Our annual CPD event and gathering: ‘Deepening Your Practice’ — 4 July 2025

“This is the power of gathering: it inspires us, delightfully, to be more hopeful, more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.”

— Alice Waters

Save the Date: 4 July 2025

Since launching our training courses in transformational coaching, our intention has been to hold an annual event where our alumni can come back together to share experiences and stories, and reconnect with our team and each other. We call this a ‘gathering’ as we aim to create an intimate and impactful event that reinforces our practice, our ethos and the values we express through our work in developing coaches.

Here is a word cloud created by our alumni at the end of the 2024 event, reflecting their experience of the day:

Our theme for 2025: Being Human

At Catalyst 14 we believe the true essence and importance of coaching lies in something deeply essential: being human. This is our chosen theme for 2025 — it reflects our fast-paced world of work, the integration of technology into it and our challenging global context.

At its core, transformational coaching is an authentic partnership that is co-created between the coachee and coach that thrives on the critical human qualities of deep relational presence, attunement and emergence. While frameworks and theories offer an intervention, it’s our shared human connection that permits the coachee’s vulnerability and development edges to be explored and for transformational growth to be created. Coaching for Catalyst 14 has always been, as Schweitzer puts it, a way to ignite the human spirit.

Our 2025 CPD day will dive deeply into our chosen theme and will again be online following feedback on accessibility, value and impact, and the success of our previous CPD days.

Our aim is to provide an inspiring virtual learning event that supports your professional development and your coaching practice, whilst continuing to build a network of professional coaches who can share experience and expertise in support of each other, the clients and organisations they serve.

About the event

The full list of workshops for the event will be shared shortly, but for now we’d like to highlight that this year, we’re pleased to announce that the day will include an opportunity for you to attend a 1-hour keynote delivered by Dr Rob Kemp on AI in coaching (details below).

Artificial Intelligence in coaching, offering democratisation, or an ersatz?

The fast growth of artificial intelligence (AI) application in various contexts has bewitched the coaching community, creating a huge wave of both enthusiasm and anxiety. This enthusiasm is a typical reaction of coaches to new and popular ideas that could give them marketing advantage in the ever-competitive coaching industry. The anxiety that coaches feel about AI development is also natural in response to threatening discussions in various fields that some knowledge-based professions may become redundant and fully replaced by AI.

In almost all respects the technology is ahead of the debate in AI coaching; this keynote aims to bring focus to the essential elements of organisational coaching to ask the foundational question of whether coaching is possible with what we have come to know as artificial intelligence.

Rob Kemp is a Doctor of Coaching and Mentoring (Oxford Brookes, 2021).  After two decades of working as a coach, Rob still coaches, supervises, trains, and writes about coaching.

Rob’s interests in coaching are many and varied: emotional labour (doctoral research), scheme design and coaching evaluation (presented at EMCC Global Research Conference), coach quality and the role of professional associations, technology (platforms, AI, assistive technology), organisational learning and culture, and coaching supervision.

Rob is currently working with Engage Coach International, Momentum Associates, Making Stuff Better, and Cambridge University (ICE).

Following this session, you will then be able to choose to attend 2 x 1.5-hour online experiential workshops (from a total of eight topics) delivered by our faculty team. In addition, there will be time to network and reflect on your learning during the day.

Each faculty member presenting has been carefully chosen based on their expertise with the theme of the day and their relationship with us. The day will be designed to bring together specific topics from our theme that will deepen your coaching as well as support you in building a sustainable, professional coaching practice internally or externally.

The details of the CPD sessions and the application form will be shared soon, but in the meantime, feel free to contact us with any queries or join our mailing list to be notified of the full itinerary when it’s live.

Timetable for the day

Note: full workshop / session details will be announced shortly.

• 08:50 – 09:00 — Arrival and registration
• 09:00 – 09:30 — Welcome, connection and orientation with Damion Wonfor
• 09:30 – 10:30 — Keynote session: Artificial Intelligence in coaching, offering democratisation, or an ersatz? Dr Rob Kemp
• 10:30 – 11:00 – Networking groups to integrate learning
• 11:00 – 11:30 — Break
• 11:30 – 13:00 — Session 2
• 13:00 – 14:00 — Lunch
• 14:00 – 15:30 — Session 3
• 15:30 – 15:45 — Break
• 15:45 – 16:15 — End-of-day Networking, Reflection and close with Damion Wonfor

Fees

The cost of attending our gathering is:

• Alumni discounted rate: £125 + VAT
• Non-Alumni: £175 + VAT

This includes full attendance for the day including session 1, the keynote and then your chosen 2 experiential workshops across the 2 coach development blocks and the community networking breakout sessions together with supporting materials.

Once you have applied you will receive confirmation of your place and chosen workshops (these are offered on a first come basis so please register as soon as possible as places are limited).

Nearer the event you will receive a briefing pack and then session resource materials.

If you have any queries about participating, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Feedback from our 2024 CPD day

• “There are many things from today resonating with me now and the quality of conversations was superb. I have been attending these CPD days since your first one and they are an essential learning place for me, so much so I organise diary and holidays around it. Thank you to the whole team for another excellent day. Thought provoking, energising and feel very much connected to a coaching community.”
• “It was great that we got to meet so many people over the day by the use of breakout rooms. Everything ran like a dream, really slick and I am looking forward to attending next year!”
• “Catalyst14 have succeeded again in providing a high quality, experiential learning experience and I have personally and professionally taken lots away to use in my practice. Thank you so much.”
• “Really engaging. All the faculty and people I met were lovely and I really enjoyed spending time with them. I learnt a lot and the day opened my eyes to things I hadn’t considered including in my coaching.”
• “Energising! I’ve got a load of new tools for my coaching toolkit which I’m excited to start using. Lovely to reconnect with people that I’ve worked with before too”
• “I thoroughly enjoyed the whole day. Again, I was hugely impressed by the event’s calibre – it’s so well organised and executed.”
• “I enjoyed it and love the community of Catalyst 14. It’s always great to see familiar faces and meet new ones. I always come away with new ideas to try out, feeling nourished and lucky to be part of a great group.”
• “I found the day inclusive, welcoming connecting, providing new and refresher learning in an engaging as well as informative.”
• “Such a valuable day! In part to normalise, in part to stretch, grow, learn and connect. I always come away from Cat 14 feeling encouraged, challenged and blessed. Thank you :)”
• “Gave me renewed energy for my own practice, reassurance that I’m on the right path and also practical tools to use.”

Feedback from our 2020-2023 CPD days

• “It was an excellent opportunity to reconnect with the Catalyst family and the wider coaching community. The day has been energizing and thought provoking, expanding my views and providing ideas for my coaching practice. Overall, a great day.”
• “Really enriching sessions, great to connect with so many coaches from different parts of world and experience and get a feeling of warmth and compassionate learning.”
• “The day for me was exactly as it advertised: ‘ deepening your practice.’ I had my eyes, ears head and heart opened on multiple occasions throughout the day and was able to put a few small changes into my practice the very next day. Invaluable. Thanks you to all.”
• “Very well organised, enjoyed meeting and sharing with other coaches, my first event of this nature, a lovely community. Went away feeling nourished, a good investment of my time. Thanks to all who organised and delivered it.”
• “The sessions were thought provoking and balanced giving a good amount of time for digesting information along with opportunities for questions and conversation. They were pitched well as I had anticipated they might be aimed at those who had been coaching for a long time but actually they were very inclusive to those still relatively new to coaching. Sessions were relevant and grounded in the real world.”
• “I loved the “team” feel that was created from the outset. Very professionally managed and thoroughly enjoyable. Thank you”
• “It was a day dedicated to deepening our understanding and it delivered on that by the bucket load. I thank the speakers and those who I met on the day for such warmth, humility and engagement. I’ll be back!”
• “All beautifully organised as ever and really appreciated the opportunity to connect with the Catalyst 14 coaching community. I felt energised and resourced with terrific information so it really was a CPD day! Thank you.”
• “The day absolutely flew by…it grabbed my interest and love of connecting learning with being part of a ‘tribe’ of people that ‘get this ‘stuff’!”
• “A fantastic day. Some great learning and the support of a lovely community of people.”
• “Fabulous day again this year. Extremely well organised, professional top class learning experience.”
• “Excellent day and brilliantly organised into the different sessions for ease of login and finding the relevant notes. Catalyst 14 always create such a safe and supporting learning environment so whether I was in the main session, breakout or selected session I was able to feel connected to the whole group (not easy to achieve virtually). High quality speakers who exuded passion, compassion, wisdom and humility.”
• “Excellent content, expert speakers, beautifully organised.”
• “The content of every session was fabulous. The break out discussions were nourishing and helped support learning. Also great to network. I thought a full day on zoom maybe too much but the whole day was so rich and inspiring it flew by. I felt privileged to be part of this wonderful community.”
• “The sessions were very interesting with valuable information! It was also great to meet new people.”
• “The event was beautifully organised, with an elegant balance of ideas, techniques, interaction, networking and space.”
• “Excellent facilitation of the sessions. All the session hosts had so much to share about their topics. I loved all the sessions I went to, learnt a lot and felt really empowered and inspired to put my learning back into practice. It was also great to re-connect and connect with other coaches and immerse myself in the day. There were lots of opportunity to speak in small groups. The whole event flowed really well in the virtual environment we were working in. Such a well thought out, well planned and well executed day. I felt so resourced when I left the day. Thank you.”
• “Really enjoyed the variety and networking possibility within this online event. Really well organised and some excellent content thanks.”