Becoming, you, the world, together
Becoming is not something done to you, but it doesn’t happen alone. It happens in the space between who you are and the world you find yourself in. In that liminal space, learning lives. That is where my work is: in conversation with leaders growing into their roles, with organizations learning to support the people who carry them, and with coaches developing a practice of their own.
Dr. Benjamin Jooste
I'm a scholar practitioner. My coaching works with individuals and their organizations together, because neither changes alone. I make space for deep conversations, the kind where what matters most can surface. My doctorate in Adult Learning from Teachers College, Columbia University, gives that work an evidence base, so that what a client senses in a conversation becomes something they can stand on. I train and support coaches to do the same. I have done this work across healthcare, finance, technology, professional services, and more.
Conversations with:
Leaders
I coach executives, physicians, and healthcare leaders through the transitions that ask them to become someone new: a first senior role, a larger team, a merger, a change they did not choose. The work is longitudinal and reflective: it engages identity, meaning, and purpose, and it has to show up in the role.
Organizations
I work with organizations the way I work with people: through coaching. Leaders coached together, with the institution in the conversation, become the agents of the change they want to see. I have done this at the scale of a global enterprise and inside a single team, and the principle holds at both.
Coaches
Coaching is more than a process; it's a way of being. I develop that capacity in coaches the way I develop it in leaders, through conversation about the work itself: in education, where a rigorous method becomes a practice of your own, as it does for the coaches I teach in the Columbia University Coaching Certification Program, and in supervision, where coaches learn more about themselves, the world, and what self as instrument truly means.