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Hello everyone, What if it turns out that learning together online can be a profound, intimate, deep and powerful experience? What if our assumptions about 'Zoom' and other online platforms - that they are tiring, distancing and a poor substitute for being together physically - turn out to be incorrect? Without the lockdown, we might never have found out. Although some parts of our Professional Coaching Course have been conducted by Zoom for some years, we've been committed to learning together, in person, as the main way to weave a strong developmental community. But, faced with the possibility - perhaps the likelihood - of many months of interruption to travel and to our familiar ways of gathering, we made the early move to step into the world 'as it is' and announce that our programmes would move completely online for now. One of the mainstays of our integral approach to coaching is to treat interruptions to what's familiar as deep opportunities for discovery and development. Instead of having our clients try to turn things back too quickly to the familiar way that they were, we invite them to find new ways to observe and act, and new interpretations of life to live in, that open up deeper and fuller possibilities for relationship, understanding and action. That's true whether the interruption is something that might be wished for - a promotion, or a new relationship - or something unexpected and unwelcome - a loss, an illness, a frustration of carefully laid plans. The pandemic, and all the ways we're all having to restrict ourselves in order to take care of one another, is just such an interruption. And we're keen to step in and find new ways in the midst of it. What we're finding is that learning together online offers profound possibilities for discovery, relationship and development; that 'Zoom' can be an enlivening and intimate forum for community when we participate in skilful practices of relationship, attention and connection; and that, as with all interruptions, learning how to learn together in this way is an opening for an exquisite kind of creativity that is creating new forms, and new ways, that we would probably have never discovered otherwise. For the next year at least, we're not going to rush to try to put back the world 'as it was', which means we're staying completely online for now. We expect that the world won't in any case make it possible to do anything else for quite some time. And we're committed also to playing our part in taking care of one another, and the wider human community, by not bringing people together when it might further the spread of illness. One day we will again run programmes which bring people together in one place. And when that comes, what we know to do will be forever changed by what we're learning during this extraordinary time. Our first entirely online Professional Coaching Course, which starts in June, is now completely full. So we're delighted to announce that we're beginning a second programme for 2020, much sooner than we had originally planned, in September of this year. The dates of the four in-person sessions are below, and all the details are on our website, if it should turn out that now is a time you'd be interested in joining us. We're wishing you all safe passage through these months.
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