Capacity Building
Stewarding the regenerative capacity of people in agriculture
Coaching
Kim Deans is a member of the International Coaching Federation and is dedicated to offering our clients the highest quality professional coaching.
Working with a coach when you become aware that things need to change in your life and business can empower you to explore road blocks, gain clarity and support you as you take action.
When you find yourself struggling to take new actions, sabotaging yourself from making changes in your life and business, struggling with what others will think of you, knowing better but not doing better, procrastinating, experiencing a general dissatisfaction with life but can’t put your finger on what you need to do to shift coaching can empower you to get unstuck and move through your resistance to change.
What is coaching?
Coaching is best described as a skill set rather than viewed as a service provided “for” others. An effective coach brings their skills in deep listening, questioning, non-judgement and reframing in combination with other expertise as you work together towards goals defined by you, the client. Coaching is focused on creating solutions from within your business/land/people rather than imposing external solutions. By empowering you to brainstorm ideas and find your own solutions, coaching promotes focus, confidence and self-motivation, leading to increased productivity and a stronger sense of achievement. The coaching process empowers you to own your results - you get out of coaching what you put into it.
What coaching can offer your business
Coaching is different from teaching, mentoring and consulting. If you’re considering hiring a coach, the first thing you need to clarify is what type of service you are looking for. If you are looking for an expert in a field where you have little or no experience to give you their solutions, you are looking for a consultant. If you are looking for someone who has extensive experience in the same field as you, who offers professional advice and guidance, you are looking for a mentor. If you are looking for someone who can support your learning and growth, work with you to develop a strategy for facilitating your progress towards your goals you are looking for a coach. We have the capacity to offer a combination of these services and can work with you to create a tailored program that fits your needs.
Our Reinventing Agriculture coaching approach
We focus on empowering you to be the expert in your business. We work alongside you to develop a strategy suitable for your individual context and goals. As a result you will be empowered to make informed decisions in line with your vision for your landscape and business.
Your success is our business. We do not sell inputs or receive commissions on product sales. We can educate you to make informed, unbiased choices around inputs when necessary, acting as a non-judgemental sounding board where there are no stupid questions. We frequently save our clients more than they spend on our services through cost savings gained from eliminating unnecessary inputs. We add value to your business through working with you to design strategies that do less harm and transition off inputs gradually, maintaining profitable production.
We do not impose a one size fits all approach. We work with you to design your unique strategy for your unique context, providing you with a clear direction and actionable steps. Through investigative conversations and processes, we empower you to deepen your observational skills and understanding of natural, human and financial resources and their contribution to the long-term viability of your enterprise. You will be empowered to find points of leverage that will give you the greatest return on investment in quality, production and performance.
Diverse life experiences underpin our approach. We bring with us over 30 years each of lived experience in agriculture in a range of enterprises and roles. We have been restoring our land using practices now known as “regenerative” since 2004. We have been using and developing coaching skills in our careers for over 20 years. Kim worked as a Rural Financial Counsellor for 12 years and completed training in mediation, facilitating farm family business meetings, negotiation, counselling and communication which were all skills that were put to use in this role. Angus has worked in management and also has completed a Diploma of Counselling Studies. Angus has been providing counselling services for over 10 years, recently adding powerful skills in The Richards Trauma Process to his coaching tool kit.
We walk our talk. We see challenges as opportunities for personal growth. We recognise the need to constantly work on our own blind spots as we can only take our clients where we can go ourselves. We love to question everything and to take new perspectives. We embrace life-long learning and are avid readers who are passionate about implementation, not just collecting qualifications and consuming information. When we are struggling or looking for access to new insights we engage outside help, choosing to work with coaches, kinesiologists, counsellors or healers who will empower us to access our own breakthroughs, not impose their solutions on us.
We are holistic. We have always had an innate ability to see the whole, as generalists and systems thinkers we are skilled at seeing connections and relationships in complex systems. This means we readily distinguish between skills that can be learned and skills that must be realised from the inside first as you journey from where you are now to where you want to be.
The outcomes from working with a coach
Investing in a coach will provide you with a sounding board for your questions and concerns and access to valuable insights and awareness to overcome self-limitations. Coaching will improve your access to relevant information and networks. Our coaching clients report improved confidence as a key benefit of our coaching programs. Confidence is a critical piece in making changes yet it’s different to having certainty. Growing our confidence helps us navigate the inevitable uncertainty in agriculture better.
Coaching will facilitate learning, build awareness, empower choices and lead you through the process of reinventing your agricultural business to achieve your desired outcomes. You will go beyond finding nicer ways to do the same things and expecting different results. You will build your support network as you get out of your comfort zone and ask better questions to create a thriving, profitable and enjoyable business.
Intrigued and interested in learning more about working with us?
Email Kim or Angus to arrange a time for a chat.
Mentoring
We love mentoring people in agriculture and sharing our wisdom gained from over 30 years each experience (over 60 years combined!) working with people, land regeneration and financial aspects of agriculture.
Whether you aspire to find & carve your path in regenerative agriculture as a farmer or as a coach and empower others, with a mentor as your guide and sounding board you will learn and grow faster than you will alone.
Kim is particularly passionate about mentoring women involved in regenerative agriculture and empowering them to find their voice and build their confidence to contribute.
Book a call for more information
The Richards Trauma Process (TRTP)
Angus is a trained counsellor and TRTP practitioner offering transformational coaching integrating counselling with The Richards Trauma Process.
Cultivating a growth mindset is vital for reinventing agriculture, essential yet it is only part of the solution. Our growth mindset alone may not create access to break through our self imposed limitations, those stories we unconsciously tell ourselves about the way things are. There are some obstacles we can not think our way out of with a growth mindset alone. Our trauma responses and adaptations we have developed to keep us safe are not stored in our conscious minds so we can’t think our way out of them, they are stored in our sub conscious mind and in our body.
When we find ourselves resisting, struggling, procrastinating, dissatisfied, unwell and challenged in life it can be a sign there could be underlying subconscious programs running our behaviour and thinking processes. We can not consciously think our way out of subconscious programming.
Reinvention resurfaces traumas
Reinvention processes often include a process of disintegration and crumbling away of the old which can trigger our survival instincts and bring our old traumas to the surface. When we are on a journey to becoming something new and different from what we are now we are in unfamiliar territory. We feel disoriented as the familiar becomes unfamiliar.
Our subconscious beliefs that impact how we operate and make decisions in our businesses can be running on autopilot to keep us stuck in the status quo and playing it safe at the same time as our conscious mind is thinking about changing. Our subconscious programming has been developed to keep us safe from things that have happened in the past however it can be holding us back from creating a different future. This is why settling for the status quo is a popular choice.
To grow and reinvent we must be able to get out of our comfort zone. If something is holding us back from the edge of our comfort zone our subconscious trauma responses are often the key to unlocking this.
Anywhere you have been playing it safe can point you towards your trauma adaptations. Playing it safe prevents us from tapping into our creativity. Reinvention requires us to do our inner work which is an ongoing, evolving process not a destination we arrive at. If we avoid this work and stay stuck in our heads we continue to build our businesses and lives on the unstable foundations of unprocessed trauma that will continue to sabotage us and our efforts to bring something truly new into the world.
Working through trauma expands our capacity
Our trauma patterns play out in how we run our businesses and in our relationship with land. Traumatised agricultural landscapes are a direct reflection of the trauma adaptations carried by the people stewarding them. The landscape is a direct reflection of the people inhabiting it and vice versa. Everything is connected. Healthy people inhabit healthy land. Traumatised people inhabit traumatised land.
“If you do not understand your role in the problem, it is difficult to be part of the solution.”
– David Peter Stroh
Being regenerative starts within us. When we focus exclusively on regenerating everything outside of us our efforts will continue to be run by our automatic subconscious programming which can reduce our effectiveness and ability to achieve the results we know are possible.
When you are ready to stop trying to think yourself into a new reality and want to access the heart of the issue contact Angus to arrange a time for a chat about how TRTP can help.
Read From Surviving to Thriving, a blog Angus wrote about TRTP here.