Marianne Craig wants to reveal the authentic self in her clients. Having co-founded Mirus Coaching for Social Change, for human rights activists, she has an exciting new project: Coaching in the Movement, offering pro-bono coaching to climate justice leaders. Liz Hall reports
One of the most precious gifts coaching potentially offers is helping people feel comfortable with removing their ‘masks’ and showing who they really are, says career and personal coach, coach supervisor, activist and entrepreneur, Marianne Craig.
“Everybody – well, at least 99% of people – has love in them. They want to do their best. They’re struggling in the world like we all are. But we go around with a mask on, trying to impress people.
“I think that’s the lovely thing about coaching. Hopefully if it goes well and the trust and intimacy builds, the client feels that they can show their vulnerable self, their authentic self. Hopefully, it’s a meeting of two authentic people,” says Craig.
Speaking of showing authentic selves, until now Craig had been reluctant to be profiled in this magazine. She only agreed finally because she was keen to speak about an exciting project she co-founded in July 2022 with Adam Klug and Emma Rees. The project is Coaching in the Movement (CitM) which aims to build a sustainable model for coaching at scale for climate justice leaders. The funded scheme is offering free coaching and other support as part of a pilot operating until December this year.
Craig remembers when she first realised how we all wear masks:
“I was in a counselling group and when I walked in – I was young – I thought, ‘I don’t like anybody in this group. This is not really going to be very good.’ After about six weekly meetings, I loved every person in that room because we’d been through something together, we’d all been vulnerable.
“The epiphany that I had was we all go around with a mask and we’re so worried that somebody will see the real us so we work really hard at controlling everything to make an impression. But actually it’s seeing the person vulnerable without the mask that makes them lovable. That’s one of the big things I’ve learned.
“I feel quite moved saying that because I think I’m saying it about myself, too. I think I still do it with public speaking, for example.
“And I remember going to coaching conferences in the early 2000s where the coaches were all very smart, dressed in suits. At the start of my coaching business I tried to be like them but to be honest I felt like I was wearing some kind of drag!
“One day it hit me that I just needed to be myself and that the clients who would want to work with me would do so because they shared my values and perhaps recognised I was being authentic rather than because I looked corporate and was wearing a suit! It seems strange now in 2023 when so many people wear casual clothes.
Craig did try corporate coaching, inspired by US coach and coach trainer Laura Berman Fortgang. “She made a virtue of the fact that she had no corporate experience. She went into corporations, charging high fees claiming her outsider status was an asset to her corporate clients.
“I tried executive coaching, going into companies. I didn’t enjoy that. I didn’t feel authentic. It’s perhaps because it’s not my background. I’ve found that quite a lot of corporate refugees come to me, such as corporate lawyers who are disaffected with that life and want to do something more meaningful. And I resonate [with] that, I suppose.”
Activism
“There is this activist part of me that’s driven to make a difference. Although I’m very involved in my local community, I still felt there was something missing.”
So in about 2005 she set up Mirus Coaching for Social Change with Alma Neville, offering low-cost coaching “to people who get up in the morning and want to change the world”.
This worked well for a number of years, “But Alma sadly died of a brain tumour and I didn’t want to carry on.
“So there was still something missing after that. And when Extinction Rebellion (XR) came along, I joined a project to coach them. And that was interesting and I learned a lot. If I was young, I’d be out there gluing myself to a lorry, but I don’t feel robust enough nowadays to get arrested and do all that stuff.”
This work came to a standstill as a result of the pandemic. And then Coaching in the Movement came into being from conversations with fellow activists and coaches Klug and Rees, who are both former school teachers and co-founders of Momentum, a grassroots organisation which sought to get Jeremy Corbyn elected as
UK prime minister.
Coaching in the Movement
Craig says, “We’re seeking to build a global coaching network to support and strengthen climate movement leadership, particularly in the global south, expanding access to coaching across the international climate movement. [This] has the potential to nurture a more strategic, impactful, and sustainable approach to leadership and foster greater cross border collaboration between parallel movements.
“There are three parts to our offer: one-to-one coaching for climate justice leaders, coaching skills, workshops to spread a coaching approach, and then supplementing leadership development programmes and fellowships.”
Currently there are 17 certified coaches in the network. Some 35% of the coaches are based in the global south, a percentage CitM is working to increase, particularly in Asia and Latin America. The coaches are all paid for their work.
“We raised £150,000 in order to do it properly and professionally and to be able to evaluate it.”
At the time of writing, 86 climate justice leaders and other activists – anyone working or volunteering in the field is eligible to receive free coaching – had signed up to receive coaching, which will mean delivery of 602 hours, surpassing the 500 hours committed to in the pilot. CitM has already reached more than 1,000 climate justice organisers, and nine workshops have so far been delivered on coaching topics including creating a coaching culture, overcoming the ‘tyranny of busyness,’ mindfulness-based coaching, discovering strengths, work-life balance and overcoming ‘imposter syndrome’.
Clients are based in 27 different countries – 10 within Africa, eight within Europe, five within North and South America, three in Asia and one in Oceania.
Feedback has been collected through a survey and a one-to-one offboarding call. The workshops have received an average score of 8.6/10 for how “useful and interesting” participants found the session. Participants have attended from all continents, except Antarctica.
The average scores for coaching (clients are asked to complete a feedback survey on completion) are: “coaching helped me to feel more clear, purposeful and strategic” (9/10), “coaching helped me to feel more confident and resourceful” (8.9/10), “coaching helped me to act more with more care towards myself and others” (8.9/10) and “I would recommend coaching to others” (9.5/10).
Craig explains that as CitM is part of the Social Practice, a consultancy that helps movements, campaigns, political parties, candidates and trade unions build people power at scale in America and Europe: “we don’t need to put our energy into having to get charity status and so on… and they’re all lovely people.”
CitM’s credibility is also enhanced by its partnership with Climate 2025, which provides capacity-building support to emerging movements working for urgent systemic change.
Why do climate justice leaders benefit from coaching?
“There are two prongs. One is that activists never think about themselves and they’re very driven and in danger of burnout. So being able to stop and think about work/life balance, the bigger picture, who am I, how do I do this in a sustainable way can be very helpful.
“The other is to stand back and think about their project or where they’re working and to think about strategy, just like any leadership coaching, really.
“I think coaching has a great role to play in supporting activists. And I wish that coaching had been available when I was young. I and so many other activists got burned out because you have this missionary zeal to change the world – it’s all down to you and all of that. Really misguided. But it’s an incredible energy. I feel it’s really important to offer people that space to stand back, pause, reflect.
“Why should only the leaders of corporations who are trashing the world have a coach and the people who are trying to make the planet safer for our children and grandchildren not have that wonderful service?
“Adam and Emma are young coaches, with a different history from me. And we brought in Faduma Hassan [from the Social Practice] into CitM as well. But our USP is that we are four people with an activist history. I think that’s quite unusual – we really understand and we see ourselves as part of the movement.”
Craig’s contributions include drawing on her expertise as a senior coach as well as an activist. She recruited the first batch of coaches and has inputted into thinking about the coaching process, the coach’s journey, pulling together resources such as the coach packs, for example.
Craig also coaches on the programme, and brings her experience to the peer supervision group she has with Klug and Rees. Ideas she’s come up with include offering team and group coaching, which is already underway. CitM is also now providing coaching services for the Climate Activist Speaker Fund through Climate 2025 and for the Youth Transport Fellowship Programme through the UMI fund. It’s also delving more into offering specialised learning and development, and may offer
Action Learning Sets.
“It’s part of thinking about coaching at scale, making a real impact, offering coaching to climate justice organisations as well as individuals. We’re just about to start piloting that with a small organisation.
“[Also] there are some small organisations that have asked us to coach climate activists who want help with public speaking. So they’re being offered training, mentoring and coaching. I can imagine there’ll be more of that little specialisms within the movement.
“For example, I’m trying to find a way of contacting Just Stop Oil activists in prison because I see them as political prisoners. And I think we should offer them coaching support.”
Getting into coaching
Craig has thousands of coaching and coach supervision hours under her belt. After starting coaching in 1999, she’d already become an ICF (International Coaching Federation) Master Coach in 2005.
“This tells you how hard I worked in six years to clock up 2,500 hours. I don’t recommend that, actually. I think it was a bit mad! But my website worked very well. I attracted many clients. I worked five days a week, long hours, but I loved it and I loved building my business.
“After having my daughter, I had quite serious depression and part of my recovery was doing crafts. One day, I was listening to [radio programme] Woman’s Hour, doing my craft and I heard Laura Berman Fortgang talking about coaching.
“I had a lightbulb moment. I thought, I didn’t know that was a job! I’d been that person who people would often come to, and I’d help them think about what they want to do with their life.
I didn’t know it was a thing!
She called the help line – “it’s the only time I’ve ever done anything like that” – contacting the ICF, and chose a coach training course with Coach U, partly it was delivered on the phone.
“It made me think about how a coaching business could be international. And that excited me. I was meeting all these American entrepreneurial people on the calls.
I think if I’d done a local course, I wouldn’t have thought like that. I’d have been thinking, I need to find clients in Brighton (in the south of England, where she lives).
“It made me think too, ‘I’ve got to get a website’ – this was 1999, by the way – and I can have clients all over the world.
“It’s interesting because I say on my website that I’ve lived in all these places including Switzerland, Germany, New York and Australia and I’ve noticed I get a lot of non-Brits. People have said that [they perceive that] people who’ve lived in a lot of different countries have a cosmopolitan outlook. I think people sought me out because they thought, Oh, she understands what it means to be an expat or to speak languages other than your own or what it feels to be a fish out of water sometimes. So I think that is part of who I am.”
And presumably quite adaptive?
“Yes adaptive, absolutely. Flexible.”
Building her business and attracting clients felt like “a really creative thing to do”, for Craig, she says.
“I used to think that creative just meant being able to paint or play a musical instrument, all of those things. I don’t feel particularly creative like that, arty, unlike my daughter, my partner and his family. I’ve always had a little bit of a complex about it.
“But I’ve come to realise that there are many different ways to be creative and one is to be creative with the way you create and curate your life.
“I grew up in quite a poor family in Scotland and when I was about eight or nine, I thought, ‘There’s more to life than this and I want to see the world’. I worked out that the only way for a girl to see the world then was to become an air stewardess. And so I got a book out of the library on how to do that.
“So I devoted my life from the age of eight to 21, getting the qualifications, including languages. I lived in Switzerland and different places, learning languages. Then I applied to and was accepted by all the airlines. I chose PanAm because it flew to many places. I was based in New York and I had a lot of fun.
“But I was quite political at school. So I got disillusioned quickly with airlines and I became involved in politics in New York, and worked on an underground newspaper and went on demos and got involved in the women’s movement.
“I decided I needed to go to university, that it was time to use my brain. So I went to Edinburgh University, studying sociology. I became very involved in student politics and something called the radical science movement.
“We used our education to turn scientific research about chemical hazards to workers, information we thought should be available to the workers, into pamphlets and trade union courses. At that time, there was nothing on health and safety.”
Craig became very interested in women’s health at work, writing a book on office worker wellbeing and starting the Women and Work Hazards Group. She then worked in a community health council, protesting against cuts, becoming involved in pensioners’ and women’s health groups. She also worked for local authorities on health policy and in other jobs, mainly in the public sector.
How has her background in Scotland informed her?
“There are all those expats who are passionate nationalists. And I’m not. They don’t live there and I don’t live there any more… But obviously, I’m Scottish and I’m quite a down to earth person. I have a Glasgow region sense of humour and I love going back there.
“I’m European, a citizen of the world. But I love Brighton [where she lives] and I feel a huge sense of belonging in Brighton. I’ve lived here for over 30 years. It’s full of like-minded people and I like that. I’m very proud of us having a Green MP. And Brighton is a very tolerant place. I feel very at home now.”
Career coaching and coach development
In the early days of her career in coaching, many people contacted Craig asking how they could become a coach. So she wrote an eBook called So You Want to Become a Coach. She also did a supervision course with the Coach Supervision Academy, and became a mentor coach with ICF, helping people get accredited.
She also started to specialise in career coaching: “In 2004, lots of people were coming to me wanting personal coaching. But actually they were saying, ‘I don’t like my job and I want to do something else, but I don’t know what.’
“I didn’t feel that my training equipped me to really help those people. My friend, Kate Edmonds, had had a different training, but she felt the same. So we got together, researching the field of career transition and advice, and creating and piloting the Firework career coaching programme with clients.”
The pair went on to create the Firework Career Coach Training programme which took a structured approach Craig finds is popular with career transition clients who “particularly appreciate knowing how many sessions it’s going to be and where they are in the process”. It can be used as a toolbox, dipped into and combined with existing tools and techniques.
Although Craig has sold the company to Careershifters, she says: “I still use Firework every day. I still really enjoy helping people find their purpose and path to meaningful work. It’s such a privilege. It gives me huge fulfilment… but I’m very much part-time now.”
Craig’s approach
Who or what informs Craig’s approach to coaching and coach supervision?
“I like the phrase, taking a walk around the garden together. I think that’s always captured my imagination. The supervisor and the coach come together to reflect on the coach’s client or whatever it is that they bring, very much together with this curiosity.
“In terms of my coaching style, I think I’m intuitive, gently challenging, non-directive, co-creating with the client, flexing depending on the client. I find it quite difficult not to speak in cliches about my style, actually.”
One of her favourite books to recommend to new coaches is Co-active Coaching (Kimsey-House et al, 2018). “I think it’s still the best textbook and you get all the resources online that go with it.”
Craig believes “the most important thing in coaching is presence”, and that mindfulness in particular helps coaches build presence.
“I think presence is the most important of the core competencies. I think training in mindfulness, reading mindfulness books and practising meditation are very, very helpful in presence, learning stillness, learning to be in the moment. I think that’s really important in one’s work as a coach.”
Craig also believes that when we coach, we coach the whole person.
“Philip Brew, co-founder of Coaching Development, once said “All coaching is life coaching once the door is closed and you are alone with your client”.
I like this because I think there’s a bit of a hierarchy in the coaching world with executive coaching at the top and life coaching at the bottom. Executive coaching is highly rewarded and has more kudos. But all humans are complex beings and all bring a range of topics to their coaching sessions (regardless of whether they’re executives or not”.”
Craig has a gift for bringing people together: “I think community, being together, doing shared activities together is really important. We’re not meant to be on our own. We’re social beings. And until really recently in human history, we lived in extended families and communities. I always remember when I had our daughter Rachel in the first few weeks and I was on my own and I was in tears. Those first few weeks was so terrible and hard. And I remember thinking, I’m not meant to be on my own. I thought of all those villages going back in time with the mothers and the sisters and the aunties. I wouldn’t have been sitting there not knowing anything and on my own.
“I think I’m quite good at sharing the vision and bringing people on board to do it. That’s not been the case with CitM because we’re all like that, to be honest. So I’m not taking credit for that at all. It all came together at the same time.
“We laugh a lot, I enjoy that. I feel I’ve come home. It’s not just working with these three, but all the coaches and the clients. It just feels like a sense of belonging again.”
Being an elder Craig believes “our society treats older people very badly. And I think coaching is a lovely place to be an older woman. You don’t need to retire at a particular age. People value experience and there is a wise woman role that I feel I can play. And maybe that’s also true in CitM, I don’t know.
“There’s also this thing where lots of new coaches say, ‘I can’t really start practising until I’m a bit more sorted out, until I’m sorted out like you.’ It’s our paradox – on the one hand, one can say wise woman, but on the other hand, acknowledging nobody’s sorted.
Craig says, just as she believes in the need for a Universal Basic Income for all, “so I believe in the idea of a universal basic coaching service for everyone. I’m aware this sounds idealistic but we must have dreams and we must have hope. These are the antidotes to despair in our highly unequal society.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everybody in the world had access to a coach? Because we know it’s not that everybody needs coaching but that everybody can benefit from coaching if it was available, including in all schools, and not just the privilege of people who can afford to pay quite high fees.
“We need people to have hope. I think getting into action gives you hope.”