A mini intro
Your P.E.P. Coach, Yvonne Hau (Thackray)
yvonne@tgccoach.com
P.E.P Coaching Specialisms
Reconnecting and aligning strategy between organizations, roles, and personal leadership
Immediate workplace conflicts
Vision creation and accountability
Professional & Personal Development
Grounding creativity, experience and knowledge into tangible products
Self-Confidence & resilience
Network & stakeholder management
Transitions
Credentials
Accredited Executive Coach (Association of Professional Executive Coaches and Supervisors)
Founder of the good coach
UCL Social Anthropology (MSc) and Surrey University Civil Engineering (MEng)
Former Advisian (previously Evan & Pecks Ltd. (HK)) consultant
Past Board Member, Accreditor and Volunteer for various coaching bodies
Additional certifications:
4-D Consultant and Coach (How NASA builds Teams). Theory U Practitioner. VIA Character Strengths. Certified Cultural Transformation tools, Barrett Values Centre. Certified Professional Coach, Erickson Coaching International. Peer coach supervision in place; former APAC, AC & ICF member.
My background
I’m a P.E.P. (Professional, Executive and Personal) coach and peer supervisor, and a practitioner researcher and editor, who has combined my passions through all these roles over the past decade. I’m currently living in Hong Kong, previously London, and work with clients locally and internationally, with a keen interest in leadership (professional and personal), transitions (career) and knowledge management (Intuition and tacit knowledge).
Before becoming a coach, I worked as a practicing civil engineer in a number of different roles in both the consultancy and construction field. I also worked as a research engineer, and published articles, for both University of Surrey and Thames Water Utilities on the sustainability of the wastewater infrastructure. Integrating all of my experiences, including my engineering and research background, has shaped how I coach and its provided me with a rather rigorous and creative coaching approach.
my mindset
With almost a decade of experience in coaching, I’ve created my practice by listening to my passions, drawing on my experiences and following my innate curiosity. Following my instincts in coaching, I wanted to find that independent variable which connected us all together - experiences and wisdom irregardless of one’s age - and for me, this is ‘time’: more specifically our relationship to time in terms of who we are, how we want to be, and what we want to do within it.
Why? For me, coaching is a multidisciplinary subject that asks us to draw from learning across the spectrum of knowledge that explores life in all its various forms. For example, from anthropology we are understanding how time came into being, from philosophy we are understanding the meaning of time, from psychology we are understanding the ways time can shape our experiences, and from physics we are understanding how we each relate to time. The later, I believe, is a useful starting point to begin our working relationship, and build rapport and respect essential in coaching.
According to Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which was presented by Professor Brian Cox during his Universal World Tour (2019), it has been proven, within its known boundaries, that when we assume that light moves at its constant speed limit through empty space, and space (in all its dimensions) is woven together with time to make up the fabric of space (space-time), then something unique happens when your speed relative to other objects is closer to the speed of light. Time passes slower for you than for the people you left behind. You won't notice this effect until you return to those stationary people. This means time isn’t an absolute-fixed quantity, but instead relative. This is why, “Our time is personal to us – this is what Einstein had discovered. There is no such thing as absolute time, but we don’t notice this in everyday life […because we’re all travelling at different speeds]”.
Appreciating that we hold all these perspectives and relationship to time, this allows for rhizomatic learning as I hold that space for you in finding your ways forward.
why coaching is of Value, today
Accepting that time is personal to each of us, we will each respond to the changes in the external environment differently. Today, we are spurred by capitalism, social activism, and the advent of the digital age with rapid hardware and software advancements. We are more connected than ever typically at the expense of our privacy, and altogether they are shaping and influencing our social system, the economy as well as our identity and approach to having a ‘portfolio’ career. We will transport our expertise and skills between projects because organisations expect its employees to work together in a just-in-time mode. This often does not leave much time for consolidating and upgrading one's knowledge and skills, which is a concern amongst the experienced professionals, and a threshold that is set too high for those entering the market. Also, those who want to be successful should have in abundance a signature character strength that helps them to thrive in our current times of risk and uncertainty.
Furthermore, we often need to choose between freedom and security when selecting our careers over our working life. This is further exacerbated as Jaron Lanier states, “The information economy that we are currently building does not really embrace capitalism, but rather a new form of feudalism. We are not creating enough opportunity for enough people online. The wide adoption of transformative connecting technology should create a middle class wealth boom … but instead we’ve seen recession, unemployment, and austerity[1].” Transitioning from the age of capitalism with this new ‘form of information feudalism’ combined with a longer life expectancy, we hope to have or, perhaps even expected, to live a more fulfilling life. Instead, what we are currently used to seeing, and expressed well by Richard Sennett, “the conditions of time in the new capitalism have created a conflict between character and experience, the experience of disjointed time threatening the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives.[2]” That is why I believe coaching has emerged, as it is one of the many tools that can help individuals and teams to hopefully better mange change and transitions in a normally complex and chaotic environment that’s aligned with their aspirations.
Coaches can see within the other person these strengths that others sometimes are not able to see because they’re too busy with their own things. Being able to give both the space-time for someone else to share something that most people wouldn’t notice through a conversation is what clients need, sometimes even crave for, to re-balance everything that’s competing on their time. That’s why I continue doing coaching.
[1] Lanier, Jaron (2013), Who owns the future
[2] Sennett, R (1998) The Corrosion of Character.