As editor of Coaching Today, I see many practitioners creating work and building specialist coaching practices inspired by personal or professional challenges. Our life experiences can give us a special empathy with a particular group of clients, and I love reading the stories of those who have used their own inside knowledge and personal experience to create something of value for a specific community or group of people.

As someone who lives with Crohn’s disease, I myself have drawn on my experience of living with a chronic, changeable and ‘invisible’ illness to support clients in similar situations. Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory is now part of the lexicon of those living with chronic illness – "I’m all out of spoons" being shorthand for "I have nothing left in the tank and now need to rest."

As well as giving us special insight into the condition, living and working with a chronic illness or disability can also have unexpected benefits. Flexibility and adaptability are two qualities I would say I have definitely cultivated as a result of living with Crohn’s. So I consider it a privilege to have interviewed coach Nishe Patel about her recent ADHD diagnosis, and the impact this has had on her coaching, training and supervision practice. In our cover feature, The World as a Spider’s Web, Nishe writes with great honesty and eloquence about her experience of living and working with ADHD, and how she has learned to adapt her work as a consequence. She also writes about the insights she has gained as a result and how her own experience is enriching her work, despite the very real challenges it presents on a daily basis. When describing how she sees the world as a spider’s web, she explains: "I can spot the connections between various pieces of information and create a simple expression of what that connection is. I also tend to work simultaneously on several different patterns, and look at each pattern from different directions. I can simply see how it’s all connected."

Articles in the April 2023 issue include: Joanne Wright of the BACP Coaching Executive provides members with an update, in A new year and a new growing network for BACP Coaching; Xeni Kontogianni explores existing research on the benefits and challenges of blending psychological perspectives in coaching, in Research digest and Alison Jones demonstrates how we coaches can harness the power of exploratory writing in our work, in Start with a question. 

Do you have a story to share? Contact me at coachingtoday.editorial@bacp.co.uk with your ideas – I would love to hear from you.

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