Culturally Aware Coaching

Since establishing my personal website, I've had the good fortune to come together with a small cohort of coaches to focus on an aspect of coaching that, in our opinion, gets too little attention in the coaching profession. That important issue is Cultural Awareness.

We are all coaches of color and began to get together in an informal monthly lunch to talk about how cultural awareness came up in our coaching practices, and in our personal lives. After a year of such meetings, we realized our commitment to the topic, and learned that we enjoyed an affinity and a manner of working together that encouraged us to go further. So we established ourselves as Prism Coaching.

Each Prism coach maintains their own practice, while working on shared goals and activities of Prism Coaching as well.

I have not yet added a Prism link to my website, so I want to add it here. For more information about the individual coaches, and the work of Prism Coaching, please go to www.prismcoaching.org. There you can learn more about Culturally Aware Coaching and about the gifts that each coach brings.
The one thing I will say, in this limited space is this: Cultural awareness is not another name for "diversity training". We can see, though, just with this comparison of terms, that our language has been evolving, toward recognition and respect of all people. We've come a long way from "the melting pot" terminology and ideology of the 1950's. We now talk about the culture of a business environment, for example. If a person moves from one company to another, he or she must adjust and learn the cultural norms of the new place. When we stop to realize the number of American businesses that now hire employees from foreign countries, and from distinct American ethnic communities, we begin to guess at the complex cultural landscapes of the American business world. When women began to move into managerial and executive positions, that too caused a cultural shift. That's just a glimpse at cultural awareness in business, and it doesn't begin to touch on the components of gender and lifestyle.

I have to admit that when I got my Masters degree in Culture and Spirituality, I had no idea that it would lead me to this work, but I guess it just proves that when you stay on your own path, you are guided, inevitably, to where you are supposed to be.

I just want to add that I'm grateful for the friends and colleagues I discovered through what has become Prism Coaching: (I've listed them in alphabetical order by last names) Jennifer Chien, Kim Fowler, Donald Gerard, Belma Gonzalez, Wendy Horikoshi, Johnny Manzon-Santos, Ernest Mark, Alfredo Vergara-Lobo, and Fresh! White. Go to www.prismcoaching.org to learn more about each of us, and more about Culturally Aware Coaching.