What is Decolonized Coaching?

Written By Shirin Eskandani
 

My Early Experiences in Coaching

I found coaching during a difficult time in my life.  Both professionally and personally I was lost.  After ten years in a high-demand career, I was burnt out.  I knew I needed to make a change but I was unsure of what that could be.  I wanted a career where I could make an impact and have agency in my own life.  I wanted to do meaningful work that was connected to my purpose.  I knew I needed help navigating this transitional point in my life. 

 I had heard of coaching but I didn’t think it was for someone like me.  I’ll be honest, at the time, coaching was considered hokey.  Most folks thought it was a scam and that people who worked with coaches were being taken advantage of.  But, after hearing a coach talk about her work on a podcast, I was intrigued.  I was open to giving it a try.

Thank goodness I did.  Because that one decision changed the trajectory of my life.   Working with a coach helped me find my self again and guided me toward a new career path- coaching. 

Here’s the thing, I wish I could say that my experiences in the world of coaching were all positive and amazing.  They weren’t…

When I discovered coaching, I was hooked (like many of us are).  I was constantly attending workshops and courses, always trying to improve myself.   Healing old wounds, facing fears, and embracing the truth of who I was was so incredibly liberating.   Yet, something always felt off. Despite being led by “experts” and “well-known thought leaders”, these spaces often failed to acknowledge what was happening in the real world.  There was no mention of systemic oppression, privilege, or trauma.

I frequently found myself as the only person of color in the room, listening to speakers who appropriated tools and practices without considering the diverse backgrounds of their audience. These sessions were filled with messages like “change your mindset and think positive,” which overlooked the complexities of our lived experiences.  I often found myself having to sift through all the harmful rhetoric to find the wisdom in it all.  It was exhausting.  

This realization led me to a crucial decision when I decided to become a coach: to create truly inclusive and accessible spaces.  Spaces that offered hope and healing but that also acknowledged our lived realities.  Deep down I knew that this is how lasting and authentic transformation happens.

What Coaching Means to Me

To me, coaching isn't about solving people's problems or telling them what to do. It's about creating a space where individuals feel supported and empowered to reclaim their own inner wisdom, strength, and fortitude. It’s about collaboration and mutual discovery, not a hierarchical relationship where the coach holds all the answers.

If a coach isn’t pointing you back to your own wisdom, then they are not truly serving you. Coaching should never create dependency; instead, it should foster independence and self-trust.

Incredible coaching starts with the recognition that every person has the answers within them.   My role as a coach is to help my clients uncover this wisdom by guiding them through their fears, insecurities, and doubts. This process involves deep listening, asking powerful questions, and holding a mirror up to their thoughts and feelings so they can see themselves more clearly.

I always tell the people I work with that they already know what is best for them.  My job is not to provide solutions but to create a space where they feel safe and supported in exploring their own solutions. This means fostering an environment of trust and openness where clients can express their true selves without fear of judgment. It’s about helping them reconnect with their inner strength and fortitude, empowering them to make decisions that align with their truest selves.

Impactful coaching results in clients feeling confident in their ability to navigate their lives independently. This means that by the end of our coaching relationship, they should feel capable of facing challenges and making decisions without needing my guidance. They should have a stronger connection to their inner wisdom and trust their ability to figure things out on their own.

I believe that good coaching is about empowerment. It’s about helping clients recognize their own potential and encouraging them to take ownership of their growth and development. This approach fosters self-reliance and resilience, enabling clients to thrive long after our coaching sessions have ended.

What Certification (hopefully) Offers:

So where does decolonizing come into all of this?

I started to notice something very interesting when I first started coaching.  My clients seemed to all have similar goals.  I can’t tell you how many times I heard someone say:

“I want to go back to school to get my MBA”
“I want to find a partner and get married”
“I want to save enough money to buy a home”

Coaching, by nature, is goal-oriented.  I knew that my job as a coach was to help them reach these goals.  But I started to ask myself, “Were these really their goals or goals that society placed upon them?”  I realized that my clients were dreaming within a box of possibility.  A box that had been created for them by external forces.  Forces that tell us what is possible for us.    

The first seeds of decolonization in my practice were planted when I recognized that even our dreams and desires had been colonized. You see, colonization isn’t just about occupying land; it’s about taking over beliefs, thoughts, customs, and imaginations. Edgar Villanueva in Decolonizing Wealth writes:

Conquering is one thing: you travel to another place and take its resources, kill the people who get in your way, and then go home with your spoils.  But in colonization, you stick around, occupy the land, and force the existing Indigenous people to become you.  It’s like a zombie invasion: colonizers insist on taking over bodies, minds, and souls of the colonized.

Reading this definition clarified why so many limiting beliefs existed—they were reinforced by a world designed to limit us.

If coaching is about achieving goals, for me, the initial step in decolonizing coaching involves diving deeper into my client’s goals and dreams to uncover their true origins. When someone comes to me with specific goals, I help them explore their deeper desires and motivations. Often, through this exploration, clients realize that their initial goals were influenced by societal expectations rather than their true selves.  They realize that they had placed themselves within a box of possibility unknowingly. 

In its most simple form, decolonizing coaching means going deeper.  It means uncovering who you truly are and what you truly desire.  

The process of decolonization in coaching also involves recognizing and addressing the systemic barriers and internalized beliefs that limit our potential.  It’s more than mindset work and positive thinking.  It’s about showing our clients how to acknowledge the real injustices in the world and offering them the tools so they can move beyond.   untangle and undo the limitations that have been placed on them.   This approach fosters real transformation, allowing clients to pursue what genuinely brings them joy and fulfillment. It’s about breaking free from the constraints of colonized thinking and embracing a more expansive and liberated vision of what’s possible.

If we as coaches don’t guide our clients to go deeper, then we’re just recreating the world we exist in, and that’s not what I am here for.  I want better for all of us.

Embodying Decolonized Coaching

Being a decolonized coach isn't about loudly proclaiming that you are one. In fact, you don't have to tell your clients you're a decolonized coach because people often have misconceptions about what that means. Unfortunately, people have come to regard terms like "decolonized" and "trauma-informed" as buzzwords.

For me, decolonized coaching is about the space you're creating. It’s an embodied practice.  These concepts are actions, values, and beliefs that a coach embodies. They don't need to be explicitly stated because the work should be integrated into the healing process.  In fact, when we emphasize these terms too much, it can distract from the actual experience of healing and transformation.

Honestly, I hope we reach a point where we don't even have to mention these terms because the practices are naturally integrated. This approach allows the people we work with to experience healing in a liberatory, open, and safe(r) way. Decolonized coaching is about creating spaces that are inclusive, honest, and rooted in the real experiences of diverse communities. This path isn’t just about reaching goals but about rediscovering and reclaiming one's authentic desires and dreams.

Here are some of the pillars of decolonized coaching that we teach our student coaches in the Wholehearted Coaching Certification:

Cultural Appreciation over Cultural Appropriation
For far too long, coaching has “borrowed” many of its tools from other cultures without any acknowledgment from where the ideas and concepts originate.  In this pillar our Wholehearted Coaches learn how to infuse their work with the teachings, knowledge and traditions of other cultures while still respecting, honoring and acknowledging their origins.  As coaches, our work can and should be inspired by many sources but we have to make sure that we are respecting the roots of our work. 

Intentional Exploration over Spiritual Bypassing
Spiritual bypassing is incredibly prevalent in the world of self-growth.  It is when we avoid the uncomfortable parts of healing and growth by slapping on a big ol’ spiritual bandaid.   Examples of this include Examples of it include: toxic positivity (making clients repeat positive affirmations they don’t believe);  encouraging someone to meditate when they are going through emotional turmoil;  using concepts like manifestation without taking into account systemic oppression; using a mindset tool to “fix” how someone is thinking instead of allowing them to process their emotions.

The tools listed aren’t wrong, in fact, they can be incredibly useful.  However, the key is when, how and why they are being used.  Our Wholehearted Coaches learn how to use tools in a deep and intentional way that creates lasting and genuine transformation instead of a “quick-fix”.

Inherent Wholeness over Fixing
Unfortunately, in many coaching spaces, coaches are taught to approach their clients as if they need to be fixed.  They emphasize people’s flaws or weaknesses and make them believe that they have the secret formula to making them better– a 2.0 version of who they are.

When we coach from a decolonized lens, we believe that people are whole just as they are and that they are moving towards a fuller experience of their wholeness.  We believe that people are resourceful, capable, and wise.  Coaching is about allowing a client to understand how incredibly resourceful, capable, and wise they truly are. Healing is not about filling some hole, but instead showing our clients that they are already whole. 

Holistic Healing over Mindset
Mindset work is an incredibly powerful tool, but it is one that is often overused and emphasized in the world of coaching.  As decolonized coaches we remember that healing is not just from the “neck up,”  we must also take into account our body and spirit.  Our holistic curriculum in the Wholehearted Coaching Certification shows our Wholehearted Coaches how to integrate somatics, mindfulness and parts work into their coaching practice.   When we allow the body and spirit to be part of our coaching process, we tap into unimagined possibilities.  


Decolonizing our coaching approach is more than just surface-level changes.  It’s more than a coach saying they are “inclusive” or having an Indigenous land acknowledgment as their email sign-off.  Decolonizing our approach requires a true examination of ourselves, our deep beliefs, our biases, our habits and our behaviors.  Decolonizing our approach requires us to dismantle how things are and reimagine how they could be. 

Want to learn more about Decolonizing Coaching?

  • Free Coaching Workshop: If you want to learn more about coaching and what a coach actually does, make sure to check out our free coaching workshop where we discuss all the ins and outs of being a coach.   

  • What’s possible as a coach: If you want to find out what’s possible as a certified Wholehearted Coach, check out what our coaches have to say about the Wholehearted Coaching Certification.  


Ready to become a life coach?

The Wholehearted Coaching Certification is a holistic life coaching certification that teaches you foundational coaching skills from a decolonized perspective. Our mission is to make coaching a more diverse, safe, and inclusive space by fostering a new generation of coaches who prioritize healing, transformation, and liberation for all

 
 
Shirin Eskandani
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