What Nature Can Teach Us About Coaching: ICF Core Competency 8 - Facilitates Client Growth

Nature does not force growth—it creates the conditions in which life can flourish. A tree does not pull its roots deeper or stretch its branches outward through sheer effort. Instead, it responds to the nutrients, sunlight, and water available, growing in alignment with its surroundings.

Coaching follows the same principle. Clients do not grow because we tell them to—they grow when the conditions for transformation are cultivated. That is our role as coaches: to be the earth in which the seed of transformation within the client takes root and sprouts. With Earth’s intelligence flowing through us, we amplify the client’s capacity for growth. Not because we do anything, but because we ourselves are living from the same alignment that we invite our clients into.

What Does the ICF Say About Facilitating Growth?

The ICF defines this competency as the ability to “partner with the client to transform insights and learning into action that promotes autonomy, sustainable change, and ongoing development.”

Yet, much like the competency of evoking awareness, this definition subtly implies that coaching is something we ‘do’ to clients, rather than a process that emerges naturally. The key here is to create and maintain an agreement with the client that clarifies what they need to do to ground their insight.

This requires the client to understand how their brain, body, and nervous system work. As a late-diagnosed autistic woman, I learned this the hard way. I understood how the neurotypical brain, body, and nervous system worked. But by the time I was in full-blown autistic burnout, those skills failed me. I needed to learn how the autistic brain, body, and nervous system worked.

True growth is not about external motivation or action steps. Growth is an emergent property of aligned conditions. When coaching mirrors Earth Intelligence, growth happens not because we push for it but because the system naturally shifts.

Three Principles for Growth as an Expression of Earth Intelligence

1. Growth Is Self-Sustaining

?? Nature Parallel: A healthy forest thrives without intervention. Its cycles of decay, regeneration, and adaptation ensure resilience.

?? Coaching Parallel: Sustainable client growth means they no longer need the coach to continue evolving. True transformation embeds itself within their way of being.

2. Transformation Happens in Cycles, Not in a Straight Line

?? Nature Parallel: A tree grows through seasons of dormancy, expansion, and renewal.

?? Coaching Parallel: Clients move through cycles of insight, integration, action, and rest. Growth is not always visible—but that does not mean it is not happening.

3. Challenges Are Not Obstacles—They Are Essential for Growth

?? Nature Parallel: A river carves a canyon through resistance. In nature, what appears as destruction often leads to transformation.

?? Coaching Parallel: Challenges are not barriers to growth—they are part of it. A coach does not remove obstacles for a client but helps them shift their relationship to the challenge so it becomes a source of expansion.

The Tension: When Coaches Push for Growth Instead of Allowing It

Many coaches unconsciously try to "push" clients into action, assuming that transformation must always be visible and measurable. But just as forcing a flower to bloom damages it, pushing a client before they are ready disrupts the natural process of emergence. In hindsight, I see how often I was forced into neurotypical coaching structures that disrupted the natural emergence of growth.

Some clients—especially neurodivergent thinkers—need more structure and support in translating insight into action. A fully EarthConnected coaching approach doesn’t just step back and “allow” growth—it actively creates the right conditions for it to emerge in alignment with how each client processes change.

Facilitating Growth as Nature Does—Without Forcing It

Too many coaching models assume that growth happens through structured goal-setting and accountability. While structure can be useful for some, for others—especially neurodivergent individuals—it can create friction rather than flow.

A river does not need to be told where to flow, but it does need a landscape that supports its movement. Clients do not need to be pushed; they need environments that support how they naturally process and take action.

? Some clients need spaciousness and emergence—allowing awareness to unfold over time.

? Others need structure and clear scaffolding to translate awareness into tangible steps.

? Neither approach is “right” or “wrong”—the key is responsiveness to the client’s natural way of processing change.

This shifts the coach’s role from being a guide that "nudges" clients into growth to being a responsive co-creator of the conditions that allow growth to unfold.

Grounding Growth Through Natural Release

Growth cannot happen without release. In nature, leaves fall, rivers carve through rock, and forests shed what no longer serves. In coaching, clients must also release old patterns, limiting beliefs, or outdated ways of being for sustainable growth to occur.

?? This is not just a mental shift—true release happens at the level of the brain, body, and nervous system. When transformation is only understood cognitively, it remains an idea. When it is integrated somatically, it becomes inevitable.

? Growth is not just about taking action but about letting go.

? Growth is not about external change but about internal realignment.

? Coaching that does not support Natural Release leads to change that is temporary, rather than transformation that is inevitable.

The Tipping Point: Growth Beyond the Coaching Relationship

Nature does not grow in isolation. A single tree is part of a larger system—a forest, a watershed, a climate cycle. Its health and expansion contribute to the entire ecosystem, creating ripples that extend far beyond itself.

Coaching is the same. True client growth extends beyond personal success—it transforms the systems they are part of.

? Human System: Personal transformation within the individual (brain, body, and nervous system).

? Family System: Shifts in relational dynamics with close family, partners, and loved ones.

? Community System: How a client engages with and impacts their local environment and support networks.

? Team System: Growth within professional teams, collaborations, and workspaces.

? Organizational System: Evolution in the structures, values, and cultures of businesses, non-profits, and institutions.

? Earth System: The deepest level of transformation, where personal growth is not separate from planetary well-being.

?? Becoming EarthConnected: The Next Evolution of Coaching

Coaching must evolve to meet today’s world—not as a human-centred practice, but as a dynamic, Earth-systemic process that aligns human transformation with the intelligence of life itself.

This is why Becoming EarthConnected with the NatureProcess is not just a coaching approach. It is the next step in coaching’s evolution—where transformation is not just personal, not even eco-systemic. It is Earth-systemic—an intelligence that moves through all layers of life.

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Earthself’s NatureProcess Coach Training Programme (ICF Level 1) helps you master the art of coaching with and as nature—whether outdoors, indoors, or online—in a way that is fully neuro-inclusive.

By joining, you’ll not only develop deep coaching with and as nature skills but also contribute directly to the growth of the Scottish food forest movement.

Cohorts start in January, May, September, and November 2025.

Get in touch to learn more and secure your place.

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