Ecological Coaching is……
The planet’s ecological boundaries are being exceeded. Scientific findings reiterate this daily. And yet, we don’t need science to tell us what we already know deep within us. Our current way of engaging with the world is broken. We know that the natural world is not something out there – it is in our very DNA.
My primary offering – through a process I call Ecological Coaching – is about supporting you as you transition your organisation towards regenerative futures. This starts with firmly establishing both where you and your organisation are today and what futures you are imagining. Only then will we know what bridges we need to build.
On a spiritual level, it may mean asking deeper questions about who you are and what truly matters to you; about the network of relationships within which you sit. It may mean reimaging your relationship with the rest of nature.
It likely means setting aside the poor masters our societies have created for us and truly sensing the sacredness of life; the awe, the wonder, the joy in every moment of every day, in every drop of water and every grain of sand.
It is thus about guiding you as you thrive in service to life.
In the outer world, it means helping you translate this inner transition into ripples of positive change within your organisation and most importantly for the communities you serve and ultimately life on this planet.
Imagine leading an organisation that not only nourishes you and your team but also the communities you serve and the planet that hosts us!
Ecological coaching is about strengthening the inner and outer capacities that are necessary for you and your organisation to make this transition. It also perfectly complements different purpose driven models like social enterprises and more formal processes like B Corp certification by working with the leader(s) to develop the mindset, skillsets, structures, relationships and cultural buy-in essential for lasting impact across the organisation in terms of putting planet and community at the heart of decision-making and governance. It can also help where such transition journeys stall or get sidetracked.
Whilst the experience will be wholly personalised to you, typical building blocks include:
- A Bigger Vision: What might be possible if your leadership were truly aligned with something bigger than your immediate challenges?
- A Holistic Approach: What might change if you deepened your connections – with yourself, your team, the natural world?
- Leadership for the Long Term: What type of leader do you want to live into over the next five to ten years?
- Thinking Time that Matters: What assumptions might be worth challenging? What perspectives have you not considered?
- Harvesting Insights: What one insight, if acted upon today, might change everything?
Who is Tom O’Leary?
My name is Tom O’Leary. My journey, lived in a number of countries and through various languages, has always been driven by a profound sense of curiosity – a trait that has remained consistent from childhood.
If anything, it has been reinforced through my experiences as a project manager, start-up founder, manager and entrepreneur for over two decades. The need for tangible outcomes is paramount and yet life has taught me that possibility lies not so much in seeking answers but in learning to ask better questions.
- What do I want from life?
- Is this it?
Together with my (now) wife, we began questioning our lifestyle:
- How can we live differently?
- How can we work differently?
Acting on these questions, we left our well-paying jobs, left Belgium, moved to Spain to live on the beach, started our own businesses and initially made our young family the priority.
Over time, we embarked on a journey of reconnecting with the natural world within us and around us as well as one of increasing concern about humanity’s relationship with the planet that sustains us.
Along the way, my lifelong fascination with questioning and curiosity led me to a Masters in Personal and Management Coaching and a thesis on Play in Coaching, which explored more creative and playful ways of supporting coaching clients.
This particularly gave me the tools to translate my decades of self-coaching and dedication to mastery of core soft skills such as self-awareness, empathy, problem-solving, decision-making and thinking environments, into an offering – that I term Ecological Coaching – I could share with others.
Ecological Coaching is about thriving at all levels of our experience, meaning we are nourishing and being nourished by our relationships with ourselves, those around us, our communities and above all the planet that hosts us.
My vision is to – within a decade – support leaders and boards of global organisations who are addressing aspects of the metacrisis. Equally, more locally within Ireland and my home county, I am bringing the vision of more regenerative futures to life through my stewardship of regening, a Kerry-rooted eco-social enterprise working to catalyse an equitable society that cares for people, place and planet. Visions only become real when you share them with the world!
What Is My Unique Voice?
I guide bold pioneers through inner transitions towards regenerative futures.
My focus – in what I call Ecological Coaching – is about working with leaders not as an “individual” but rather as part of an ecology of relationships. Within this ecology, I help the leader feel heard, gain clarity, take action, build confidence and thrive all in service of something bigger. This could thus equally be called Regenerative Coaching because the intent is to create a positive feedback loop between the leader, organisation, community and planet that nourishes each.
The first step? Becoming more curious. I see curiosity as the key, allowing us to unlock deep insights that directly enhance our capacity to think, act and lead.
This means spending time connecting with the world around us and contemplating what might be possible so that when we take action, we can bring all our energy and power to bear.
In a culture obsessed with efficiency and productivity, the paradox is that much energy and resources are wasted by a bias towards action over contemplation. Humans are very good at solving problems but less so at ascertaining the right “problem” to solve. Afterall, if you are answering the wrong question, it does not matter how ‘hard’ you work, you are still answering the wrong question.
The focus of my work is thus helping clients to think differently and question more. This starts with how we think about the challenge right in front of us right now. The mindset here is that every choice matters; every decision compounds.
This builds into longer-term thinking partnerships that truly provide the scope to foster curiosity about every aspect of what we do, how we do it and indeed why we do it in the first place. This progressively allows the client to nurture their own self-coaching skills and build a high-performance mindset.
That is why I always emphasize that while some of this may seem fuzzy or theoretical – “Am I right in saying that we will basically talk?” – it is by its nature highly practical. This means that, as we move from call to call, you should feel the benefits and experience immediate impact by thinking differently, behaving differently and doing things differently as a result of what you have experienced.
To continued curiosity,
Tom O’Leary
P.S. Please take maximum advantage of the free content on this site to become more curious and expand how you think. I also endeavour to answer every email so if you have any queries do reach out – you will find my address if you are curious. I’m not claiming to have any answers. Instead, I offer questions, which open the door to infinite possibility.
If you find it helpful, please also share it. My view is that humanity could solve most of its problems by simply thinking differently and, as a species, it seems like we certainly have created a series of not only major problems but potentially existential crises.
This is collectively known as the metacrisis. A key component underlying the metacrisis is a thinking (or sensemaking) crisis – how we think and what we allow ourselves to think as constrained by the stories we tell ourselves. To survive and thrive, we are being called to evolve every aspect of our thinking – even how we think about thinking and what constitutes thinking. All of this requires curiosity.
