Read about Katie Conely, one of our 2024 Grid Coach Training Alumni and Certified Grid Balance Coach and why and how she decided to add Grid to her coaching tools.
The ICF defines coaching as ‘partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential’. Grid coaching fits this definition perfectly and it’s my experience that the Grid framework facilitates the opportunity to address both personal and professional arenas in a holistic way that is both thought provoking and creative.
Katie, Conley – Licensed Career Coach, Accredited Strengths Profile Practitioner, and Certified Grid Balance Coach
Katie is a Licensed Career Coach, an Accredited Strengths Profile Practitioner, a Registered Professional with the Career Development Institute, an Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development and Author of ‘God’s GRACE for Your Career’.
She runs Conley Career Coaching, helping people get the most from their careers. She says, ‘Coaching people to help them flourish in their careers is what I love to do!’
Katie’s Story
What initially attracted me to the Grid is how deceptively simple and yet powerfully impactful it is. Grid provides a coaching framework that supports personal agency, productivity and wellbeing. Grid helps you maintain balance in both personal and work settings, recognizing that energy needs to be restored through self-care and learning whilst it is expended through life and work activities.
As a busy working Mum, I had always neglected self-care and Grid’s focus on wholeness helped me understand the importance of self-care and how not paying attention to my own needs negatively impacted other areas of my life.
You can read Katie’s initial story where she shares how she discovered the Grid method and used it to support her wellbeing and productivity.
Before Grid things kept falling off my ‘to do’ list and I was being pulled in many different directions at once. I was trying to juggle everything at once and feeling guilty about taking time for myself. With Grid, over time I have been able to review the things that don’t get done, assess the reasons why not and reframe them to make them more appealing.
Katie’s Grid Practice
My own regular practice is to draw up a weekly Grid, and this helps me focus on activities that keep me balanced in both my personal and professional life. I discovered, over time, that the Grid is also a really helpful reflection tool, since you can see at a glance which things don’t get done and reflect on the reasons why not. More recently I have also discovered the benefits of a daily Grid when I was recovering from a spinal injury and couldn’t focus on anything more than the day at hand. It freed me to focus on the moment and not worry about the rest.
As a Career Coach, I am particularly interested in the ‘career’ quadrant and how to use this for career progression or career development. The homebases in my Grid in the career quadrant include Networking, Learning and Promotion. I have found that being specific with the tasks I put under these homebases ensures that I stay focused and on track. Having a quadrant on the Grid dedicated to my career means that this area of my working life doesn’t get either neglected or become overwhelming. Also, I can review progress, reframe and celebrate successes as I go along.
What made me seek Grid Coach Training and Accreditation?
As I used the Grid over the past three years, I found I was naturally sharing it with others, especially with clients and I wanted to be able to do this competently and with a deeper understanding of the psychology behind the Grid, and to be able to explain the science that underpins it.
Our careers don’t happen in isolation to the rest of our lives and I have experienced how the Grid can be a powerful way to manage productivity, reflect on progress and be a tool for opening up opportunities for transformational coaching giving the client agency over their lives and careers.
The Grid makes perfect sense practically, recording everything in one place, and I wanted to be able to explain why this method is so powerful neurologically. Completing the Grid Coaches training has enabled me to do this, and I have started to share the Grid formally with clients.
“The Grid Coaches training really helped me to consider embodiment in coaching, and how to use movement and moments of transition to ground the coaching for the client. Also how physically stepping in and out of Grid quadrants can help clients focus their sense of presence as well as provide an opportunity to discuss context, how this may change over time, and how the client can manage this change.”
Katie Conley, Certified Grid Balance Coach
Putting Grid Coaching to Work as a Certified Grid Coach: Case study
The first person I coached using Grid, was juggling so many things in her life and she jumped at the chance to use the Grid to make sense of everything and to help give her focus and balance. She found list-making soul-destroying and loved the creativity of the Grid. During our session, when she created her first Grid, we were able to draw out the things that were important for her, focus on areas that would be most impactful for her, and above all she gained a sense of personal agency over her life. She had a vision for how she wanted her life to be going forward.
When we met again, she said, “It’s like magic! I felt so productive, and I got so much done!” She had struggled with work/life balance and seeing everything laid out on paper made it hard to let things slip through the cracks, she felt more in control and explained how the Grid had become like a central command station for all the various tasks she needs to think about in her life. It was a transformational moment for her, and for me as a coach, since I had been able to coach her around her homebases and help her attune to what draws her attention, and what constitutes a task. She recognised the endorphins released as she highlighted completed tasks. It was very powerful.
With my next client we were able to discuss barriers to progress and reframe them, especially where there was an overlap between the quadrants. Sometimes relationships fall across different quadrants and we were able to discuss the nature of these relationships. Were they restorative or draining? And, where did they fit most naturally?
Growing Grid Coach Mastery
Grid is a powerful aid to learning and coaching and I am planning to integrate it more and more with my career coaching practice to provide a holistic approach to career development, where clients get to create their own Grid, focussing on the areas of their personal and professional lives that are important for them. Our careers don’t happen in isolation to the rest of our lives and I have experienced how the Grid can be a powerful way to manage productivity, reflect on progress and be a tool for opening up opportunities for transformational coaching giving the client agency over their lives and careers.
I also plan to experiment with using Grid for vision and goal setting, with the starting point being the current context a client is in, compared with their desired future perspective.
Final words…
Grid coaching exemplifies the ICF definition of coaching where clients go through a thought-provoking and creative process focussing on all aspects of their lives, giving them agency to review their potential for growth and make relevant changes. As a Grid Coach I am able to guide, reflect, observe and notice things whilst the client takes an active role in assessing their current situation, identifying changes they would like to make, and then setting goals to do this, all through the lens of their own personal Grid.
Want to become a Certified Grid Coach?
Our in-depth Grid Balnace Coach is designed for people interested in transforming their lives and bringing similar positive change to others as coaches, managers, parents and carers. Learn more here and take a big practical step towards healthy living and leading.
And, if you’d like to add Grid training to your organization reach out to us.
