Originally Posted on The Coaching Tools Company as Earth Day for Coaches: Small Conversations, Big Ripples | by Dr Steve Jeffs
What if the conversations happening in your coaching sessions are contributing to something bigger than either you or your client realises?
Dr Steve Jeffs attending Anthropy at the Eden Project in Cornwall.
It is a question I came back to after attending Anthropy earlier this year. Anthropy is an annual UK gathering that brings together more than 2,000 leaders, policymakers, and organisations from across business, government, academia, and civil society. It takes place over three days at the Eden Project in Cornwall, a world-renowned environmental education charity and visitor attraction that itself began as a reclaimed clay pit with no soil. This year marked the Eden Project’s 25th anniversary, which gave the whole event an added sense of what long-term commitment can actually produce.
The conversations at Anthropy were wide-ranging, but a consistent thread ran through them: the gap between what we know needs to change and what actually changes. There is no shortage of ideas. There is no shortage of intent. The challenge, almost always, is how those ideas translate into sustained action.
It left me thinking about coaching. Not as a solution to any of the big challenges being discussed, but as something that quietly operates at the level where those challenges are actually lived, in the decisions people make every day.
Earth Day and the Question It Raises
Earth Day, observed each year on 22 April, has grown since its beginnings in 1970 into a global moment of reflection involving individuals, communities, and organisations in more than 192 countries. This year’s theme, “Our Power, Our Planet,” points to individual and collective agency. The idea is straightforward: the future is shaped not only by policy and strategy, but by the choices people make in their everyday lives.
For coaches, that framing raises a natural question: what kind of future are the people I coach helping to create?
It is not a question that requires a special agenda or a new coaching approach. It is simply a broader lens, and one that coaching is already well suited to hold.
Where Coaching Connects
Coaching is fundamentally about awareness, clarity, and intentional action. Those are not just coaching outcomes. They are the conditions that make meaningful change possible at every scale.
As coaches, we work with leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, and professionals who make decisions every day that shape organisations and communities. When those people develop clearer thinking about their values and their impact, the effects extend well beyond the coaching conversation.
A conversation shifts a perspective. A perspective shapes a decision. A decision influences a team, an organisation, or a community. Over time, those ripples extend far beyond the original session.
Coaching will not change the world overnight. But it often changes how people think about their role in it, and that is where change tends to begin.
Earth Day as a Coaching Prompt
Earth Day can be a useful moment to bring a slightly wider lens into coaching conversations. Not as a lecture or a directive, but simply as an invitation to reflect on purpose, responsibility, and longer-term impact.
A few questions that sit naturally within many coaching conversations:
- What kind of future does your work contribute to?
- When you think about success, what impact matters most?
- What responsibilities come with the influence you have?
- Where might small decisions today shape the world of tomorrow?
These are not purely environmental questions. They are leadership questions. And they belong in coaching conversations year-round. Earth Day is simply a good prompt to bring them into focus.
A Reminder From Cornwall
The Eden Project, Cornwall.
The Eden Project itself offers a quiet illustration of what the Anthropy conversations kept returning to. What began as a reclaimed clay pit with no soil is now a thriving, living ecosystem visited by millions of people each year. It did not happen through a single decision. It happened through sustained thinking, sustained action, and a willingness to stay the course over twenty-five years.
Meaningful change rarely announces itself. It accumulates.
That is true at the scale of a former clay pit in Cornwall. It is also true in the quieter space of a coaching conversation, where a shift in thinking, carefully supported over time, can change the decisions someone makes for years to come.
The future is shaped in everyday decisions. Coaching influences how those decisions get made. That seems worth pausing to notice on Earth Day, and perhaps more often than that.
