Unitive Coaching is a holistic approach to personal and professional development that has been developed over several decades by Charles Bentley PhD.
Unitive® Coaching is primarily concerned with your personal development and growth, rather than simplistically looking for a solution to a perceived problem. It encourages the exploration of your total being, enabling you to find the resources within yourself to resolve your own dilemmas, not just now, but throughout your life.
It values your individuality and recognises that when you get in touch with your true self, you will instinctively find your unique pathway through life – and that this is as valid as anyone else’s. In short, it enables you to unlock your true potential with lasting positive benefits for both your personal and professional life.
It is a holistic approach that recognises that the individual parts of you cannot be viewed in isolation and that taken together they form a whole that is greater than the sum of those separate parts. A Unitive® Coach therefore recognises that issues in one part of your life are bound up with all other areas of your life and affected by the environment in which you find yourself.
Unitive® Coaching focuses particularly on raising awareness of what’s really going on, both within and around you, thereby enabling you to see the real choices before you.
The benefits of Unitive Coaching
The benefits of the approach also include enhanced interpersonal and communication skills, a calm acceptance of who and what you are and a more meaningful and personally fulfilling life.
In your professional life this can lead to improved satisfaction with your work, improved relationships with colleagues, more creative and independent thinking, a more effective management style and an authentic approach to leadership, allowing your natural charisma to shine through. You can become more aware of the sorts of work that really appeals to you and go beyond the old constraints of what you merely think you ought to do.
In your personal life your relationships can become warmer and more relaxed, communication becomes clearer and more heart-felt, you become more able to listen and to really hear the meaning behind what your friends and family are saying. You become able to rise above and resolve your dilemmas and instinctively know the right path for you to take.
An investment in your self
Far from being a simplistic set of bullet points, rigid processes and theoretical models, Unitive® Coaching is highly practical and experiential and is tailored to your own uniqueness and idiosyncrasies.
It is an investment in your personal growth which pays dividends for a lifetime.
The origins of Unitive Coaching
Unitive Coaching has its original roots in the work done by Dr Jay Stattman in the 1960s and 1970s whilst working in the USA and then in the Netherlands. Jay was a pioneering psychologist and developed his experiential, group-based work when he was the Director of the Institute of Unitive Psychology in Utrecht. It was here in the 1970s that Charles Bentley studied with him, subsequently becoming a member of staff and close colleague. After Jay Stattman’s sudden death, Charles continued develop the approach whilst practising as a psychotherapist. When in the 1990s Charles moved into coaching, he further developed and refined the approach, resulting in the distinctive approach practised today. You can learn more about Charles Bentley here.
Andy Turnbull has worked very closely with Charles in recent years, first completing his professional Unitive® Coaching programme and then going on to be an associate, colleague and a business partner, taking Unitive® Coaching into the future and out to new audiences.