welcome

our website is dedicated to inspiring the application of Relational Mindfulness in coaching, other helping professions and beyond

Based on our pioneering book Relational Mindfulness for Coaches: Enhancing Presence, Awareness, Wisdom, Compassion and Courageous Collaboration, our aim here is provide information and resources and to engage with you through our community and contact form.

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about the book

The quality of coaches’ presence and awareness is key to the quality and success of our coaching relationships and interventions. Relational Mindfulness for Coaches supports coaches to co-create compassionate, psychologically safe yet courageous coaching spaces, generating profound insight, wisdom and understanding in the client.

At the book’s heart are powerful practices to expand mindful presence from the individual to the relational, bringing present-moment, non-judgemental awareness to self, others and the relationship, whilst speaking and listening. The book provides understanding of Relational Mindfulness’s (RM’s) foundations in mindfulness, compassion and Insight Dialogue, an approach to insight meditation that brings mindful speaking and listening into the meditation.

Drawing on our and other experienced coaches’ experiences, we illustrate the benefits of engaging in RM practices and provide easy-to-follow guidance for bringing RM into coaching. We also situate RM in the wider field of theory and practice, including neuroscience, and explore RM in relation to a host of other coaching models. In these challenging times of polarisation and conflict, with a polycrisis including the climate emergency and a mental health crisis, this inspiring and practical book addresses the urgent need to create transformational dialogue and interrelatedness in coaching and beyond.

This trailblazing book will be essential reading for coaches, coaching supervisors, coaching psychologists, coaching academics, leaders, and other helping professionals.

get the book
access the book resources

about the book

The quality of coaches’ presence and awareness is key to the quality and success of our coaching relationships and interventions. Relational Mindfulness for Coaches supports coaches to co-create compassionate, psychologically safe yet courageous coaching spaces, generating profound insight, wisdom and understanding in the client.

At the book’s heart are powerful practices to expand mindful presence from the individual to the relational, bringing present-moment, non-judgemental awareness to self, others and the relationship, whilst speaking and listening. The book provides understanding of Relational Mindfulness’s (RM’s) foundations in mindfulness, compassion and Insight Dialogue, an approach to insight meditation that brings mindful speaking and listening into the meditation.

Drawing on our and other experienced coaches’ experiences, we illustrate the benefits of engaging in RM practices and provide easy-to-follow guidance for bringing RM into coaching. We also situate RM in the wider field of theory and practice, including neuroscience, and explore RM in relation to a host of other coaching models. In these challenging times of polarisation and conflict, with a polycrisis including the climate emergency and a mental health crisis, this inspiring and practical book addresses the urgent need to create transformational dialogue and interrelatedness in coaching and beyond.

This trailblazing book will be essential reading for coaches, coaching supervisors, coaching psychologists, coaching academics, leaders, and other helping professionals.

get the book
access the book resources

praise
for
the
book

From the start of this outstanding book, it is clear that the authors Emma Donaldson-Feilder and Liz Hall bring us a wealth of experience and a deep and in many ways pioneering approach to coaching. Their book addresses their subject in a wide-ranging way, and its extensive outlining of both theory and practice will make it a truly invaluable resource for any coach who wants to take their practice to new levels, and to become an agent of genuine transformation for their clients.

…It is no longer enough to participate in and help people to make a broken system work better. It is time for coaches and coaching to play their part in birthing the highest possibilities for humankind.

For anyone who hears this calling and who aspires to reach their highest potential as a coach, to be of the deepest service not just to their clients but to humankind as a whole, this pioneering book is one you will return to over and over again.

Presence and connection are the double helix of our being. Without the belonging that is sustained by our relationships, we fade into a purgatory of loneliness. Without being present with the other, we cannot realise the loving inter-connection that is the truth of our existence. Emma Donaldson-Feilder and Liz Hall offer the treasure of why, what and how – inspirationally, wisely and with profound compassion. Relational mindfulness must be the future for coaches, indeed for all of humanity. Here is how.

Clearly, mindfulness enhances our relational capacity. Clearly, well-crafted relational practice can strengthen mindfulness. This book contributes to how this synergy can be applied in coaching, leadership, and elsewhere. But the boldest assertion in this work is suggested on every page: our growth in relational capacity and awareness can yield the intuitive wisdom we so urgently need at this time. Wisdom is about human suffering and our higher potential as skilful and compassionate people. And profoundly wholesome results can be expected when this wisdom guides our lives – as coaches, leaders, citizens, and members of the human family. I hope you read this book carefully and let it touch you.

We all want a better life. For some, it means more freedom. For others, it means more love. Sadly, for too many it means less fear and pain. An even more basic human drive is to want a better life for our children and our loved ones. For many, it may even extend to all of the others with whom we share our planet. As coaches or helpers, we want to inspire and invoke this hope and renewed capability in our clients. This book is about hope. But it is not fanciful hope, it is feasible hope. Liz and Emma focus on two major themes, mindfulness and caring for and with others. With their style and linguistic magic, they have created a book that is a feast of possibilities. Relational Mindfulness is what creates conditions in which you and coaching clients, friends, family or coworkers have special moments of caring, laughter, productivity, and ingenuity. That is what this book can help you seek and achieve. Enjoy reading it. Talk about it with others. Practice their exercises.

Emma Donaldson-Feilder and Liz Hall have written a brilliant book on Relational Mindfulness and its significance for coaches and in coaching. In our mechanistic, utilitarian, digital, world it is rare truly to be listened to. And it is especially rare in the workplace context to have deep, meaningful, open and interactive conversations. It is too easy for coaches to fall for the merely instrumental and for the coaching relationship to be hollowed out in pursuit of goals, KPIs and targets. This book allows for a return of our essential humanity into the coaching context. More than almost anything today, we all need to be deeply heard and to be allowed to discover our own deeper purpose. Good coaching leads to that. This book can help us all coach more deeply.

praise for the book

For anyone who… aspires to reach their highest potential as a coach, to be of the deepest service not just to their clients but to humankind as a whole, this pioneering book is one you will return to over and over again.

Relational mindfulness must be the future for coaches, indeed for all of humanity. Here is how.

The boldest assertion in this work is suggested on every page: our growth in relational capacity and awareness can yield the intuitive wisdom we so urgently need at this time… I hope you read this book carefully and let it touch you.

As coaches, we want to inspire and invoke hope and renewed capability in our clients. This book is about hope. But it is not fanciful hope, it is feasible hope.

More than almost anything today, we all need to be deeply heard and to be allowed to discover our own deeper purpose. Good coaching leads to that. This book can help us all coach more deeply.

about us

Emma Donaldson-Feilder

Emma Donaldson-Feilder is a Relational Mindfulness (RM) and Insight Dialogue (ID) teacher, chartered coaching psychologist, coaching supervisor and chartered occupational psychologist, who aims to support the development of kinder, wiser workplaces. In 2019 she completed a Professional Doctorate, in which she conducted research exploring the use of mindfulness and RM in leadership development. Building on this work, she developed a range of RM programmes to support leadership development and coach development.

more about Emma

Liz Hall

Liz Hall is the founding editor of Coaching at Work magazine (in 2005), award-winning journalist specialising in HR, business, coaching, and health and wellbeing, a leadership coach, and a mindfulness teacher, with clients including the NHS. She trained as a mindfulness teacher with Bangor University’s Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice (UK) and Solterreno (Spain) and has been practising mindfulness since 2004. Liz is the author of other books including Mindful Coaching (Kogan Page) and Coach Your Team  (Penguin).

more about Liz
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