Where My Coaching Comes From: Learning, Experience, and Reflection

In this interactive session, we examine coach development through a Human Resource Development (HRD) lens, focusing on how learning from experience profoundly shapes professional judgment and practice. Within HRD, professional growth extends beyond mere skill acquisition; it is the fundamental development of judgment, meaning-making, and identity. Coaching operates precisely within this developmental space.

This session invites participants to explore how their approach to coaching has been shaped by lived experience, formative relationships, community, and professional learning. Using an adaptation of Ella Lyon’s "Where I’m From" poem as a structured reflective activity, attendees will examine how their ways of knowing have developed over time and how these epistemologies influence their coaching presence, interpretation, and interventions.

We will introduce epistemic knowing—how practitioners come to know what they know through experience, reflection, and sensemaking. Special attention is given to the tacit knowledge, informal learning, and values-based judgments that guide coaching decisions but often remain unexamined in formal training.

Grounded in adult learning and reflective practice, storytelling is positioned not merely as personal disclosure, but as a rigorous, practical method for continuous coach development.