Earth Connection: why it’s absolutely essential for effective coaching of the future

Tabitha Jayne
7 min readJan 26, 2021

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Over five years ago I made the decision to evolve the work I do into Earthself. The idea behind this was to create a story of what happens when you decide to model your business on the biggest business in the world: The Earth itself.

As part of this, I decided to go back to university and get my second masters. A difference in the experience of my clients and myself was occurring in terms of our relationship to nature. It was going deeper into the Earth.

My first attempt to explain this was fluffy and woo (found at the end of The Nature Process 2nd Edition). I knew that wasn’t enough to be able to apply the work I was doing on a bigger scale. I needed to understand the theory behind it.

These decisions came about as a result of flashes of inspiration from time spent in relationship with the world around me. It’s only in looking back at the patterns that I can even attempt to create the story around it.

What followed these decisions was a crash course in learning how to function within a natural system. I could see something being revealed to me through my own invitation for the Earth to be not just a stakeholder in the business but also a mentor and guide.

Last year, my masters research was officially published in a new open-source peer reviewed journal. Feedback received on the article said it “provides evidence of a new emerging field and a timely response to the global concerns around climate change and human stewardship of earth”.

Some people think my work is academic. At heart, I’m a practitioner. Yet I know that it is dangerous to play with things that you don’t understand, especially when working within complex, adaptive systems. That’s why I strive to blend practice and research.

What the research says about Earth Connection

Earth connection is a subjective sense of feeling part of the Earth that helps an individual gain a clearer sense of who they are and connects them to a divine cycle of life. It is a conscious relationship that recognises the interconnectedness of the Earth’s ecosystem and creates an awareness of the need to support the Earth as the Earth supports humanity.

Earth connection is created through engaging with the natural world around us and can help us to cope more effectively with our emotions, stay present to life’s challenges and feel in control of any changes that happen. When we connect to the Earth through our bodies, we can receive guidance and insight that is communicated to us through the immediate response of the natural world around us.

There are a number of potential processes that help people develop a sense of Earth Connection:

• Regular interaction in and engagement with the natural world.

• An understanding of the individual health benefits received from doing so and the ability to articulate them.

• A regular mindful and embodied practice that the individual can bring out into their time in the natural world.

• An awareness of the individual’s relationship to the Earth while out in the natural world.

• An awareness of a spiritual life and death cycle that includes the individual.

The majority of the participants focused on three key sensory experiences as part of connecting to Earth:

• Paying attention to the way they were breathing

• Feeling their feet on the ground

• Noticing how their body was moving

They would also have an intention for spending time in the natural world or a challenge that they wanted to explore. From my own personal experience, I experience a dance between my thoughts, feelings and sensations and what I notice about the natural environment around me. They seem to merge into one conversation.

Examples of Earth Connection in Action

It probably won’t come as a surprise that applying Earth Connection is still very new in my coaching practice, even after 5 years of researching and working with it! A key element of coaching with nature is to meet people where they are at — something that sometimes disappoints the coaches I train.

Many people in organisations still see nature as something that hippies and tree-huggers do. It needs the evidence base for people to take it seriously, whether we like it or not. Jumping into Earth Connection in an organisation that still has resistance to embedding nature into its strategy is unwise.

It takes time to consider the Earth as the main stakeholder in business and also to explore how to start embedding nature into an organisation. This is an entirely different way of working from business as usual.

Letting the Earth Speak

A few months ago, I led a session on Earth Connection for the executive team of an interesting start-up focused on the leading edge of consciousness and technology. The team wanted more than to have the Earth as a stakeholder in their business. They wanted to also bring their own Earth Connection in as the ‘voice of the Earth’.

Every team member met the requirements of the potential processes to create Earth Connection. In preparing for the session, I was told that the team work in an emergent process around a specific topic. This meant that none of my previous tools and strategies were appropriate.

We started the session by checking in and creating a sense of connection between us all. My eighteen-year-old cat had died that week. It turns out that the story of how you named your cat Fuckwit after your brother who died is a really good ice-breaker.

From there, the team spoke about where they lived in the world to create a sense of the landscapes that surrounded them. Afterwards, a discussion on how they felt when they connected to nature and also the Earth emerged.

To ensure that they could collectively express the voice of the Earth in their strategic meetings moving forward, we agreed that they would all explore in more detail how it felt for them when they were experiencing this connection. This information would then be shared within the team so that they could hold collectively responsibility for this and offer feedback whenever they sensed that something wasn’t right.

Another session to follow up with this will emerge at the right time.

The Earth as the Main Stakeholder

Within Earthself, our shareholders are known as Guardians. Part of this role is to ensure that we create more formal processes to keep bringing the Earth into the business as it evolves into a more complex organisation beyond a solo business owner.

Our Winter review and emergent Spring strategy session was this week. As part of the preparation, I’d prepared a report on what had happened within Earthself and what was emerging. The Guardians read the report and then spent some time in a natural setting practicing Earth connection around the following question: “What needs to be explored further during our Guardian meeting to help ES move successfully into spring?”

At the start of our meeting, we shared our experiences. What was interesting is that two of the three nature experiences significantly featured blue tits as part of them. We made a note of this and continued on following the process we’d created to see what emerged.

Ironically by doing this, we missed addressing what was emerging through the shared experiences! It was only when we got to the end of the session that we realised that our nature experiences hadn’t really come up again and we’d forgotten to go back to them.

Our learning was that we didn’t give enough space to this. I went away and reflected further by exploring the symbolism of the blue tit and also some repeating patterns I was noticing within myself. Turns out that an answer to that initial question posed was that I need to trust the Guardians more and look at how I’m being dishonest in our meetings because of my own insecurities around business.

We’ll need to explore this in a more emergent and relational way.

Identifying the Earth’s Requirements

As part of the development of the Coaching with Natural Systems program (starting February 26th, 2021) that I’m co-creating with Alex and Ann from Talik & Co, we’ve started to explore what the Earth wants from this program. We’re reinforcing the fact that it’s key to model the approaches we’re going to be exploring with others.

This was a huge learning for me when I started Earthself. I assumed that we didn’t need give voice to our exploration and relationship with either the Earth or the natural world because it was embedded into everything we do. The research highlighted if you don’t take the time to stay conscious of your relationship with the Earth, you can forget about it.

This offers coaches the opportunity to have a unique role in supporting businesses. We can act on behalf of the Earth if we take the time to become conscious of our connection to it. That’s why it’s essential that we’ve done our own exploration first so that we can better serve our clients. This gives us a better understanding in helping others explore their connection to the Earth.

Before we start the full design process for this program, we’re giving ourselves the space to explore what emerges from playing with Earth Connection and using it to bring the Earth fully into our program as co-designer and mentor.

None of us have any idea what is going to emerge through this exploration or how it’s going to shape the program we offer. We’ll find out in our next conversation!

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Tabitha Jayne
Tabitha Jayne

Written by Tabitha Jayne

Founding Director, Earthself. Passionate about putting Earth at the Heart of Business through coaching as nature and Earth.