Conversations at the Edge: 14 hours over 10 weeks
Dancing at the Edge: 12 hours over 5 weeks
Mapping the Edge: 18 hours over 14 weeks
Life brings us all the challenges we need to intentionally evolve. The difficulty is taking the struggles that come from the rising complexity, uncertainty, and conflict and using them for good, rather than being fatigued or paralyzed. Learning how to metabolize these challenges into growth is what will ultimately enable you to transform yourself and others around you.
Growth Edge Coaching is for coaches, leaders, and other humans who are interested in leadership development and transformational change. For more than fifteen years, we have used our deep expertise and experience to have deeper conversations, to ask better questions, and to support real and lasting change. Come learn with us!
Jennifer Garvey Berger’s much-acclaimed book Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World, based on adult development theory (also known as vertical development), describes a way of coaching developmentally that stretches our way of meaning making and grows our capacity for perspective and complexity.
We call this Growth Edge Coaching!
You can take our introductory class to transform your listening and questioning capacities or take all three courses, which will enable you to confidently coach developmentally, as well as become accredited as a Growth Edge Coach.
Intro course: Conversations at the Edge
Conversations at the Edge dives into conversations that open up entirely new realms of possibilities. This gateway course will take your listening and questioning skills to a new level, and deepen your understanding of adult development (aka vertical development).
An advanced course: Dancing at the Edge
Dancing at the Edge explores how you can make significant impacts with brief, targeted interventions. This advanced course teaches you to identify and navigate the patterns that influence how adults grow and change, enabling dynamic shifts in your coaching sessions.
An advanced course: Mapping the Edge
Mapping the Edge enables you to help your clients make sense of their meaning-making in a structured and detailed way, effectively guiding them through their personal growth paths.
The International Coaching Federation (ICF) accredits the programs with continuing coaching education units (CCE’s) follows:
Introductory Growth Edge Coaching course
You explore how you and others make meaning from their experiences. When we listen to others’ sense-making, we do so through our own sense-making. Growth Edge Coaching raises a plethora of new questions, beyond consisting of a set of ideas and tools.
You know those conversations that open up entirely new possibilities? Where a question opens up a whole new vista of perspectives? In this course, we offer a new form of listening and questioning that will open up a new kind of curiosity for you as you have conversations with your clients – or your partner, your kids, or others. Learn the difference between the content of someone’s thinking and the structure of someone’s sense-making.
We slow down the process of conversations—reading interviews, engaging in deep conversations together, and feeling what it’s like to be on our growing edge. And because sense-making is more than a cognitive experience, we use our whole bodies as we explore, paying attention to our thinking, feelings, and sensations.
The course builds on the first three chapters of Jennifer Garvey Berger’s book, Changing on the Job: Developing leaders for a complex world. That introduces sense-making and outlines how that can help enhance executive coaching.
The course can be taken independently and would serve as a foundation for applying sense-making as well as adult development theory, vertical development, and meaning-making. The International Coach Federation (IFC) accredits this course with continuing coaching education units (CCE) Core Competencies 21, Resource Development 19.
Conversations at the Edge was previously called Conversations at the Growing Edge.
An advanced Growth Edge Coaching course
You start integrating Growth Edge Coaching into your existing coaching practices. You practice stepping out of traditional coaching and helping clients explore their sense-making, asking different questions, taking multiple perspectives, and noticing patterns.
In this course, we practice weaving developmental approaches throughout your conversations and coaching sessions, to discover the sometimes invisible patterns inside the way people experience particular dilemmas.
Once we see the patterns, we can help expand the solution space for our clients, helping them discover new possibilities in themselves and the situations they face. As with all of our courses, we practice as we learn, exploring our own sense-making as we understand the sense-making of others. This module also includes discussion and practice of specific coaching approaches that might be helpful with clients who seem to be in particular developmental transitions.
Completing the Conversation at the Edge course is a prerequisite for participating in the Dancing at the Edge course. The International Coach Federation (IFC) accredits this course with continuing coaching education units (CCE), Core Competencies 10, Resource Development 2.
Dancing at the Edge was previously called Psychologically Spacious Coaching
An advanced Growth Edge Coaching course
Start conversing with your clients about how they see the world using the Growth Edge Interview technique. Learn how to use this effective process to help people explore the edges of their growth.
Once you begin to explore growing edges, though, you might want to have conversations with your clients about the way they see the world. Knowing how helpful this set of ideas and theories is to your own development, the next thing you’re likely to want to do is share it. This is the course for you!
In this course, we move from having conversations at the edge to Mapping the Edge–with our clients. In this practical and highly-applied course, we practice all of the components of the Growth Edge Coaching process: conducting a full Growth Edge Interview, creating an exploratory narrative to share with your client, and talking with your client about their developmental trajectory.
And because you’ll have a turn being both client and coach in this practice, you’ll get the benefits of experiencing some Growth Edge coaching of your own and understanding the true developmental power of this process.
Jennifer believes that leadership is one of the most vital renewable resources in the world. In this topsy-turvy time, when uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are raging, we need a new form of leadership for a new era. To that end, Jennifer designs and teaches leadership programs, coaches senior leaders and their teams, and supports new ways of thinking about strategy and people. In her…
Carolyn is a founding partner of Cultivating Leadership and Growth Edge Coaching and also co-founded and is a board member of the LUME Network. She works with leaders to help them become their biggest, most complexity-fit selves and trains coaches in the theory and practice of adult development. Carolyn’s coaching and leadership development work is informed in part by the 10 years she…
Vernice believes that leaders can learn to expand their impact and agility through presence, connection, and awareness across contexts. With over 15 years of experience working with global Fortune 500 companies and large nonprofits, Vernice Jones creates experiential leadership programs and leadership development solutions that connect and drive business results. Vernice is a Director and…
Rodney sees himself primarily as a facilitator of individual and collective growth. He brings an abiding interest in our journey of becoming to leadership and organisational development and is passionate about the importance of this work in assisting us to create meaning in our individual and collective endeavours. When first introduced to adult development and complexity practices, he felt as…
Patrice challenges and supports her clients to grow into the leaders they dream of being by applying decades of experience in coaching, facilitation and leading. Patrice has worked with people all around the globe in many different industries including technology, government services, not for profits, insurance, financial services and consulting firms. She has also run her own business and…
Fred has taken a deep interest in developing people and the organizations they lead for more than two decades. His core work has evolved to focus on how individuals and collectives develop in relation to questions they hold and how they stay with the challenges they face. This most often takes the form of an experience designer and facilitator, and also as a 1×1 coach and leadership team…
Our intro course, Conversations at the Edge, is the prerequisite for our two advanced courses, and must be taken first. Afterwards, you are free to take the two advanced courses in any order you desire. That being said, we do consider Mapping at the Edge to be the most “challenging” of the three courses in terms of both content and time commitment.
Yes, you still need to take Conversations at the Edge despite any previous trainings you have done. We have experimented with this in the past, and found that nothing else can replicate the learning from this course, especially when it comes to the small-group work that is central to the Growth Edge Coaching experience.
The Growth Edge Coaching approach is built on the foundation of Robert Kegan’s Subject-Object Interview (SOI) alongside Jane Loevinger’s theory of ego development, as interpreted by Bill Torbert and Suzann Cook-Greuter. Unlike the SOI, which primarily served as a research method, the Growth Edge process emphasizes practical application, making it more useful for creating the possibilities for development. For deeper insights into the distinctions between the two see, “Changing on the Job: Developing leaders for complex times” by Jennifer Garvey Berger (Chapter 3).
We have made significant efforts to make sure our courses are priced fairly compared to other offerings in this market, while maintaining the value that these courses offer, both to our faculty and to you as a participant. That being said, we do not want price to be a barrier in attending, and work to be as inclusive as possible when it comes to pricing. Please reach out directly if the cost is prohibitive for you.
Chapters 1-3 of Changing on the Job are currently required pre-reading for Conversations at the Edge.
In many cases, it is possible to watch the session recording and complete a session learnings form to make up for the missed live session. Homework will always need to be completed in-between sessions. Attendance at live sessions is compulsory for Dancing at the Edge – please do not register if you think you will miss a session.
This course is available on these dates. Select an item to see individual session dates and times:
Virtual course delivered by Zoom
Virtual course delivered by Zoom
Feb 5th – Mar 12th, 2025 / 11:00 – 1:00pm / New York (EST)
| Session 1 | February 5th, 2025 | 11:00am | 2 hours |
| Session 2 | February 12th, 2025 | 11:00am | 2 hours |
| Session 3 | February 19th, 2025 | 11:00am | 2 hours |
| Session 4 | February 26th, 2025 | 11:00am | 2 hours |
| Session 5 | March 5th, 2025 | 11:00am | 2 hours |
| Session 6 | March 12th, 2025 | 11:00am | 2 hours |
Six weekly 2-hour sessions via Zoom. Attendance at live sessions is mandatory for course completion and ICF credits.
Because we believe diversity is crucial to our personal, professional, and collective development, we intentionally invite participants from various backgrounds and from different sectors and geographies. The fee might be overwhelming for some, and we can consider offering some individuals interested a discount. Contact Patrice@Cultivatingleadership.com to discuss a reduced fee.
Virtual course delivered by Zoom
Virtual course delivered by Zoom
Apr 22nd – Jul 29th, 2025 / 7:00 – 9:00am / Sydney (AEST)
| Session 1 | April 22nd, 2025 | 7:00am | 2 hours |
| Session 2 | May 6th, 2025 | 7:00am | 2 hours |
| Session 3 | May 20th, 2025 | 7:00am | 2 hours |
| Session 4 | June 3rd, 2025 | 7:00am | 2 hours |
| Session 5 | June 10th, 2025 | 7:00am | 2 hours |
| Q&A 1 | June 17th, 2025 | 7:00am | 1 hour |
| Session 6 | June 24th, 2025 | 7:00am | 2 hours |
| Q&A 2 | July 1st, 2025 | 7:00am | 1 hour |
| Session 7 | July 15th, 2025 | 7:00am | 2 hours |
| Session 8 | July 29th, 2025 | 7:00am | 2 hours |
Eight 2-hour sessions via Zoom, plus two 1-hour Q&A sessions, plus between session work in trios. Trio work is essential to complete the course. Completion of the workshop is mandatory for course completion and ICF credits.
Because we believe diversity is crucial to our personal, professional, and collective development, we intentionally invite participants from various backgrounds and from different sectors and geographies. The fee might be overwhelming for some, and we can consider offering some individuals interested a discount. Contact Marcus Howard at gecoaching@cultivatingleadership.com to discuss a reduced fee.
Payment is fully refundable up to 28 days before the start of the event, less a 13% processing fee; it is not refundable thereafter. If the event is under-enrolled, we reserve the right to cancel 28 days prior to the event start date, and refund your registration fee in full.