Damian Goldvarg: Leader for the Americas Coaching Supervision Network

In this episode of "Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee," Damian Goldvarg shares his journey from a psychologist in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a globally recognized leader in coaching and supervision. With a PhD in Organizational Psychology from Alliant International University, Damian's career began with Personnel Decisions International (PDI), where he gained global experience training leaders in coaching skills and conducting executive assessments. His extensive background positioned him as a prominent figure in the coaching community, leading to his current roles, including being a leader for the Americas Coaching Supervision Network and the Asian Supervisors Network.
 
Damian is a strong advocate for the integration of supervision in coaching, emphasizing its importance for maintaining high professional standards. He explains that supervision provides a reflective space for coaches to evaluate their work, which differs from mentoring that focuses more on providing feedback. Despite initial resistance and misconceptions about supervision, Damian underscores its value for professional growth and the enhancement of coaching practices. He has also authored nine books, with his latest focusing on leadership in contemporary times and addressing the importance of foresight, technology, and resilience.
 
Looking ahead, Damian is excited about the integration of technology and artificial intelligence into coaching. He sees these advancements as opportunities to enhance coaching accessibility and effectiveness, providing tools that can offer immediate feedback and support. Damian envisions a future where technology and human insight coexist, allowing for a more comprehensive approach to coaching. He encourages coaches to embrace new tools and methodologies to stay relevant and effective, blending traditional practices with innovative solutions to meet the evolving needs of the profession.

Transcript

Damian: Most of the time, when you think about supervision, you think about telling people what to do, versus supervision, as we like to separate the two words, super vision, is about, like looking at your work and reflecting on your work. It’s a reflective space to continue learning.

(intro)

Alex: I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is an author, coach, and former ICF global chair. He is the leader for the Americas Coaching Supervision Network, Asian Supervisors Network, and Master Coaches from Latin America and Spain. Please welcome Damian Goldvarg.

(Interview)

Alex: Hey, Damian. How are you? 

Damian: Great. Great to be here with you, Alex. 

Alex: It’s great to have you. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today? 

Damian: We have some coffee. What about you?

Alex: Same. We’re keeping it simple today. Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, it’s usually not coffee that we’re drinking, interestingly enough, but, today, it is coffee so it’s great. I guess we’re both in the same time zone and it’s before 1 p.m. so we can still have coffee, right?

Damian: Yes, yes. For the rest of the day. 

Alex: Nice. Cool. Well, it’s great to have you here. You’ve done so much great work over the years. Coach supervision and mentoring is something that comes to mind when I think about your name and you’re always doing really cool things a lot. I guess we could do this podcast in Spanish but our audience, probably 98 percent of our audience doesn’t speak Spanish so maybe we’ll leave that for another day but you and I are always speaking in Spanish about what’s happening in coaching so it’s great to have you here. We’ll do it on the podcast, we’ll do it in English, but there’s things I don’t know about your background. I’ve known you for many, many years. I think you had just finished your tenure as the global chair for the ICF when we met many years ago at a conference. So, take me through your journey. How is it that you ended up in the coaching space? As much as I know you, I don’t really know your journey so I’m excited to learn more about it today. 

Damian: Well, originally, as you know, I am from Argentina, and I –

Alex: No one’s perfect. I have to throw the Argentine joke there, you know?

Damian: That is an internal job because in Latin America, people know that, but outside of Latin America, people don’t understand all the jokes about Argentina, like Argentina, particularly in Buenos Aires, the capital, we have a lot of influence from Europe so Argentina, particularly with people from Buenos Aires, many of us believe we’re Europeans because we have all of this influence from Italians and Spaniards. So, we are a little bit arrogant around that so we have a really bad reputation in Latin America for being arrogant. And I think we are. 

Alex: So you’re very arrogant that you’re arrogant. I like that. It’s very Argentinian of you.

Damian: Authentic.

Alex: That’s hilarious. My dad’s from Uruguay so I grew up hearing a lot of jokes about Argentinians but we have a lot of Argentinian friends. My worst nightmare always was that, not really my worst nightmare, but you guys would win the World Cup and all of us would have to kind of deal with that. And I mean, obviously, you won it before but I was two years old last time you did so you guys won it. 

Damian: Yeah, we won it recently.

Alex: I know.

Damian: Recently, we won the cup again.

Alex: Believe me, I’m aware. All my Argentinian friends have been, yeah, difficult to deal with the last couple years. But, yeah, some of them moved to Miami so they could watch Messi play and everything so, yeah, you guys are interesting. I love my Argentinian friends. I kid with all those jokes.

Damian: In Mexico and in Spain, they do have a lot of jokes about Argentinians. 

Alex: We have a lot of jokes about a lot of things. Yeah, I know. But, yeah, Argentinians, yeah, there’s so many good ones but I’ll refrain from engaging in telling you all the Argentinian jokes that I have in my repertoire. We’ll leave it for another time. Nice.

Damian: Great, great. Well, continuing my journey, I left, when I was 23, I was a psychologist, also interestingly, in Argentina, particularly, again, in Buenos Aires in the capital, psychology is very well developed. There is no stigma around psychology like this in the rest of the world, I would say. And when I came to the United States, I went back to school and I got a PhD in organizational psychology. So I think we went to the same program, correct? We went to the same program through Alliant?

Alex: Yeah, we went to the same school. My program, so Alliant, you went to the LA campus, I went to the San Diego campus. Mine is in consulting psychology, which, honestly, when people ask me, I’m like IO psychology, it’s the same thing, but yours was IO, right? 

Damian: It was organizational psychology, but at the end of the day, there are not big differences. But my focus was on leadership development. So, when I finished my program, I got a job for Personnel Decisions International, that was acquired by Korn Ferry.

Alex: Yeah, PDI. Yeah.

Damian: PDI. I worked for PDI in the Los Angeles office locally here for a couple of years and then I was in the cadre, consultant for many years, and they sent me all over the world to train leaders on coaching skills. And I also do an assessment center working as a coach with executives. So that really gave me a global perspective, like working globally with people from all over the world. And then, locally, I was going to my local chapter in the International Coach Federation to renew my credential. I thought, okay, I’m going to get into the board so I can volunteer, I can help, and I can also get to meet other coaches with more experience so I can learn from them. And in my first day on the board of directors meeting, I found out that I was the only PCC coach, the only credentialed coach and I had more experience than everybody else, and so, okay, I am here, I’m going to contribute and I’m going to support, and it was a great experience. And then that positioned me in a way to get involved at the global level and I got involved with the global board of directors and I was a member for six years, and two years ago, became global president. So I think that, in terms of my career, this PDI work really made a difference for me, getting the chance, the opportunity to work with companies I would never have access to work with by myself. And then I opened my own company and I started providing coaching, leadership development trainings. I opened a coaching program to train coaches, to train mentor coaches, to train supervisors. Recently, we started training team coaches. So part of my job is to train colleagues. What I really love is teaching and training and personal growth and creating high level of awareness and consciousness in the world and I think that all of this work helped us to do that. It’s not only about being more effective, it’s about also having better quality of life, more satisfaction, better relationships, and I do believe that having a higher level of awareness about how we’re showing up and what is around us allow us for that.

Alex: How has coaching changed in the last couple of years?

Damian: Well, technology, AI, it’s interesting because David Peterson, I used to work with him in the period before he went to Google, and I remember him presenting at one of the ICF conference, one year that I was a global president 10 years ago, 2014, in Malmo, Sweden, and he said, “You have to be prepared because AI is going to be affecting the profession and you need to pay attention to that,” and I remember sitting there and I’m so upset, I said, “How can he say a lot of those things? Not possible, that’s not right,” and it took me two, three years, I think, to digest and integrate that, but I have been already involved and engaged in understanding the influence of technology and AI in our professional practice. So I am having like his job, telling people that and people have so much resistance and defensiveness that I say, “Okay, you can choose, do whatever you want. You can live your life without engaging with AI and technology but you’re going to stay behind. So things are going to move forward without your interest or concern or involvement or not. So do you want to stay behind or do you wanna do something about it? Be proactive?”

Alex: Yeah, definitely. 

Damian: So I think the field is changing really rapidly, very fast. 

Alex: David Peterson. I miss him every day. I was very close with him. He was in our board of directors at Coaching.com and quite a legendary guy and such a visionary. I mean, no one was really thinking about AI and coaching 10 years ago other than David and one of the things that I loved about him is just people were always upset when they heard him talk but they were always intrigued, fascinated. He planted a seed and he was so likable too so he had the perfect demeanor and just an incredible intelligence to go about kind of talking about these topics that used to be in the fringe of coaching and now have become really commonplace and really at the center of where coaching is. I think both you and I and David as well, we like the human element in coaching, that’s kind of what drives us and, yeah, I think soon we’ll be probably the old guard kind of trying to safeguard what we think of as real coaching from all these other things that are going to happen and one of the conversations I’ve always had with David was when all these tech-enabled coaching offerings started to pop up, is it really coaching? Are we changing the fabric of the dynamic, the relationship? How can we scale coaching in a way that’s true to form, true to what we love about it? And these conversations are only becoming more important. Look, I run a technology company, we provide a lot of technology for coaching, but we’re always thinking people first, right? So, you got to stay ahead of the game. 

Damian: There are two misconceptions, I think, out there that people need to start. First, you need to be willing to listen. A coaching skill, by the way, to listen and be open to other possibility because this is our business. We are in the business of working with our clients so they can see new possibilities. And I’m finding, Alex, sometimes coaches are not as open, willing to go there, but there are misconceptions. One misconception is all, everybody wants to work with a human being and they will rather work with a person than AI software, which is not true. Many people will rather work with software, with AI, than having to talk to another human being. So this is a misconception. The other misconception is that humans cannot be replaced. And it’s true that we cannot be replaced and there are some things that can be done and sometimes even more effectively, by AI. So it’s about being an open mind, like, today, I have a new client so just before our session today. It was a beautiful session, Alex, really great connection. We talked about things. She could have not had that conversation – the quality of a conversation and interaction that we have, she cannot have that with AI. And not everybody is interested or able or willing to go in that direction. So I think that AI allow us and software companies and technology allow to get access to coaching and coaching conversations and coaching tools without having this quality of conversation. So I don’t think that they’re going to go over that. We think we have that and some people will choose us so we don’t have to worry about losing our work, but we need to be aware that we can be much more effective in integrating all of these techniques and tools to our work. 

Alex: I agree.

Damian: So this is I think when some people, Alex, are getting behind, because they are afraid of technology or they feel that they don’t understand it, and as a result of that, instead of looking for ways to learn about it and integrate it to their work, I think that they are going to stay behind. 

Alex: I agree. It’s how do you weave in technology into coaching, both as an independent coach practitioner, as a coaching company, as a large enterprise. And I do think that some people prefer to interact with a chatbot. It won’t be a chatbot for much longer, coaching avatars already are out there. So it’s going to be what’s the right blend? When should you talk to an actual human and where should you have technology kind of embedded into the process? How do you make coaches better by enabling technology and analytics and feedback? And I think coach supervision and mentoring and we’ve traditionally lagged behind in the US, as we know, with mentoring and supervision and there are some interesting changes happening, I think, at the ICF there around mentoring and supervision that are really exciting, when you think about that whole part of the field, coach development is about to get a huge enhancement with AI capabilities, the ability to provide immediate feedback after a session and so on, what a world class coach would do in a similar situation. I mean, we really are at the fringes and at the beginning stages of this complete transformation in terms of our ability as coaches to have access to information and feedback that could completely change the way we serve our clients. So I agree with you. It’s more about don’t miss out on this wave of change but also understand what are the things that you find valuable about the way things have worked and kind of try to blend both, right?

Damian: Yeah, exactly. But that requires to have an open mind and a willingness to try new things and interesting, Alex, also, I have been an advocate, as you know, for supervision for 10 years –

Alex: I know.

Damian: – like into 2020, Coaching Supervision Academy came for first time to North American and did a training. I was in the first cohort that was trained as a supervisor in the Americas and I thought every coach should be working with a supervisor. Doesn’t matter how much experience you have. Why? Because we all have blind spots. 

Alex: Yeah.

Damian: We all have emotional reactions. We need to have a space where we can discuss our work, and many people were not open to that. Like in Europe, for EMCC, European Mentoring and Coaching Council, in the code of ethics, it’s included supervision as part of the practice, expected for all coaches to have supervision as part of their practice, and I think I say, finally, after 10 years, it’s going in that direction but it took a lot of work and time. 

Alex: There’s the economics of that too, right? I mean, I think, traditionally, coaches, the average coach, struggled to make a good living as a coach but, luckily, I think the profession has really established itself. There’s a much greater demand, more clarity on the offerings, on what coaching does, why you should engage in coaching from an organizational perspective, from an individual perspective, and as that has been clarified, I think it opens up the possibility for there’s a lot more people that can make a really good living as a professional full-time coach, which also puts the accreditation bodies in a position where you can require things like supervision because coaches are making enough money to be able to invest in themselves and continue to raise the quality of themselves in the profession in general. So, everything seems well aligned. I can see why it wasn’t necessarily a requirement before because the economics of it perhaps weren’t there. 

Damian: I think that that’s one piece and the other piece is lack of information and lack of understanding, because they was supervision and not very well received in general because, most of the time, when you think about supervision, you think about telling people what to do, versus supervision, as we like to separate the two words, super vision, is about like at the distance looking at your work and reflecting on your work. It’s a reflective space to continue learning. But, Alex, even for free, even free supervision, people would not get, even when they were offering the opportunity, because, as you know, I trained supervisors, and what is interesting is supervisors are not going to get rich doing supervision because you can charge much more to a client in a corporation than to another coach for supervision session, but they do – so that’s something that can be a misunderstanding or misperception that, okay, you’re a supervisor, you make a lot of money, which is not the case at all, but it’s about, as you’re saying, bringing the whole professional practice coaching to a different level. And I am also an advocate to have supervision since coaching training. So in my coaching trainings, graduates of our programs that are doing coaching training, they include supervision as part of the training because they see the value of supervision when they’re being trained as coaches, not after that, and not even the mentoring. Mentor coaching is about providing feedback. Mentor coaching is mandatory and it’s about getting feedback so if anybody wants to get the credential with International Coach Federation, you need to receive mentoring, mentor coaching in this context, to apply for the credential. But supervision is not mandatory yet, only for team coaches. Now, that’s new. Last year, with the new team coaching accreditation, I say make that mandatory. If you want to get a team coach credential, you need to show that you have been reflecting on your work, that you have somebody that’s working with you because of the complexity of the work. So that’s something new too. 

Alex: Yeah, it’s a very interesting shifting dynamics in the space. What are you the most excited about these days? 

Damian: I went to study foresight. I don’t know, Alex, if you’re familiar with the foresight program where you get to train to be like a futurist or a foresight practitioner, looking at trends and seeing what’s coming up. And I have done that before COVID so I have been working on that for a few years now and I am interested in, okay, what’s coming up? How we can be really? How other designs, how we are paying attention to the signals of the future so that helps you to make decisions today? So I do believe that everything around technology, AI is really exciting to me, it’s like an opportunity to do things, to access things I never thought that will be possible so this is really interesting. I just published a book in Spanish that you can read, Alex, not everybody, but it’s called –

Alex: How many books they have now? Yeah, I can read that, yeah, Liderazgo Para Los Tiempos Actuales, Leadership for Today’s World or Times. Nice. Congratulation. 

Damian: This is my book number nine and it just came out and now I am working with Berrett-Koehler, I shall sign the contract so they are going to publish the book in English, which is really exciting and to have a book published by them, will be the first one in English with them. And it’s about leadership and it’s about how leaders today in the current times, they need to be thinking about these issues, about the future, about technology, about how to be resilient and flexible with everything’s coming up. 

Alex: Tell me more about that. What’s the book about? Like break it down for me.

Damian: Well, in this book in particular, my goal was to provide a tool for other coaches to use with their client so you can give this work to your leaders, the client you’re working with, it’s about preparing for the future, it’s about being more effective leaders, what’s happening right now, it’s helping the leader to be more effective. So I use this for training leaders in my coaching program. In my leadership training, I’m coaching skills so, basically, it’s a manual for my leadership training coaches, coaching skills programs, but Berrett-Koehler, they didn’t like all of the exercises and the manual because they didn’t want a manual, they want a book so they are taking all of my exercises away, which I am not very happy about. They think it’s going to be better so I need to be open. Okay, this is going to fix, okay. Now some of the trends that I’m seeing, you’re asking, originally, when I wrote this book, I wrote it during the COVID-19 pandemic was going on so I originally thought –

Alex: What pandemic? I don’t even remember anymore

Damian: Yeah, people don’t even want me to use that word, to say that word. Originally, the book I was going to call Post-Pandemic Leader, The Post-Pandemic Leader, and then they said, “No, no, no –

Alex: No one wants to hear that word. Yeah, no, we’re done with that word. Yeah.

Damian: And if you get my book that you can buy it in Amazon digitally, I talk about COVID-19 and how COVID-19 affected us and my editor at Berrett-Koehler doesn’t want – all of the COVID stuff is gone. But, basically, the idea was about COVID and they don’t think that people still get the awareness of the sequels of COVID because there are many sequels. There are many consequences as a result of COVID-19 and how that affected us. For one part, it’s all related to emotional issues, emotional intelligence, leading with emotional intelligence, resilience, and how COVID-19 affecting mental health of everybody. And today it looks like people are very stressed at work, very stressed out. There is a higher, higher level of stress at work and people are depressed, anxious, and I don’t think that leaders are connecting to that. So I do believe that leaders need to be a little more aware of how all of the people are dealing with stress these days. And so there is a whole, I can talk, I can write a book about that. There is a new report from, when did you report this, well, from last year, from Gallup, that talk about world trends. So, basically, Gallup every year does a big research, research thousands of companies, organizations and collect data to see what make organizations more effective, and found out that 65 percent of the people answered that the day before they were stressed at work, that they experienced stress at work the day before. That’s a high number of the people. And also there is a very high number of quiet quitting. So I also talk about quiet quitting. People are not engaged at work. People are not feeling doing their best. That was the result of the big resignation, people left their jobs. Why? I think that COVID-19 confronting all of us with existential things, so it was an existential challenge in terms of asking ourselves who we are, what we want, are we going to stay in organizations that don’t respect us and don’t treat us well or do I want to stay or do I want to go? So organizations need to adjust and leaders are in the middle, between the pressure that they receive about results and people needs and interests and new ways of thinking and being and working, particularly young people. The younger generations are showing up at work with different needs and expectations and I do believe is something great to offer them. They want coaching. People are really willing and interested in growing and learning and developing and I think that leaders who coach their people and invest in their learning and development and growth genuinely because they care about them, not just the results but they really care about other human beings, people want to work with them and they’re more effective. So, these are some of the things, I’m talking about the hybrid work, digital teams, people working worldwide having cultural competency and cultural diversity, that’s a hot topic these days. Some of the things that people will want to pay attention to. Technology and being open, paying attention to what’s happening in the world, reading the newspapers, seeing everyday what’s new, what is small things can affect us, being on top of the news, what’s happening in the world. Also, the wars that are happening in the world. This is also affecting us. I think that new things will come out from that. That’s happening in Middle East. It’s really, really – I’m concerned, not only because I have family there but also because of how this is affecting the whole world.

Alex: Yeah, I mean, we never thought another war in Europe in our lifetime, it didn’t really seem like we were headed in that direction so I think it all adds to the volatility and uncertainty of our times. Things move very quickly, the interconnectedness of the world, face value is a really good thing, but it also accelerates when things go wrong, things go wrong faster, and everyone’s more connected so countries that traditionally would not have a connection to a war far away are completely enmeshed in that, just the interconnectivity of the modern world is both incredibly valuable but also very challenging for individuals. I mean, we’re living in this hyper connected world and we’re stressed out.

Damian: Yeah.

Alex: So when you think about like the next five years, now that you’ve been studying on kind of understanding trends, patterns, and looking into the future, what does Damian Goldvarg see when you look into your magic ball? What’s happening? What do you see in coaching in the next five years or so?

Damian: Well, I see that we need to diversify. We’re talking about we need to diversify, diversify, I think the reason why I am going to be focusing not only in coaching but I wrote this book on leadership, I’m starting to do more programs on leadership, focusing not only on coaching services but other services. I think the International Coach Federation global survey is not annual but I think every two, three years, there is a survey where they get information with PricewaterhouseCoopers what’s going on in the world related to coaching professional practice and most coaches are not 100 percent coaches, only a percentage of coaching do only coaching. And I do believe that with all of these trends and with all of the technology coming up and all of these apps and opportunity for people to learn and grow and develop without having to hire a coach, I do believe that we need to diversify our services. So coaches should be one but we need to look at other things that are related. For example, what I am doing is training leaders on coaching skills or other activities that we enjoy that are also supporting people to grow and develop. But I do believe that, in some ways, some of our activity, not all of it, but some of our activity will be replaced by apps, like let’s imagine, Alex, before, you wanted to be more effective in, let’s say, time management. I’m going to hire a coach to help me to be more effective in managing my time. Today, you go and you can get a lot of direction from YouTube videos, then you go, you get ups about performing tasks and having goals and the app made you accountable for your own goals so there are many things in place that can replace the work of the coach. So some people will still want to work with a human being, we are not going to be losing our work, it will still work for us, but I am seeing, Alex, less people signing up for coaching programs to be trained as coaches. I had some challenges in getting people into supervision, not only because they don’t understand what it is but also as a trend. So, yeah, I think there is something coming up and we need to be open and willing to see what is that and how it looks like and we’re paying attention to see how we can be engaged in whatever comes up, we can be engaged versus, “No, I don’t wanna see, I don’t wanna hear.” Pay a lot of attention. Whatever is coming out, how we’re going to engage. So, for example, some people are more and more working in platforms so they’re calling and contacting platforms so they can be part of this platform so they can be found because this is another big trend. I think companies are not hiring individual coaches any longer. If people want to work for big companies, you need to be part of pools of coaches that are hired by companies through, these days, third parties so that’s something else. I think inviting coaches to consider who do they want to work for? Coaching.com at this point right now, because somebody was asking me about that specifically, how is position related to this opportunity? Related to offering coaches opportunity to provide services to clients? 

Alex: I mean, part of what we do is we provide very high quality trainings like we have our team coaching program so coaches that are really good at one-on-one coaching, they want to become proficient with team coaching so we equip coaches in that way. Sometimes we have coaching companies approaches and say, “Hey, we’d like to have 10 of our coaches go through one of your programs,” or something like that. When it comes to – we don’t really compete with the coaching companies, we serve them and then with the digital, tech-enabled platforms, we don’t go out and respond to RFPs for coaching services. We have a marketplace component of our ecosystem but it’s something we’ll probably spend more time on in the next many years. But, as of now, we focus more on equipping coaches with the tools they need, both from a technology infrastructure standpoint and the training to – all of our trainings really are related and connected to what we’re seeing in the market. How would coaches need to be prepared to be successful? If you go through the team coaching program, now you can develop team coaching services. There’s a lot of interest, let’s say, on neuroscience so we have a neuroscience for coaches program so now you’re equipped with that. We’re launching a couple other really cool ones this year. Last year, we had red team coaching, which was not really team coaching, it was red teaming, how to prepare for the things that most people are unprepared for. Red teaming is just something interesting. Won’t get into the details of that now but it’s really cool and coaches were so happy to go through it. So that’s kind of how we serve the market, preparing coaches and equipping them for success. And, yeah, we don’t want to become a services company. We don’t want to compete with coaching companies but there are some interesting dynamics on marketplaces that I think could be successful for the ecosystem and we’ll keep our eyes out for kind of when we accelerate that side of things, but it’s not really an area of focus tremendously for us at the moment. And, lastly, I’d love to hear from you, there’s a pattern or a trend for team coaching, both on the demand side, organizations, companies want it, and coaches are very interested in getting trained. I know you’ve trained coaches on team coaching as well. So, what about team coaching you think is so appealing to the market today?

Damian: Well, organizations realized that the leader can develop skills and be more effective but at the end of the day, their team is the one who perform the implementation, who had to perform, so maybe the leader, investing in the leader is not enough. So companies realized that if they really want to be successful, they need to invest in the leader but they also need to invest in their teams, to have them lead their teams going from good to great. So team coaching is not about fixing things. It’s like supporting the team to go from where they are to where they could be to produce higher level of results. So, companies are learning about it to start with the companies with like coaching. We don’t need to explain to companies what is coaching now. Not too many years ago, you had to. Team coaching is similar. Many companies don’t know that it exists and they know team building, but team building is different. Team building is about helping the team to get people to get to know each other, to trust each other. Additionally, it is an intervention that is a weekend. Team building, people get to know each other and then they get closer. But team coaching is an ongoing activity that supports the team on an ongoing basis. So, first, we need to bring more visibility to team coaching so companies understand what is it, how it works, and how they can benefit, and I do believe that there is a big market opportunity for coaches interested in offering these services. So that is why we’re also training team coaches and I’m also going to – I study writing a book about it with the perspective of International Coach Federation competency model. So, usually, my books, I like to work in that way, looking about competency models, what do you need to do, what do you need to demonstrate and work through that.

Alex: Pretty cool. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Damian. It’s great to have a conversation with you on the podcast and looking forward to seeing you soon.

Damian: Thank you, Alex. Thank you for inviting me and I look forward to the conference that is coming up soon. I don’t know if this podcast will go before or after, but congratulations for all of the work that you do. It’s one of probably the most prestigious conference worldwide for coaching so congratulations for continuing with that trend.

Alex: Thank you. We love it. The first year that the WBECS Summit became the Coaching.com Summit so we rebranded it this year and it’s just better than ever. We kept all the things that people liked about the conference and we added a lot of new stuff and just have an incredible team and have an incredible community that we’ve built over the years and it’s just – the summit is just a super fun time. I think I look at it in the calendar coming up always and I’m like, yes, it’s just so fun. We open our doors to 50,000 or so coaches worldwide. It’s just fantastic. Amazing sessions –

Damian: I already signed up. I will be there.

Alex: That’s amazing. Yeah, we’re all remote so it’s nice that we all come together in things like this in our company so we love opening our doors. So, thank you for mentioning that and looking forward to seeing you soon.

Damian: Great. Take care.