Coaching Through COVID & Beyond Update:

Coaching through COVID and Beyond is winding down. As of 8th June 2022, we are no longer accepting client or coach applications, although all existing coaching assignments will be honoured and completed. We are proud that, together, we created an award-winning programme that has since our inception in March 2020 delivered coaching to around 650 people. We thank all our coaches, clients, and trusted partners for all the support. Together, we’ve made a difference to the wellbeing, resourcefulness and resilience of our clients, their colleagues, families and patients, offering a uniquely safe space and a compassionate, non-judgemental, skilled listening ear at a time of unprecedented pressure for the NHS and care sector. We are now in a process of capturing the learning around coaching in a crisis through internal evaluation and, we hope, an in-depth independent study with a leading university. We will be sharing the learning with the wider community. Any questions, ideas or comments, please email info@coachingthroughcovid.org

For key worker participants

If you’re thinking about receiving FREE coaching via our initiative:

Read our FAQ’s to find out more about coaching
Download our quick-read leaflet to find out more about our programme
Read feedback from previous participants
Watch a video from Ciara, a consultant anaesthetist who received some coaching, to hear about her experience.
Click HERE to sign up for your free coaching

Once we’ve received your application, you’ll hear directly from your coach as soon as possible to set up your first session.

Diversity and inclusion: We welcome applications from key workers from all departments and backgrounds, including BAME, LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities.

If, for any reason, the chemistry with your coach isn’t quite right you’ll have an opportunity to work with a different coach at any point, and sessions will be held at your own convenience. You can stop whenever you feel the time is right or continue with more than 6 sessions if you’d like to.

For organisations including trusts

If you think people working within your organisation could benefit from Coaching Through COVID & Beyond, we’d welcome a conversation with you to discuss how we can bring the programme to you.

For example, you may have direct contact with staff who could benefit, or you may wish to explore the role of champions in engaging colleagues in the programme. We’re keen to collaborate with you so that together we can bring this support to more of those who need it.

We’re aware that, regardless of whether or when there is another COVID surge, the experience staff have already had may leave a long tail, and that wellbeing, and capacity to resource oneself will have a direct relationship to compassionate leadership, self-compassion, and effectiveness – and thus to patient care and safety. Our coaching is intended to serve those significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic & beyond, and includes those who have worked, or are currently working, in COVID-infected zones in acute trusts, care homes and community settings, those who are helping to resource and support those areas, and those in mental health trusts who are dealing with issues and crises exacerbated by COVID-19. This includes clinical staff, nurses, cleaners and porters. The programme is not intended to serve those in management roles to whom we believe their organisations would normally offer coaching which would be paid for by those organisations.

We have created a poster that can be displayed in your workplace to help promote our service to your colleagues, which you can download here. If you would like to receive some printed copies do get in touch and we will do our best to facilitate this.

Please contact us here to discuss: info@coachingthroughcovid.org

For internal champions

As a champion of coaching, you’ll have the opportunity to promote and bring Coaching Through COVID & Beyond directly to colleagues, to help us reach people from all backgrounds and departments and to easily connect them to the programme. You may have your own inspiration on how to get started, and equally we can support you through our two mentor champions, both anaesthetists at the Royal Free Hospital in London. Click here for ideas on how other champions have brought the programme to their colleagues. You can also download this poster to display in your workplace and help us to spread the word within your organisation. To find out more about this role, or to start now, please contact us here: info@coachingthroughcovid.org

Internal champion Dr Ciara Donohue (Consultant Anaesthetist, Royal Free London NHS Trust) says:

“The sense of overwhelm has been both a driver and a challenge in setting up this programme. Those who have found the bandwidth to engage have relayed to me just how precious and resourcing their coaching experience has been. How opening up a safe space with a neutral party has allowed them to organise the chaos, prioritise, regulate. We have been incredibly touched and humbled by the generosity of your offer to care for us as we try our best to care for our patients and colleagues. With the passing of the first COVID surge our workforce are bruised and weary. In this period, the coaching relationship you are providing to help us to reflect, restore and potentially grow feels like such a blessing.”

Watch Ciara’s video on her experience of the programme HERE

For volunteer coaches

If you’d like to offer your services pro-bono as an accredited coach, register HERE.

We welcome accredited coaches from all backgrounds.

Please do bear with us if we can’t immediately match you with a key worker. We’re finding, as are other similar service providers, that these things take time and that demand is uneven: key workers may be overwhelmed, exhausted or finding it hard to sift through different offers.

To find out more about our coaches, see ‘How we work’ below.

One way for us to make it easy for key workers to find out about us and trust what we’re offering is through building relationships with organisational representatives (see more at ‘For organisations including trusts’ above) and internal champions (see ‘For internal champions’ above) – and we’re developing those relationships all the time. Many of these relationships have come through introductions from our coaches or existing trust relationships, so if you know anyone who you’d like to introduce to us, we’d be delighted to talk to them. Please get in touch with us here:

info@coachingthroughcovid.org

Volunteers to help us connect/stay connected

As we grow relationships with more trusts and care providers, please consider being a light touch focal point for the programme.

You may be a coach or other professional who enjoys building and managing relationships, and who would relish the challenge of forming and nurturing connections with our clients/partner organisations.

You’d have the opportunity to build a relationship with the internal champion(s) within the trust or organisation, and with the organisational representative (perhaps Learning and Development or Organisational Development), and to help us keep an overview of the coaching. You can see more about the role HERE

If this fits the bill for you, or you’d like to explore what this role involves, please get in touch by emailing:

info@coachingthroughcovid.org

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity”

Pema Chodron

How we work

Our purpose : To be of service to key workers who’ve worked in, or are currently working in ‘COVID infected Zones’ in acute trusts, care homes and community settings, mental health trusts, hospices and other health providers who are dealing with issues and crises exacerbated by COVID-19, or who are helping to resource and support these areas…by offering these workers high-quality professional inclusive coaching and other timely, demand led resources bespoke to individual needs and schedules… in a way that is relational, tangible and sustainable… to help them find meaning, learning and growth from their experiences, attend to their own wellbeing and deliver sustainable care to those they serve.

The programme isn’t intended to serve those in management roles to whom we believe their organisations would normally offer coaching paid for by those organisations. If you work in the NHS, social care, or the hospice sector, and you’ve been or continue to be affected by COVID-19 and aren’t sure whether the programme is for you – do get in touch/fill in the form – we may still be able to help.

Our values:

Be of service
Reduce suffering
Do no harm
Agile
Courage
Ethics & integrity: check intentions &
‘Do the right thing’
Collaborate
Compassionate leadership
Inclusiveness & diversity

We’re delighted to be partnering with Professor Amy Edmondson’s Fearless Organization to ensure we attend to psychological safety as a key enabler of team effectiveness, innovation and sustainable growth. We also endorse the GMC’s approach to compassionate leadership and seek to mirror this in offering compassionate coaching. We’re also delighted to be partnering with the Compassion Institute to offer clinicians and coaches an opportunity to develop the inner practices to reduce secondary stress, compassion fatigue and burnout and support wellbeing, flourishing and growth.

To find out more about our purpose, values and approach, click HERE

What makes us different and distinctive?

Our commitment to compassion in all that we do
Our relationships with internal champions (although we also encourage key workers to contact us directly)
Our selection and development of accredited coaches who are:

At an advanced stage of ‘coaching maturity’ (relational, compassionate, take a systemic approach, eclectic – not wedded to a single technique but able to formulate and deliver the interventions that they consider appropriate)
Psychologically-minded – able to work with a range of psychological issues and know when and where to refer on for other support. Our team includes resilience trauma therapists and wellbeing specialists
Able to adopt a holistic participant-led approach, offering support on anything participants bring to sessions

How to apply

Participants

Find our simple registration form HERE. You’ll be matched to a coach as soon as possible, and they’ll contact you to arrange your first session. If, for any reason, the chemistry isn’t quite right you’ll have an opportunity to work with a different coach at any point, and sessions will be held at your own convenience. You can stop whenever you feel the time is right or continue with more than 6 sessions if you and your coach would like to.

Accredited coaches

We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive and generous response from coaches. Key workers are weary and are sometimes bombarded by offers, so it may take time for matches to happen. If you’d like to join us (and don’t mind waiting), register HERE

About us

As COVID-19 took hold of the UK in March 2020 Mark McMordie, whose facilitative compassionate leadership is key to how we work, planted a seed: how can coaches and others step up to support key workers? And here we are:

The current core team comprises:

Dr Ciara Donohue – consultant anaesthetist, Royal Free Hospital
Christina Silver
David Elliott
David Skinner
Fiona Setch
Kay Parker
Lindsay Wittenberg – Lindsay Wittenberg Ltd
Liz Hall – Liz Hall Coaching & Coaching at Work magazine
Maria Foxwell
Nicky Bradley
Rosanne Green
Dr Raviro Mangwiro – consultant anaesthetist, Royal Free Hospital
Sarah Haler

Previous core team members :

Mark McMordie – The Conscious Leader and Coaching Through Covid co-founder, whose brainchild this initiative was
Carole Osterweil
Carrie Rooney
Dr Charlotte Kingsley – consultant anaesthetist, Royal Free Hospital
Dr Kate Sherratt – consultant anaesthetist, Royal Free Hospital
Dvija Mehta
Ella Clark – Ella Clark Coaching
Fiona Byrne – programme & project management
Gina Lodge – Academy of Executive Coaching
Pauline Muldoon – Lee Hecht Harrison
Sarah Barlow – Imakeitso
Sasi Panchal – project management specialist & leadership coach

For more information on our sponsors and supporters, see ‘Supporters and sponsors’ below

What people say

Dr Ciara Donohue, consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Free Hospital, talks about how both receiving coaching and acting as an internal champion have made a difference.
Watch Ciara’s video

Dr Marc Wittenberg, another consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Free hospital, shares how coaching helped him decompress, make sense of challenging experiences, relieve high degrees of stress and anxiety and prepare him for a second wave, Watch Marc’s video

“Having had my second coaching session yesterday, I am amazed by what the programme offers. Pure life changer and I’m so pleased I signed up. Suddenly, I can identify resources already available to me that I can utilise to build resilience.”

From participant

“I truly think it is the incredible and proactive support we’ve been receiving that is keeping us going through this crisis. Definitely agree that the coaching is really good for identifying signs we need to respond to, which we may otherwise ignore.”

From participant

This is the most fulfilling coaching I’ve ever done.”

From coach

“Many thanks for the resources, and your comprehensive overview of how we create a supportive and professional coaching experience for our NHS frontline coachees. Most grateful for the clarity too guiding our working relationship with you.”