Matrix Coaching is a foundational part of a new leadership model that brings the full range of our capacities to the table. We call this Leader as Healer
Matrix Coaching is the 1:1 coaching system that supports the capacities of Leader as Healer, and the building of coherent, high-performing teams.
This radical and uncompromising system is based on over 40 years of research into consciousness and peak performance, in the arts and in leadership.
It recognises and corrects the fundamental fragmentation at the heart of our working cultures, in which doing eclipses being, and hyper-rational, analytical thinking relegates feeling, sensing, intuiting and the transpersonal to the outer fringes of life.
The normalisation of this fragmentation means that leaders and teams are unknowingly functioning at less than half of their full capacity, with a narrow bandwidth of thinking and perception that is outdated and no longer fit for purpose.
Many individuals and organisations are failing to adapt to current challenges and floundering precisely because of this.
The work is a path of restoration, through which we reintegrate previously exiled aspects of our nature: physical, emotional and transpersonal. On this pathway, the brilliance and sophistication of the thinking self takes its rightful place alongside the sensing and feeling selves, together creating a much larger, more holistic intelligence. That which is suited to and urgently needed in the current times.
To face the scope and threats of 21st-century challenges, today’s leaders must possess potent powers for logic, reason, discernment and strategic forecasting. Yet, they must also be empathic and therefore embodied; grounded and therefore intuitive. They must be skilled in mindfulness and deep listening; present and receptive to higher levels of insight and innovation; able to inspire authentic engagement and collaboration; and possess a clear and wholehearted sense of service, mission and purpose.
Nothing less than this will suffice now.
We call such a leader Leader as Healer. S/he navigates with embodied Presence, high emotional and relational intelligence and the practiced capacity to listen receptively to the ‘whispers’ of higher levels of insight and innovation. Their teams coalesce with deep alignment, mutual connection, heightened energy and clarity of thought, responsiveness and action.
Each of us is an energetic structure within which at any one time there is free- flowing life energy, and stuck or frozen energy.
Nothing in us needs healing, fixing or transforming. What is needed are qualities of unconditional acceptance and a trust to move towards and embrace whatever is arising.
In the words of Nikola Tesla: “if you want to understand how the universe works, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration”
Furthermore, Matrix Coaching understands that genuinely effective leadership development must embrace two parallel streams of inner work.
One stream is a depth of meditative engagement and subtle bodywork practice (yoga, qigong etc). These, not as occasional, part-time palliatives that make our dysfunctional mindsets feel a little less stressful – the way the corporate world all too often dumbs down the profundity of mindfulness - but rather as committed daily practices that open ever more subtle frequencies and perceptions within us, as they gradually erode the core experience of separation that underpins the culture of ‘absence’.
The second stream is in many ways the more demanding and certainly the largely ignored one. Because here we understand through our experience that the first path will be limited by all the unintegrated emotional parts of ourselves - the emotions, personal, transgenerational and collective, that we and our lineage had to ‘exile’ along the way, as vital self-protection, because there was never the possibility of a safe enough holding environment to turn fully towards them.
One without the other is incomplete.
Thus, in a Matrix Coaching session we give only two minutes to the ‘narrative’, to the presenting issue, and immediately look together into what is actually happening inside us beyond the conceptual bubble of our thinking.
Here we encounter physical sensations, and within the physical sensations, we discover that there are often unattended layers of emotion.
In the remaining twenty-five minutes instead of creating further fragmentation by labeling some emotions ‘negative’, or by trying to fix, transform or over-analyse them, we create a warm, safe enough, unconditional space to simply feel, to finally give up all the tension we use to not feel.
In so doing, we usually discover a profound relaxation, a deeply welcome sense of ‘coming home’, of ease, of oneness.
This is energy work, and the results of each session will be experienced in the whole self. Typical results are more energy flow, more ease, more compassion and empathy, more clarity, a sense of inner space, and more groundedness.
These are the foundations of Leader as Healer