In the latest in her series about grief in coaching, Emma Pearson explores: Grieving Planet Earth – Coaching a loss that’s the size of a planet.
‘When the last tree has fallen,
And the rivers are poisoned
You cannot eat money, oh no’
‘The Seed’ [Song], Collier and AURORA (2025)
Aurora’s haunting musical collaboration for Greenpeace with Jacob Collier (Collier & AURORA, 2025) has been reverberating in me ever since I first watched the music video over a year ago. Its truth is simple and stark: when life’s systems collapse, no currency will sustain us.
It’s both lament and love song – a call to remember our dependence on, and our interdependence with, the living world.
My coaching has utterly transformed over recent years – partly because of my many personal losses, but also because of waking up to the inconvenient truth that traditional executive coaching perpetuates ‘business as usual’ – one of the root causes of our ecological crisis.
Gone are the days when I mutely followed the client’s agenda. I can no longer coach as I once did. Whether or not clients mention ‘what’s going on in the world,’ it’s always in the room – in the foreground or the background – shaping who we are and how we lead.
Now, I only want to work with people who are awake to their impact in the world and willing to use their leadership as a force for good.
I often begin with a simple question: “Where are you at with everything that’s going on in the world?” From there, I help clients craft intentions that ripple positively through time and space – through the complex, interconnected systems of which we are all part. Prospective clients who are unwilling to engage in these questions usually choose not to work with me.
An ethical agenda
For any coach still wondering about the ethics of bringing climate and ecological realities into the coaching contract, the answer is clear. These issues are already here. We just need the courage to face them. The Climate Coaching Alliance has been invaluable in helping me develop the confidence to do so – and to find community among others navigating this terrain. We cannot hope to create a safe space for the unfolding of our clients’ inner work if we pretend nothing is happening in the wider world.
Alongside the clients for whom I raise the topic, there are those who bring it up themselves. A common question is: What does it even mean to keep leading, creating, chasing goals, or raising a family when the world feels so fragile, when everyone’s future hangs in the balance?
This grief is unlike other griefs. It’s collective, chronic, ongoing – the size of the planet itself. And it’s not only ecological. It’s entwined with the breakdown of democracy, increasing social inequality, and the erosion of trust in the very institutions meant to protect us. For many, the loss runs deeper than melting ice or burning forests – it’s a loss of coherence and meaning, and of shared belonging in life, to life.
When clients bring up other forms of grief in our coaching room, we may or may not have lived a similar loss. With ecological grief, though, we’re all inside it. The sixth mass extinction is underway, and its impacts are already affecting all of us. When we pluck up the courage to look deeply and learn more, far from more knowledge building our confidence, this grief deepens as awareness expands.
Showing up with love
As with all grief, at its heart lies love. When clients speak of the state of the world – the loss of biodiversity, the deluge of climate news, or the chasm between their values and their organisation’s actions – I feel the same terror, shame, anger, numbness and powerlessness. What makes these moments sacred is the courage it takes to keep looking, to stay with the horror of what’s unfolding, to refuse to look away, and to make again a conscious choice about how we choose to show up in this spiralling world.
Is eco-grief even coachable? Not in the usual sense. Grief never is. But we can coach the person who’s grieving. We can stay in relationship with them, with ourselves, and with the wider living world beyond the coaching room. There are times when I’d rather focus on something smaller, tidier, more ‘coachable’. But, as with all grief, this isn’t something to fix. It’s an invitation to deepen our humanity and our interconnection.
When we sense grief this big, grief that can be about the past, the present, and the future, grief that often feels disenfranchised or unacknowledged by others, our task is to stay present and breathe into the pain of it – to let the space hold the uncomfortable truth of our shared complicity, and to stay, fully present, in the not knowing. Authenticity and courage matter much more than answers.
A wider field of care
The Work That Reconnects, developed by the late Joanna Macy (Macy & Johnstone, 2022), offers a navigational compass for this territory: Gratitude, Honouring Our Pain, Seeing with New and Ancient Eyes, and Going Forth. It’s a living spiral that shifts and evolves as we do.
- Gratitude grounds us in what we love and what still nourishes us.
- Honouring our pain legitimises grief, despair, fear and rage.
- Seeing with new and ancient eyes widens our belonging – reminding us we’re not separate from the living world, nor from those who will come later.
- Going forth invites action, not as fixing or guaranteeing results, but as love expressed through service.
In the ten-week, We Are The Great Turning Circles I’ve recently hosted, participants described how impossible it feels to face this grief alone – and how different it feels when held in community. Grief witnessed allows for recognition; recognition becomes courage and conviction, which leads to meaningful action. Community doesn’t erase the pain – nothing does – but it holds it in a wider field of care. When the grief is witnessed and tended, healing magic can happen.
For some participants, their relationship with uncertainty shifted. Not knowing how things will unfold over the course of our lifetimes, and our children’s, can feel unbearable. But uncertainty, once fully accepted, can open into possibility. When we stop demanding tidy outcomes, we rediscover what it is to “live into the questions,” as German language poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (2012) invites.
For coaches, this is radical. We might have been trained to help people move towards clarity and measurable goals, but in times of collapse, seeking certainty is just another form of denial and avoidance. What if our role is to accompany – to help people stay present, resourced and open-hearted as they navigate an unpredictable and changing world?
What helps?
Doing this work demands that we do our own inner work. We cannot hold grief we haven’t met. That might mean taking long walks in the forest and mountains and really allowing our hearts to break open. It might mean sitting with our messy contradictions – the flights we still take, the waste we still generate. It might mean coming to peace with career choices and ways of living in the past. It might mean holding the tension of both our love for life and the pain of living within systems that wound what we love.
In coaching, what seems to help is simple, though not easy: presence, deep listening, the courage to stay with discomfort (our own, and that of our client), and an understanding that ecological grief is not pathology. As Britt Wray (2022) notes, “our challenging emotions about the climate crisis are a healthy response to an existential threat.”
What doesn’t help? Rushing to solutions. Reframing too quickly or insisting on optimism. Clients sense it when we can’t sit in the dark with them. They also sense when we haven’t done our own work.
Again and again, I see what supports living with this pain without burning out: time in nature, being witnessed without judgement, collective spaces where people can speak and express emotions freely, and gentle invitations to turn pain into meaningful action.
Executive coaching, too, needs a shift in posture. Born in an era of growth and performance, it now calls for a wider lens – one that includes systems, interdependence, and the living world. Coaching in these times needs to shift away from individual development and resilience; it asks for collaborative, connected participation in life’s unfolding story. Our work is to help people stay awake and (re)connect to what brings life – to coach for consciousness rather than comfort, for courage and compassion rather than control.
Beyond the coaching room, this means helping clients find a rhythm between engagement and rest, between doing and being. When we honour that dynamic dance, renewable wisdom emerges.
As ever, coaching is about questions rather than answers, so I leave you with a few of my favourites for navigating this unanswerable terrain:
- What would love have me do?
- What would life have me do?
- What future do I want to be faithful to?
Next issue: From grief to regeneration – beyond the myth of transformation
About the author
Emma Pearson is an executive and systemic team coach, OD consultant, and business psychologist. She supports leaders and teams in navigating complexity, strengthening connections, and fostering cultures where both people and organisations can thrive. Loss has shaped her as much as her work. In the space of a few years, she lost one of her best friends, her youngest brother, her husband, and her teenage daughter. That depth of grief has sharpened her awareness of life’s impermanence, the urgency of living fully, and the kind of leadership we need in these times – one that is courageous, deeply human, and awake to what truly matters.
References
Collier, J., & AURORA. (2025). A Rock Somewhere / The Seed (For Greenpeace). [Song]. Hajanga Records; Interscope Records; Decca.
Macy, J., & Johnstone, C. (2022). Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in With Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power. New World Library.
Rilke, R. M. (2012). Letters to a Young Poet. Penguin Classics.
Wray, B. (2022). Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. Knopf Canada.
Resources
The Work That Reconnects: A framework and set of practices developed by Joanna Macy to help people transform despair and overwhelm into active, life-affirming engagement. https://workthatreconnects.org/what-is-the-work-that-reconnects/
Climate Coaching Alliance
A community of coaches intent on transforming our practice, transforming our impact, and transforming our profession: https://www.climatecoachingalliance.org
Climate Cafés
An inclusive space for talking about and acting on climate issues.
We Are The Great Turning
A podcast series by Joanna Macy and Jess Serrante (Sounds True).
https://www.soundstrue.com/a/resources/we-are-the-great-turning-podcast/?srsltid=AfmBOop48jKAT0EUJEbmh3ZKWdh5t0167_O-1w0haOsuy2Cgio1a9DE6
