I'm a communication and relationship coach, conflict mediator and workshop facilitator. I specialise in the area of intimate relationships, leadership development and team dynamics.
My work is rooted in 22 years of dedication to my own personal development and my practice of Compassionate Inquiry, Nonviolent Communication, Somatic Awareness, Internal Family Systems, and Attachment Theory.
For the last eleven years, I have been supporting people transform their communication habits and navigate conflict with more compassion and truth, so that they can enjoy more connected, supportive and harmonious relationships with themselves and others.
A big part of this is helping people heal the emotional weight they carry from the past that keeps them stuck in unhealthy communication and relationship dynamics.
My experience with organisations includes facilitating Nonviolent Communication workshops for over 4,000 people within schools, NGOs, businesses, and more recently, humanitarian leaders.
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The reason I got into this work is because I grew up struggling with communication and relationships.
How it started
I often experienced intense emotions and went between bottling it all up and exploding, both of which led to frequent disconnection to myself and others. I often felt misunderstood and alone.
After an episode of depression I realised I needed help and began practising yoga. It had such a profound effect on my life that after 5 years of practice I trained as a yoga teacher, gave up my work and began giving yoga lessons.
In 2011, I got married and moved with my partner to live in Rio de Janeiro. After the move to Brasil we started having frequent arguments so I looked for help and found Dominic Barter, a teacher of Nonviolent Communication (NVC).
It was only once I started practising NVC that I realised how awful I was at listening and communicating.
My frustration would spill over onto the other, I fell into blaming and trying to get the other person to change, I feared being abandoned and I ended up betraying myself out of this fear.
From my healing process to supporting others…
I had spent over 700 hours in Nonviolent Communication workshops and although a lot had changed I realised that workshops would only ever open up a window of possibility, but that like a muscle, transforming communication patterns for lasting change requires an ongoing training.
Over the years, I saw many of us struggling to integrate the learnings into our daily lives so I started a Nonviolent Communication practice group in my own living room in Rio.
I started with 1 group of 12 people, which quickly grew to 3 x groups of 20 people coming together for 3 hours every week for a period of 4 months!
People from the groups started asking me if I could help mediate conflict with their partners, families, work teams, and business partners.
The frequent invitations to give workshops in businesses, schools and NGOs led me to open a consultancy with two partners and in 2017 I worked with Oi, one of the largest telecoms in Brazil, to reinvent its performance review process and train 800 leaders across the country.
When my marriage ended after 10 years, I really hit rock bottom. It was painful to recognize how my dedication to the practice of Nonviolent Communication had gotten me to a certain stage but in some areas I was still repeating habitual ways of communicating that contributed to the deterioration of the relationship.
Over the next four years, I devoted myself to healing the traumas that had kept me stuck in the destructive communication patterns that contributed to the breakup. This became a very challenging but meaningful path to learn what was holding me back from communicating and showing up in the way I wished I could have.
I am good at supporting people not because I have it “figured out” but because I have over two decades of focus in my personal life and a decade of supporting others to improve communication, conflict resolution because the quality of our relationships make all the difference.
These years of dedication to Nonviolent Communication and the process of deeper inner child healing gave me a deep compassion and insight into the often unseen dynamics that lie beneath the surface of conflict in intimate relationships.
I chose to specialise in supporting couples because I wanted all this experience to serve more than just me. I know how tough it is when love is overshadowed by frequent arguing and I want people to have effective support to heal and grow together instead of fighting this downward spiral alone.
Ready to grow your relationship and communication skills?
KIC COATES
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