CRêPS Expectations

What’s CRêPS when it’s at home? Well, this is a space for my writing about coaching, and more specifically, the elements of coaching I’m interested in:

Creativity;

Research;

Ethics;

Psychology; and

Supervision

It’s a neat little acronym which pleasingly captures all the aspects of coaching where I feel like I might have something vaguely interesting to say. Also it meant I got to draw a silly little pancake man for the branding, which felt like a good enough reason on its own if I’m being totally honest.

So who am I and why might you want to listen to my thoughts on those topics? I’m Beth, a psychologist, artist, and PhD researcher from Manchester, UK, where I live with my partner, James, and our two Devon Rex cats, Peanut and Pickle. My best work happens at the intersection of psychology, coaching, and creativity.

More specifically, I’m an organisational and coaching psychologist, with particular interests in well-being and emotions at work. I am lucky to enjoy a diverse portfolio of professional practice, including part-time employment at the Co-op as a People Coach, and a range of freelance work as an organisational psychologist, coaching psychologist, and coach supervisor. My research is looking at the role of creativity in coaching psychology and you can read my first published paper on using music and mark-making in coaching supervision to support reflective practice over on the Philosophy of Coaching journal.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been pulling together my portfolio of evidence towards Chartership as a Coaching Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. It is a really full on process which I am enjoying as much as I’m enduring. As I was writing a timeline of some of the highlights of the last 6 years since I qualified as a coach, I felt a wave of sadness when I realised that amidst all the things I’d managed to achieve, becoming one of The Psychologist Magazine’s ‘Voices in Psychology’ back in 2019 was the start of something I really wanted but that I hadn’t managed to maintain*. I didn’t think I stood a chance of being selected, and then I was. Of course after publishing a few of articles (1, 2, 3), I stood firmly in my own way through procrastination and fear, followed by fear’s uncomfortable companion shame, which emerged, ruddy faced, with a broom to sweep the whole thing under the carpet, thank you very much.

How can I profess that coaching can be life changing if you listen to what you already intuitively or actually know when the massive revelation that emerged during my first foray as a coaching client - that I wanted to be a writer - is something that I only pursued briefly and then shied away from when it all got a bit too real? And, whilst this introductory edition allows me to be a little more reflective, is that even true? I’ve published in an academic journal, written a book chapter that’s about to be published, and I’m doing a bloody PhD, which will require about 80,000 words over the next few years… but clearly there’s something preventing me from adopting ‘writer’ into my myriad of professional identities, and CRêPS is the way I’m currently choosing to do something about that. Let’s see where it goes.

On that note, I’m not entirely sure at this point what the frequency of this writing will be, or what shape it will evolve into - my last attempt at a newsletter (Thoughts Illustrated) always felt like it had a bit too much pressure on it, not least because the title always suggested I had to draw something to go with the words and at the time I was experiencing quite significant creative apathy. I am leaving the articles I published online as I still feel there’s some good stuff in there, but I’d like to do something a bit less personal with a bit more freedom whilst still retaining a sense of myself in the writing. The as-yet-unnamed silly pancake man will be setting the tone here for something a bit less serious and that involves a bit less navel gazing. Basically, I’m hoping I can get over myself a little bit and have some fun with this whilst sharing things that are really useful for practitioners, as opposed to writing missives about a practitioner (me).

I’ve got the aforementioned book chapter about to be published in a book on arts-based coaching, and a couple of events and a lot of reading coming up around the existing research on creativity in coaching (spoiler alert: it’s pretty scant), so it’s likely I’ll start these newsletters from there and then move into explorations around coaching supervision (as I’m pursuing my certification and accreditation as a supervisor this year).

I’m hoping not to be too self-indulgent, but equally I want to write about things I’m already thinking about and researching so the chance of me actually pulling something together to share with you is exponentially increased. Perhaps I will submit the article on failure that I wrote for The Psychologist and has been sitting on my desktop since 2021, or maybe I will rework it and share it here. I’d like to start whatever CRêPS becomes simply as an intention to write and to share that writing with others. Hopefully a rhythm and structure will emerge that works for me and gives any readers something useful, interesting, or enlightening to ponder.

In sum: I want to make coaching psychology and research around coaching more accessible and engaging; I want to empower coaches to embrace being ethical practitioners, rather than avoiding unethical practice; I want to champion the roles of creativity and supervision as a powerful and underestimated forces for good in our profession; and most of all, I’d love you to join me along the way.