Intercultural Mentor Coaching-ICF

For some years now we’ve been bridging interculturalism and coaching. Doing so, we’ve also been wandering between our passions and honoring our ideals. Today we want to present our new Mentor Coaching Program focused on intercultural competences. But let us first tell you a little bit more about our journey to get here.

Back in 2014, we met at a SIETAR-Brasil workshop in Sao Paulo and we joined forces to create multilingual workshops for expat spouses offering them the opportunity to pause and to reflect on their new life, combining goal setting and an understanding of their new environment.

This first experience led to a presentation at SIETAR-Brasil’s Annual Conference on Intercultural Coaching [link (in Portuguese) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcTWCDGWNNk], which we further developed in a SIETAR-Europa webinar [link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDiGt9MS-Xo&feature=youtu.be]. Our goal was to share coaching tools with interculturalists as a way to offer them new or renewed strategies to accompany expatriates, global managers and teams in a sustainable and enriching way.

In parallel, we collaborated with Missao Paz, accompanying refugees, migrants and volunteers and staff. Our goal was to help increase self-knowledge, empathy towards the other and create cultural differences consciousness as well as ways to bridge the gap. We then became ambassadors for this volunteer project, presenting it in different European cities.

In the meantime, after moving to Paris and with Beta’s mentoring, Jimena applied for an ACC certification at ICF. Those familiar with the meandrous of Portfolio certification at ICF know it is not always simple, and if you add up many languages to it, you definitely get interesting questions. Let’s see.

Jimena’s mother tongue is Spanish, her coaching training was in Portuguese, Beta’s mother tongue is Portuguese but our mentoring process together was mostly in English and Jimena’s coaching session’s recording was in French. The obvious question we faced was which language to choose for the online test. While debating, we decided to take a look at ICF 11 competences in different languages. This proved to be culturally challenging and our new Intercultural Mentor Coaching Program became to be shaped.

Our expectations for the program are to share with other coaches (you?) our thoughts and cultural insights on the 11 competences; to accompany them (you?) in developing personal intercultural awareness and to propose new tools to address intercultural issues with (your?) clients.

We hope you can join us, we are looking forward to meeting you and exchanging experiences.

Jimena Andino Dorato & Roberta Raffaelli