who have a really important role. I'm not dissing activists and so they thought I would be an activist coach. And people told me don't do this. This is commercial death. You will lose all your clients. And then other people told me you're not allowed to do this. This is breaking the ICF code of ethics, or you know everyone's code of ethics, for example, and unfortunately, as you said, I'm an entrepreneur in residence that just made me want to do it more.

Garry Schleifer:

Don't tell an entrepreneur they can't do something.

Charly Cox:

Well, quite, it's like oh, why not? So that and the fact that I had this kind of real drive, this real feeling of I can't not do it, and then kind of don't tell me I can't not do it, you know. So it took me about two years to work out how. So 2016 to 2018.

Charly Cox:

It took me about that long to kind of really get my hands around it, and then, when I launched my website, it was the day after the IPCC report came out, by complete coincidence, and my phone just started ringing. And then, about a month later, I got an opportunity that essentially meant that I created the Climate Change Coaches. I was invited to make a speech. I didn't want to make a speech. I said I've got this idea. Could we instead bring a bunch of coaches to your audience and test out whether you can coach people about climate change? And they said that's a great idea.

Charly Cox:

And so I just rang some coaches I knew and said do you want to do this? And they said, yeah, okay, let's find out, you know. And so we found out that you can coach people to have a better relationship with the climate crisis, and so that's where that was born from, and at that moment, as soon as we launched the Climate Change Coaches website, we were just, I mean, inundated with coaches completely, and so when a year later, the Climate Coaching Alliance was founded it was it was really fantastic because it meant that we had somewhere to send people.

Charly Cox:

We could say listen, there's this community waiting for you who want to talk about the things you want to talk about. And it freed us up to focus on our actual mission, which was accelerating the green transition and putting coaching into the hands of climate workers. And so we still work with coaches now. We love professional coaches. We work with internal coaches, but the Climate Coaching Alliance formation was really helpful. It created a global home for coaches. They did tremendous amounts of work with the ICF, the EMCC, with the other global bodies, to try and get this into the code of ethics to make it safer for people who maybe weren't as gung-ho as I was.

Garry Schleifer:

Well, you know, and kudos to you for just jumping right in like that. Until I met with Renee, who was my co-partner on this, I had them as two separate things.

Garry Schleifer:

I could be active in the climate conscious arena and be a coach, but never the two should meet.

Charly Cox:

What kind of narrative?

Garry Schleifer:

It's what you said. It's not my client's agenda. It never occurred to me to bring my passions into there. Okay, now that's a load because I'm an entrepreneur and I bring that in all the time when it's appropriate, when my client is asking like well, you're an entrepreneur.

Garry Schleifer:

So what I'm learning is from a lot of you, as examples, is that when you put out your name as a climate change coach, you're basically saying that's what I coach. So duh, I mean no different than if I was like an entrepreneur coach or a leadership coach or an ADHD coach or a relationship coach. I've put my shingle out. You expect I will talk about that at some point, or you know you have the freedom to bring it up.

Garry Schleifer:

So, and what I've also learned, and you wrote this in the article, ask your existing clients what they think about climate change, and where I love to see that happen was adding a question to your intake questionnaire about the legacy. And not even just that, you want to leave to society and the environment. So it's even not driving them to that answer. It's still allowing them some space and grace to figure out like what does that mean to you? Legacy could mean anything, right, to your children. Like you had that epiphany when your daughter was born. It's like, oh. So there it is. So it was just didn't occur to me until somebody pointed out that it could work, which is why we call the issue Making The Connection, kind of like your book.

Charly Cox:

Yeah, exactly.

Charly Cox:

Well, and in the book I guess what we are really keen on is focusing on what a coach is good at. So what coaches are really good at is building very strong relationships very quickly. That's why coaches work on Zoom. Other people hate Zoom meetings but they love Zoom coaching because the coach kind of reaches through and makes this stronger connection. We ask better quality questions.

Charly Cox:

So one thing that's missing in the climate conversation is feeling a sense of collective agency. We have two kind of doubts that dismantle our actions. One is can I even do this? Can I go vegan? Can I buy an electric car? Can I agitate for my company to have a better recycling policy, for example? But the other one is if I do it, will anyone care? Like, can we do this? And that collective doubt is what dismantles the individual agency. And so what we said was hang on.

Charly Cox:

Well, what's stopping people bonding together? Well, just being not being able to be in relationship well with each other, not being able to have robust conversations about difference without being mean, you know, and also not being able to listen properly to each other. It's like my view and your view, and we're just going to you know. So actually, the power of connection is what creates action, connecting really well to each other. Marketers call it social proof. Seeing other people are doing something, following the majority view. So when you have an election and people put stickers in their house saying I'm voting for Bill or Bob or whoever it is Susan, that social proof, you think, oh look, how many people are voting for Susan. Wow, she must be really good.

Charly Cox:

If we don't talk about this in a way that isn't combative, if we don't have compassion for each other's views, then we're not able to move this, this on, we're not able to join together and move. So many movements start and then fall apart because of the lack of good relationships, right? So part of what we wanted to do was say listen, coaches, we're really good at helping people be skillfully in relationship with things they'd rather not be in relationship with. None of us want the climate crisis to be happening.

Charly Cox:

I would love it not to be true but it is so how can we engage with it in a way that feels less frightening? How can we then engage with each other in a way that is less competitive? And all of these are coaching behaviors that we know because we've been trained to use them. We should be teaching other people this and we should be modeling this for other people that we can say to our client hey, what do you think about climate change without like, why are you such a bad human for not doing it? We should be able to open this one up. Years ago I spoke to the then chair of the Climate Psychology Alliance, which is was a forerunner. It's still in existence in the UK. It's got psychologists, coaches, counsellors you name it as members, and he talked about going to a wedding and it had been unseasonably hot. It was February and it had been 20 degrees which is not normal, 20 degrees Celsius not normal for the UK and he sat next to a guy who said hasn't it been really hot? And he wanted to jump in and say, yeah, well, this is climate change, you know. And instead he said yeah, how do you feel about that? And they had this incredible conversation sitting next to each other at the wedding breakfast and he said you know, even as a psychologist, it reminded me to just ask more than tell, and that's what we do as coaches. That's why we have a role here, because we can say what do you think about it? And help people to just explore things that they maybe wouldn't otherwise.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, no. Well, yeah, definitely. You know, I can't help but think about the way that I've initialized conversations. It's an open space and you know to your point, and then just leave it up to the client in a way, and the coach is listening for things anyway.

Garry Schleifer:

So you know, that's just amazing.

Charly Cox:

And sometimes you don't even need to bring it up. You know, I still coach people from pre-2016 when I was a leadership coach and and one of them said to me the other day you know, I've joined a group in my village that's trying to protect the green belt, which is an idea we have in the UK of kind of creating belts of land around cities that you can't build on. And she said we're trying to protect the green belts in our county. And she said I wouldn't have done that if you hadn't become a climate change coach.

Garry Schleifer:

Wow,

Charly Cox:

And yet I've never talked to her about the environment ever. So actually sometimes just showing that you care is enough to sort of open the door for people to also show that they care. I don't believe that any single person doesn't care about the environment.

Garry Schleifer:

Well, and you gave some pretty amazing statistics in your article about how much people care. Yeah, and to your point, perhaps they just don't have the place, or they don't think they have the place, to have those conversations.

Charly Cox:

Yeah, and our brain pulls a number of tricks on us, you know. But as with any systems change, like making organizations more diverse, for example, that would be a systems shift in an organization. Often these big systems change problems, they lead to the same things in our brain, and you know one of them being I've got to solve it on my own.

Charly Cox:

You know it's nuts, but yet sort of, even though we know it, we sort of feel it, and so we then don't do anything. We turn away, you know, we go it's too hard. Or the other one is I'd have to have a PhD to know what to do, because some of this just is so complex. And then you meet somebody who's an expert they blind you with science and you think, oh, there's no way I can do anything. Yeah. Or we see the standard ways people respond and we don't want to do them. Like we, I don't want to be a vegan. I'm not a vegan, for example. kay, so don't be a vegan then do something else. What do you want to do?

Charly Cox:

You know, I live in Europe. I live in the UK and we have, not necessarily in the UK but in Europe, we have amazing trains. I love exploring. As a 19 year old, I traveled all over Europe by train. So now I take my family on holiday by train, not by plane, because I love it and my kids love it. But if I hated it, it would be a very bad thing to do, because I would just moan the entire time making everybody miserable and resent it completely, and that's not a way to live.

Charly Cox:

So pick your thing. Pick the things that bring you joy and that also have a positive environmental benefit. Don't force yourself into stuff that you'll hate every minute of it because you will just be a terrible advocate to everybody else to that point about bringing other people on board. You'll just go around saying, oh, veganism's so hard, it's so awful.

Garry Schleifer:

Exactly, don't go for things that you aren't passionate about. I'm a reduce, reuse, recycle guy. So I look at things, and everything I look at is how can I avoid that thing from ending up in a landfill? First of all, don't buy it? Do I really need it? And then, if I do have it, what do I do with it when I'm done with it? And so we have recycle bins in our home. W e're in a building that has recycle.

Garry Schleifer:

I basically just am passionate and open and caring that other people follow that lead when they can, and so around the household it's like oh, what do I do with this cloth? Oh well, if we send it over here, they'll chop it up and make it into other stuff, right? So these kind of answers come to me as well that help other people understand what has me committed to and thinking I can make a difference in this one corner of the whole right.

Charly Cox:

And what matters to you about that, particularly about the reuse, reuse, recycle?

Garry Schleifer:

Not filling up landfills.

Charly Cox:

Yeah.

Garry Schleifer:

Right, it's like you said in your article about it's now becoming that it's not just fish eating plastics, but it's the plastics breaking down and being a part of the fish. So it's things like that that I have in mind, the plastic islands that are out in the ocean. So those are the things that just upset me in a way and terrify me in another, and I know that if I, you know, when I'm done with this container, like, could I use it for something else, like maybe growing some plants out of or something like that, until it biodegrades on its own. I've had this one for years too. So that's the other thing is, you know. Don't get me started on bottles because I drive them crazy with get it in the recycle. In a way, but jokingly, they count on me to be that advocate. So they know that's who they can count on me to be. But it's definitely about, like, landfills, and I've been to countries where people make a living out of picking out of the garbage which is, in itself, is great and sad at the same time.

Garry Schleifer:

But in Canada I don't believe anybody does that so why should I help fill a landfill, you know? Another example is we have a store, a Canadian store, called the Bulk Barn, and you buy bulk foods and on Sundays, if you bring your own containers, they weigh them and then you get a discount for bringing your own containers. I know you nod, but there are people who see me come in there with the containers into the store they're in and they go I can bring my own containers? And I go yep, just take them over there, they'll weigh them. You go do your stuff, they'll deduct the weight when you get to the cash. And don't forget to ask for the week's coupon. I'm also a very frugal shopper. That's a whole nother story. But yeah, there's things that you can, just by being who you are about your passion around climate consciousness, that will impact other people. It's like what you said with that client who you never coached on climate change.

Charly Cox:

Exactly and we have a phrase, use it or lose it, in the UK in relation to things like local buses. If you live in a village in the middle of nowhere maybe the local bus service is really needed by the elderly who can't drive or don't drive, and if you don't use that bus you will lose it. And I think the same is true for refillable containers. The more people who kind of vote for a change, the more that change will stick. Because companies are looking for trend data, same as governments that's called polling data. They're looking to see like where are people going and how can we be with that change. And so if there's a triangle of kind of change points, there's governments, there's companies or organizations and then there's the public. And the public often feel very powerless. They say, well, what can I do? You know, what can I do, as Garry, just like refilling my. Does it really make a difference? But it makes a difference to those, because those people saw you do it, because the company said how many people did the refillable things? Is it worth us doing that anymore? Oh yeah. There was a supermarket that 800,000 people called it and asked what were they doing about plastic here in the UK? And I bet you that every single one of those 800,000 people thought this phone call is not going to make any difference and on its own it didn't. But 800,000 phone calls and that marketing department probably said, whoa, we'd better have a line on plastic. What are we doing about plastic? Because this is really bad, you know. And so suddenly the dial starts to shift. So you know, that's the connection bit. It's like don't keep these ideas to yourself. Put it on Facebook.

Charly Cox:

n, I took my containers to Bulk Barn. Look what a great deal I got because I did it. I discovered that I could re-glaze my sunglasses. I had a pair of sunglasses that I've had for God, actually, I've nearly had them for 20 years. Thinking about it, have I? Yeah, yeah, maybe I have and they were very expensive. I bought them at an airport. I'd forgotten to take sunglasses with me. I was going to West Africa where I used to live, and knew I couldn't buy any there, so I was completely over a barrel at the airport and they were 200, which at the time was a huge amount of money and they were scratched to hell and I discovered that for 30 pounds I could have them re-glazed and I was convinced I had to throw them away.

Charly Cox:

I didn't realize such a service existed, so as soon as I found it, I put it all over Facebook.

Charly Cox:

Guys did you that you can reglaze your sunglasses?

Charly Cox:

And lots of people got in touch and said I had no idea you could do that. Why would you? You think, oh, I'll chuck those in the bin and I'll get a new pair. So there's so many things like that, where our clock in the kitchen broke and, um, I rang the manufacturer and they were like the glass broke. I knocked it off the wall when I was dusting and the glass broke and I rang the manufacturer. They said we just sell new clocks, we don't fix them, which is a classic, isn't it? We don't know how to fix them, you know.

Charly Cox:

And it sat on the wall, broken for months. And then my husband said there's a shop down the road that sells windows, glass windows. So he took me down to them and he said could you cut me a piece of glass? And the guy said no problem, $20. And it was done like that, you know. But it takes a bit of thought and our lives are so busy that we don't have time for that thought process. So this is why the four-day week has been proven to create more climate conscious behaviors and reduce the carbon of households, not because people are sitting around on that final day, but because they have more time to be intentional about recycling and reusing and fixing and not just, oh, just bin it and buy a new one on amazon. Which is what we do when we're stressed and tight for time. And so, you know, the four-day week is not about saying to people just, you know, down tools for a day. It's about giving people more space in their lives to be able to make more climate conscious, cheaper, better decisions for their households as well, not just consuming more because we don't have time to make better decisions.

Garry Schleifer:

Wow, thank you for introducing that and everybody like, because technically we don't have a, we still have a five-day work week.

Charly Cox:

Same here, same here, yeah but, they're fighting four-day weeks.

Garry Schleifer:

I don't. I have freedom Fridays. Nobody can book me on a Friday. They try and I tell them what I'm doing and they're like oh, and then you see the wheels turning. It's like, well, how can I do something like that?

Charly Cox:

Yeah, exactly, and that's why you know what you write in your email signature also matters. You know we make a point during the summer of saying our team takes August off to be with their children and their relatives and their community. Nobody's working in August in Europe.

Garry Schleifer:

Europe's always had that big. I think it started most with the car manufacturers and that kind of thing. Because I remember my relatives in Germany and they were like nope. They retool the factory or something like that.

Charly Cox:

Yeah, and so there's no point going to work just to perform, you know, just to, you know be present, so we take that off, but we make a point of saying why in our you know out of office, that it's about valuing community as much as it is about valuing work. And that's another kind of readjustment, recalibration that would help is people being able to say I have a family, even if you don't have children, I have people I want to spend time with. I don't want to just spend time in my job. That's also another thing that's been shown to create lower carbon lifestyles but also happier, more resilient communities. Where you live you've had really big problems with wildfires in Canada and south in the USA as well, and you know that's a very real example of when communities need to be resilient. They need to know how to get together quickly, how to get safe quickly, how to establish, you know, support networks at a moment's notice. All of that stuff comes from having time to be with each other rather than just dashing in and out.

Charly Cox:

So yeah, so that's another kind of reason for those kind of things.

Garry Schleifer:

There's so many reasons and so many places to take action, as you say in the article.

Charly Cox:

And if nothing else, if your coaches, if the coaches listening to this and reading choice Magazine, who have the ability, because they work for themselves, to have Freedom Fridays, that's another great reason to have them. They will be able to probably reduce their costs, have a better quality of life and reduce their carbon footprint of their own life, their own work. So even if they don't tell anybody about climate change, they don't do anything about climate change. Take a day off a week and you will be doing something.

Garry Schleifer:

Well, and my goal is to be outdoors in the winter weather. It's nice, so that's part of my freedom Friday. Charlie, this has been absolutely amazing. What else, other than the hundreds of tidbits we've talked about, would you like our audience to do as a result of this article and this conversation?

Charly Cox:

Well, I'd love them to take a look at our book. They can get a free chapter on our website, which is climatechangecoaches. com. There's a free downloadable chapter, so they don't have to buy the book. If they want to buy the book, then it's available in all good bookshops and in North America it's printed on demand, so there's not a whole lot of stock sitting in a warehouse wasting away. We have a very clear policy that is printed when you want a copy, so there's a lower footprint to it. So I'd love them to have a look at the book.

Charly Cox:

I'd really love coaches just to start to talk about this issue with people and not think that you need to be an expert in this subject in order to talk about it. When I trained as a coach, it was impressed upon me very strongly that we were not the people who had the answers. Our clients have the answers. That is a core tenant of ICF coaching, certainly, so why would we need to be experts in climate in order to coach people about climate?

Charly Cox:

I am not an expert. What I know you could probably write on the back of a postage stamp, or I've learned from my clients to be honest. But I can ask good questions. I can be a good coach to those people. I hope so. That's what people can do.

Charly Cox:

They don't have to be in any way expert in climate. What you need to do is, they need to notice their own thoughts in relation to these conversations.

Charly Cox:

When we train coaches, we train internal coaches in organizations, the first thing coaches say is they want to do the course because they want to learn new tools. Totally valid and we've got new tools for them. What they come out of the course saying is oh, you taught me how to be in the conversation myself. Because if you come to me as an individual coach and you say I'm having a fight with Rene, we're having a conflict, I don't have any skin in that game. So I can be neutral and I can say let's talk about it, let's look at it from Renee's perspective. But when you say I'm frightened about that my house might burn down in the next wildfire and maybe, you know I live in the same community, I think, yeah, I'm frightened about that too. I'm now triggered and I can't be a good coach. Being able to be with this topic ourselves is the greatest service we can do to helping our clients and so practicing being with it, talking to people and noticing when we trip up and we suddenly go oh, I'm moralizing, you know.

Charly Cox:

That's really the trick that we need to pull here and I'd really encourage all of your coaches to just spend some time thinking about how they feel, find something they're passionate about when it comes to environment. Everyone's got a piece of it that's theirs, whether it's food, or health, or landscape, or people or justice. We've all got something that we can care about. And find that thing and then get involved. Get involved with your local community group and talk to people about it, because the lack of talking is creating a feeling that nobody cares, when actually, you know, as we put in the article, the research shows that very many people care. They just don't think anyone else does.

Garry Schleifer:

It is funny in a way but not funny in the big way, but we'll leave it as funny. Charly, what's the best way to reach you?

Charly Cox:

People can email me at charliecox@ theclimatechangecoaches. com. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm there also as Charly Cox, Charly with a Y and you can also just get in touch through our website, climatechangecoaches. com. There's a contact us form. We'd love to hear from you. We have periodic insight and energy sessions every couple of months and they're free and free for everybody to join. And sometimes we also run training sessions which are in aid of charity. So we'll run a workshop which will cost, you know, $20 or $30. But all of that money will go to an environmental charity.

Charly Cox:

So your coach is very welcome, always welcome to come to any of those.

Garry Schleifer:

Thank you, thank you so much. Well, thank you so much for writing the article and for joining me for this Beyond the Page episode, brilliant conversation. As we knew we could go on forever, however, we must move on. Thanks again, Charly

Charly Cox:

Thank you very much for having me.

Garry Schleifer:

That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app, most likely the one that got you here. If you're not a subscriber to choice Magazine and you're watching this, you can sign up for your free digital issue by scanning the QR code in the top right hand corner of our screen or by going to choice-online. com and clicking the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.