vibe coaching
The Human Edge: A coaching vibe for the age of anxiety
Panama · Australia · working worldwide
The condition
We are living in an age of anxiety that tears at our collective humanity. Leaders are feeling it, as are the executive coaches who support them.
The Mexicans have a precise word for this state that goes far beyond standard anxiety: zozobra. The word originates from the sea, describing a vessel in imminent danger of capsizing — tilting helplessly in a wind it cannot outrun.
Zozobra is the structural instability of a world that refuses to stop shifting. Just as we begin to feel secure, the ground moves.
It was born out of a Mexican history of invasion, political instability and natural disaster. It has broken its historical banks. It has become a global condition.
Formerly stable organisations, legacy technologies, established structures, and even foundational mindsets are under existential threat.
One voice
“It looks like I’m winning, but I’m disappearing.”
Adrian ran a big division in a global retail enterprise. Meeting every target. Praised by his board. Introducing lots of juicy innovations.
Quietly unravelling.
The turn
Hope exists through our willingness to hold the tension between the real possibility of collapse, and the collective will to continue.
Just when everything seems to be dissolving, there is a realisation that what is being experienced is not one story. It is a shared state. People naturally begin to turn to one another. vibe coaching works within the tension and energy of this turn.
Compassion emerges from chaos.
Who
I’m Geoffrey. I’m an executive coach and academic. I currently live in Panama. I’m Australian. Twenty-five years of this work, across industries, countries and cultures.
In every room I have worked in, I have had an allergy to false choices. It’s an uncomfortable way to live because it invariably puts me on the edges or in the middle, or both.
As a teacher early on, I learned to hold rigour and inspiration in the same hand — discovering that you don’t have to choose between a lesson that is true and a lesson that lands.
As a policy executive inside government, I held the procedural and the imaginative together. At SBS, in the thick of Australian multicultural broadcasting, I held faith in multiculturalism and an acute scepticism about how easily good intentions calcify into corporate box-ticking.
Editing the Routledge Companion to International Business Coaching meant holding traditions that explicitly disagree with each other — Western and non-Western, measured and felt, individual and collective — in one volume, trusting the friction between them rather than smoothing it away.
With QUT, I worked with an amazing team of coaching academics to develop and deliver an innovative leadership and coaching executive certificate. My role was to keep the programme on the edge — to nudge, irritate, and support.
I infused fresh thinking from my mentoring and coaching in a global customer experience programme with Ford Motor Company. In contributing to Ford Motor Company, I pushed the boundaries beyond the scope of the programme. To be clear, my enthusiasm and creativity sometimes outran my relationship building. That limited my impact.
I am passionate about coaching. I have coached C-suite executives in multiple industries and around the globe, including in group and team coaching formats. I facilitate advanced coaching and mentoring programmes. Intercultural coaching is a niche for my practice and writing.
For years I tinkered with the idea of writing a book about coaching. Coaching seemed to be going along fine, and the last thing I thought was needed was another book. Then the challenges started combining. People are suffering, and coaching has a part to play in creating a response. I care about this.
Coaching must be different.
Flavour goals with deeper purpose. Infuse process with compassion. Embrace creative tension beneath false certainties. Connect while circumstances suggest withdraw.
Coaches must be different. I must be different.
explore the approach
What vibe is
vibe is a cultural system for coaching in cultural systems.
The epicentre is human energy. In and around modern leading and coaching, there is actually no shortage of energy. People and organisational systems are severely overloaded with it, often to the point of structural failure.
The challenge is not to find more. It is to feel it, shape it, and direct it — for the wellbeing of individuals, teams, organisations and wider societies.
the four vibe states
voyage
— the ocean. Open space, currents, encounters with different worlds.
immerse
— the soaring eagle and the slithering snake. Forensic exploration with a holistic mindset.
bravely create
— the sandbox. The limits of what is possible are temporarily abandoned.
experiment and execute
— riding the waves. Testing, refining, learning while doing.
These are not phases. A phase implies progression, completion, a box to tick before the next. Phases end. An energy state is something you sense in your body right now, something that can shift, layer, or surprise you.
You are in all of them all the time. Usually one is dominant.
how it worksTwo ways in
For executives and organisations
One-to-one executive coaching, leadership team coaching, group coaching, and coaching embedded as part of your organisational cultural system.
For coaches and leaders
Coach mentoring, and vibe coaching workshops face-to-face and online from 2027. An online pilot group starts in January.
vibe coaching