We are pleased to share an article entitled “Coaching For Change ~ How coaching can create common ground and collective action on climate change“ written by Charly Cox.
Start a conversation about climate change, and you may find that people begin earnestly studying the floor or ceiling. This hot topic creates a lot of guilt in us, stirring strong emotions. It’s also a topic that comes with blame, shame and righteousness. As coaches, it can be easy to see this angst, avoidance and aggression and decide that this is not our lane to drive in. But we would be wrong. These are exactly the reasons that coaches – with our focus on empathy – should be here.
Climate change is both a technological and environmental problem, with related photos showing high-tech farming, wind turbines and pristine forests. Yet the problem is just as much psychological. Climate scientist Kimberly Nicholas noted, “We already have the tech we need. A 2018 study in Science led by Steve Davis concluded that most of today’s energy services were ‘relatively straightforward to decarbonize.’”
What’s missing is the willpower to use these technologies. This is sometimes called the ‘say-do gap’ – the gap between intention and action that takes us from sitting on the sofa complaining how unfit we are, to jogging down the street in snazzy new sneakers.
Coaches may have an old story in our heads that ‘people don’t get it or don’t care’ about climate change, and the only role is to educate. But this story has changed. A study in Nature, found that 66 to 80 percent of Americans supported “major climate change mitigation policies”. And “A majority of Americans (61 percent) say that global climate change is affecting their local community,” according to the Pew Research Center.
The cat is out of the bag. It is now much more likely that people are concerned and want to see action, but feel stuck as to how to do it.
Climate change is also no longer a future problem; it is here now. This year alone, the USA has experienced its hottest temperatures on record, and flooding in Spain resulted in a shocking 224 deaths, making it a national natural disaster. Yet the say-do gap persists for individual citizens, corporate leaders and politicians.
Listen as a coach to someone being interviewed about climate change. You will start to hear that people from all walks of life sound powerless, overwhelmed, unsure of whether their actions count, and even threatened by the change required. The scale of the challenge feels too huge, regardless of your position in society.
There is a paradox at play when we think of the climate crisis. On one hand, many of us don’t see how we can make a positive difference. We feel, understandably, like a small cog in a huge engine, unable to fix the system by ourselves. But on the other hand, most of us would likely agree that our actions are making things worse. We know that flying generates huge emissions, that plastic chokes our fish, and that some food choices create deforestation.
We know that our day-to-day actions worsen climate change, but at the same time don’t believe the inverse to be true.
Why don’t we see that our day-to-day actions can improve the situation?
One reason is that we feel alone. In the same research in which people reported support for climate policies, respondents also assumed that only 37 to 43 percent of Americans supported such policies. This disparity, known as ‘pluralistic ignorance,’ is stopping us talking about a subject that is already imperiling our lives and livelihoods.
It is as if we are all struggling to come to terms with the terminal illness of a beloved relative, while assuming that we are the only ones feeling loss and confusion. In such a circumstance, we would want to create space for that family to talk safely about their feelings. What’s different here?
Coaching at its heart helps people to believe in change, to feel safe and to find the willpower to act. Along the way, we do battle with self-doubt, surface misgivings and offer new perspectives that make the path easier to walk. Fundamentally we are also a companion, because we know that left to our own devices, many of us would stay on that sofa.
Coaches encourage, meaning we put courage into people. Doesn’t climate change feel like the kind of daunting topic that needs all the courage it can get?
If we restrict conversations about the climate crisis to either being taboo or to those who are keen to have fiery, aggressive debates, we miss the opportunity to help a much wider group of people to make sense of the change that’s being asked of us. That matters, because change happens when people gain clarity and feel empowered.
Any change manager will tell you that compliance is a poor substitute for commitment to change. When we feel dissonance around a topic, we might comply, but our heart won’t be in it. We are far more likely to push it away and focus on things that we feel better about.
This ‘coming to terms’ with climate change matters because it is a subject around which we need consensus if we are to act now, while also ensuring that the decisions we take today aren’t undone later on.
We need to find common ground if we are to create lasting solutions, and to do that, we all need to be flexible enough to change our minds. Yet that is extremely challenging. Decades of research show that opinions are not easily altered by facts or objective reality. And they are certainly not changed by angry opposition. Rather, understanding and respecting each other’s viewpoints can eventually create a shift.
As scientist and best-selling author Ozan Viral writes, “If someone disagrees with you, it’s not because they’re wrong and you’re right. It’s because they believe something that you don’t believe.”
Coaches have a key role to play precisely because we don’t wield a forceful agenda, and because we listen for beliefs and work with them.
At a national level, this is about being able to bring people together across different political standpoints to see themselves as communities first and foremost. At an organizational level, this is often about enabling leaders to skillfully debate their company’s transition to net zero by making it safe for leaders to share misgivings, or by coaching sustainability teams to engage stakeholders better. Coaches are skilled at helping people to find common ground and create action plans.
In October 2024, PWC reported that the world decarbonized by only 1.02% in 2023.7 That means that a year-on-year decarbonization rate of more than 20% is now required to limit global warming to safe levels (1.5°C above pre-industrial levels).
To put that into context, just five years ago, businesses were told they had to cut emissions by 10 percent. That’s now doubled due to our collective inaction. We are beginning to see big business moving at pace to reduce their emissions, while the global financial services sector has begun issuing stern instructions to the businesses they underwrite to get their operational houses in order. We are also seeing new industries expanding in renewable energy and regenerative farming.
Coaches working in an organizational context will increasingly find that the leaders they coach want to talk about sustainability and how they will achieve their climate targets. Many of us in the C-suite are already coaching on this.
Coaches who are able to believe in a boldly different future and coach complex topics like this will be invaluable in helping executives lead in uncertainty, and therefore will be in demand.
Whether or not the coaching industry embraces climate change, our clients are already on this journey. To quote the title of the 1994 book by historian Howard Zinn, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” The world around us is changing, and we can be a meaningful part of helping it to change for the better.
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