The next guest of the OnCoaching Podcast is John Parr!
I am a lucky person as in my coaching journey I have met with great people who mentored and supported me. John is one of them. We met more than fifteen years ago when I was attending my first-ever TA (Transactional Analysis) seminar series around coaching and organizational work. As a part of the program, he was teaching us about PCM®.
That was the first time I ever heard about it. The clarity of the content and John’s calm presence, his embodied “OK-ness” made that seminar a life-changing experience for me. As a psychologist I have been looking for a toolkit that could provide me a blueprint for interventions: “You see this – you do that”, and I got exactly this. Since then, John has been there for me in my professional journey, certifying me first as a trainer, then later as a master trainer in PCM®.
During these years together, I made one big mistake: I have not realized how experienced and talented he is in all the other walks of his professional life. I guess I had so much to learn from him as a PCM® mentor. However, as my practice grew, and my client cases became more and more complicated he gave me further guidance in TA, then I found out about his work around Emotional Assertiveness too.
What I have always admired in our conversations, is his clarity, and his ability to grasp – and explain – the core elements of complex challenges. A nice thing to have in a mentor 😊. I invited him for this conversation to talk about his past and to explore some of his ideas for working with emotions.
John is a seasoned international executive coach and trainer.
He is certifying master trainer of PCM® and the founder of the Emotional Assertiveness Model. John brings a wealth of experience to the conversation. During his career, he served in the Royal Navy, was a probation officer, was an HR manager, and is a past president of EATA (European Association for Transactional Analysis) … he is a trained psychotherapist too.
In this conversation, we talked about his career experiences and how he got to this point. We had some important side stories about submarines (or have we edited them out? 😊) and spirituality – how love and religion influence how he helps professionals. We talked about how he uses his wide knowledge and his experience in multiple theories of psychology to support his clients and of course, we covered Emotional Assertiveness as well.
From all the inspiration I got I really came to appreciate how John works with joining thinking and emotions. As a bit of an overthinker myself I could immediately relate to his experience about
Clients being either too distanced from their own emotions to be guided by them, or are too overwhelmed by these emotions – so their thinking becomes clouded.
With a short example, he has shown a technique for starting to join these two – equally important – processes.
This episode is special in the sense that John and I frequently have conversations, and I am happy that I can share a piece of my experience with the world through this episode.
You can listen to the conversation here:
I am happy to hear your reflections and comments! Commenting is available under my LinkedIn post of this episode. Reach the post through my profile here)
