If you identify as a person who coaches others, you're most warmly welcomed into the NCN.

Our teaching assumes prior knowledge of coaching and is pitched at professionals working with clients, students, team members, coachees, patients or other humans who need our skills.

The curriculum has been designed to provide continuing professional education for those in coaching practice and does not provide a coaching qualification.

Note, Sarah is a neuroscientist, Mary is a coaching psychologist, neither of us are medical professionals and as such, we offer no medical advice, nor do we make any claims about health outcomes for you or your clients, patients or students. Neither are we business coaches or advisors and we make no claims about outcomes for your business, or your coaching or wellness practice.

However, we do hope to inform, inspire and enlighten you to the beauty and wonder that is the world of neuroscience research.

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Yes.

The NCN offers students the equivalent of 38 hours of professional development training, which is formally recorded on a certificate after successful course completion.

Note our course offers CCE and is considered supplemental and continuing education
for those wishing to acquire new learning, professional development and/or those who are renewing their ICF Credential (not an initial qualification).

Think Brain Pty Ltd, is an approved provider of Continuing Coach Education for 2022/23 with the International Coaching Federation (38 hours CCE).

Many organisation and accreditation bodies allow members to self-assess their professional development. Please check your individual circumstances with your organisation/accreditor.

Here in Australia, many students have applied for CPD points with the Australian Psychological Society (APS), the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, and NSW Teacher Identified Professional Development (TIPD).

To gain the NCN certificate of completion and to be eligible to apply for professional development hours/points all students will be required to present a 5-minute talk on a topic of their choice.

The NCN was created after Sarah was invited to author a chapter on neuroscience and coaching for the text Positive Psychology Coaching in the Workplace (2021). (click here to download full PDF)

Towards a neuroscience-informed coaching practice: opportunities and limitations. (2021) Sarah M McKay & Sarah Smith. 

Neuroscience provides coaches with a compelling lens through which to view their coachee’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

However, enthusiasm for integrating neuroscience into coaching often outpaces the coach’s knowledge of the subject matter.

In addition, there is no empirical evidence for the use of neuroscience within positive psychology coaching (PPC) per se.

To address these concerns, this chapter considers the lessons learned from two disciplines that have scrutinised the opportunities and limitations of translating neuroscience into practice in other disciplines (education and psychoeducation in the mental health setting.)

Opportunities exist for the thoughtful development of neuroscience-informed coaching practice including

(i) the development of neuroscience-informed content for coaching conversations (the ‘what’),

(ii) the development of neuroscience-informed structures or tools for the delivery of coaching (the ‘how’), and

(iii) validation of coaching efficacy using neuroscience technology (e.g. testing how coaching ‘works’).

Attention needs to turn towards the training of coaches in how to assess, understand and integrate neuroscientific research to ensure the continuation of evidence-based coaching practice.

More and better could be done if neuroscientists and practitioners acknowledge the limits of their disciplines and start talking and listening to each other. The integration of neuroscience into coaching could benefit from a thoughtful, cooperative and systematic approach.

Benefits:

Despite the recognition that neuroscience and coaching have “…not yet established consistent dialogues underpinned by experimental research...” (Pereira Dias et al., 2015), coaching is not immune to the enthusiasm for all things brain.

This enthusiasm is evidenced by books, training programs and magazine articles on the topic of “neuro-coaching” or “brain-based coaching” and application of neuroscience in the workplace (e.g. Rock & Page, 2009; Swart et al., 2015).

Even the Harvard Business Review devoted its 2019 special issue to “The Brain Science Behind Business” and included pieces on ‘Engaging and Persuading Others’, ‘The Brain Science Behind Trust’ and how to ‘Stimulate Your Customer’s Lizard Brain To Make A Sale’ (Bernstein & Hock, 2019).

The assumption is if you are a coach, manager or leader working with the minds of clients or employees, it makes sense to understand how the brain works.

Proponents argue that by understanding the brain, the coach can “tailor their coaching practice to be in alignment with a client's way of thinking and behaving” (Bossons et al., 2015). Boyatzis and Jack claim that by using functional brain imaging, “neuroscience can shed light on the underlying mechanisms of coaching”, i.e. show how coaching changes the brain (Boyatzis & Jack, 2018).

Rock and colleagues also propose that a “brain-based approach” should underpin and explain every good coaching model (Rock & Page, 2009).

The benefits of integrating a discussion of brain anatomy or physiology into a coaching conversation are understandably appealing, not least because a client is more likely to be persuaded by the seductive allure of the neuroscience content!

Helping a coachee understand how their brain changes in response to experience (neuroplasticity), and giving information about brain structures and functions is said to build trust, instil hope, and influence thought patterns (Ardern, 2015; Duenyas & Luke, 2019). Brain-based descriptions of psychological challenges, Ardern says, externalise and demystify the patient experience.

CHALLENGES

Unfortunately, enthusiasm for “using neuroscience” in a coaching conversation often outpaces the coach’s knowledge.

As Brann (2017) notes, coaches often expect neuroscience to provide nicely pre-packed coaching tools and techniques, and this is rarely the case.

Instead, the challenge for the coach is to keep up to date with the relevant neuroscience literature and make meaning of it.

To put the task into perspective, a search of the biomedical literature database PubMed using the terms ‘brain’ and ‘anxiety’ generated 3,589 papers published in 2020 alone.

To complicate matters, even within a narrow discipline there are scientific disputes. For example, among neuroscientists studying fear and anxiety, there is considerable disagreement about how to define fear, if fear is innate or learned, and which neural networks are involved (Mobbs et al., 2019).

For the non-expert, it is easy to be confused, and the risk is for haphazard integration of out-dated or misunderstood neuroscience concepts. It is well-documented that poor neuroscience literacy leads to the belief and sharing of neuromyths — defined as the misunderstanding, misreading, or a misquoting of brain science facts (Im et al., 2018; OECD, 2008)

To date, there is no coaching framework or method in the academic literature that tests the use of neuroscience-informed explanations of human behaviour or any practice of ‘neuro-coaching’.

As pointed out in Grant’s 2015 paper Coaching the brain: Neuro-science or neuro-nonsense?, there is “…little empirical data that directly links neuroscience research to coaching-specific outcomes” (Grant, 2015). In the same issue of The Coaching Psychologist, O’Broin acknowledges that a ‘brain-based’ approach to coaching is inherently appealing but cautions against “overstating the current ability” of neuroscience to explain how and why coaching works (O’Brion, 2015).

Despite the absence of a neuroscience-framework for coaching, opportunities exist for the development of a neuroscience-informed evidence-based approach to coaching and PPC in particular.

As the saying goes, “absence of evidence” is not “evidence of absence” and the enthusiasm for using neuroscience in coaching is certainly present.

Other professional disciplines have grappled with the same opportunities, pitfalls and seductive allure of translating neuroscience into evidence-based practice, including law (Meynen, 2016), counselling (Wilkinson, 2018) and education (Anderson & Della Sala, 2012).

In Australia and Ireland (where we live) we spell ‘enrollment’ and ‘enroll’ with only one ‘l’, i.e. ‘enrolment’ and ‘enrol’.

You might have also noticed I spell words such as ‘visualization’ with the letter ‘s’,

i.e. ‘visualisation’.

We hope you enjoy this opportunity to explore global variation in spelling and grammar usage!

Our next NCN session will be open to students in February 2024.

Please note: we are only accepting one intake of students for 2024.

Our other courses, including The Neuroscience Academy and Brain Coach Bootcamp, will commence in the second half of 2024.

Note that your fee includes a lifetime membership and inclusion in all future teaching sessions and speaker workshops for 2024, 2025, and beyond.

We want you to be satisfied with your purchase, and to give your best effort to apply the strategies and learnings from the course.

We offer a 21-day refund period for purchase if you believe the course is of unacceptable quality or does not match the curriculum description.

Refunds will not be provided more than 21 days following the date of purchase.

After day 21, all payments are non-refundable and you are responsible for full payment of the fees for the program whether or not you complete the program.

Refunds will not be made due to a change of mind or similar.

Please note: If you opt for a payment plan and you do not request a refund within 21 days, you are legally required to complete all the remaining payments of your payment plan.

All refunds are discretionary as determined by Dr Sarah McKay trading as Think Brain Pty Ltd ABN 19626919266.

We may revise and update Terms of Use or Refund Policy from time to time in our sole discretion. All changes are effective immediately when we post them.