Developmental Coaching
Personal development coaching in Sydney and online—supporting your natural capacity to cultivate more meaningful, effective, and fulfilling ways of being
What is Developmental Coaching?
Developmental coaching seeks to expand how you see yourself and the world—exploring the mindset, values, assumptions, and ways of being that shape your reality.
Traditional leadership and life coaching might invite questions such as:
What do I want?
How do I overcome current obstacles?
What actions do I need to take?
Developmental coaching asks fundamentally different questions:
Who am I becoming?
How am I being invited to grow through my current challenges?
What way of being wants to emerge in response to what's here?
Drawing on insights from developmental psychology and adult development theory, developmental coaching supports shifts in how you make meaning, enabling more complex, inclusive, and adaptive ways of seeing self, others, and the world.
Beyond identity and cognition, this work encompasses emotional, ethical, relational, and spiritual dimensions of growth—always within the wider cultural and systemic fields you inhabit.
A developmental orientation still includes practical action. As you begin to see how your goals and choices arise from deeper patterns of meaning, new possibilities naturally emerge—ones that feel more authentic and life-giving.
Developmental coaching is part of my broader approach to coaching. Continue below to explore it in more depth.
Vertical Development
In developmental coaching, we often distinguish between horizontal and vertical growth.
Horizontal growth is about adding new skills, strategies, and knowledge within your existing values and worldview. You become more capable, but the basic lens through which you see yourself and life remains the same.
Vertical growth is about examining the very structures that shape perception and meaning-making. Rather than learning what to think or how to perform better, you begin to see how you’re seeing. That changes everything.
In horizontal growth, you learn to play the current game more skillfully.
In vertical growth, you realize there’s a larger game at play.
The Need to Move Beyond Stage Models
The field of developmental psychology —from Kegan to Loevinger to Cook-Greuter to O’Fallon—has mapped many stage models of ego development. These frameworks offer valuable insight into how human capacities expand as consciousness evolves. For many, simply learning about these maps can be illuminating and even life-changing.
Many developmental coaching approaches use these models to assess where you are and to design plans for moving toward the next stage. While helpful as orientation, something essential is often overlooked: stage models describe what development looks like, not how transformation actually happens.
Without an understanding of the generative processes that drive transformation, development plans can inadvertently become sophisticated attempts to engineer growth that often reinforce existing ego structures rather than transcend them.
Yet, Human growth is inherently emergent, relational, and non-linear. When we move beyond the map and meet life directly, development becomes less about climbing stages and more about participating in the living process that continually reveals what’s ready to emerge.
How Growth Unfolds in this Work
Each of us is already navigating countless threads of development—in relationship, work, creativity, and purpose. Some of these threads are horizontal, weaving through familiar life themes; others are vertical, drawing us into deeper contact with the qualities of our own being.
A horizontal challenge—a conflict, a recurring pattern, a limiting belief—often traces back to a vertical thread: a deeper capacity or quality that’s trying to emerge. By meeting what’s here with awareness and care, the very patterns that may at first seem obstructive begin to reveal their generative purpose.
In this way, development becomes a process of ego transformation. You find yourself less defended. Inner conflict gives way to greater coherence. What once felt like fragmentation begins to organize around a deeper center of presence and aliveness.
This approach to developmental coaching is integrative, embodied, and emergent. Transformation unfolds not through control, but through participating in the living intelligence already expressing itself through your life.
Working Together
Developmental coaching runs through everything I offer. It’s the thread that connects each doorway of this work. The best place to begin is often my main coaching offering, where it provides the central orientation. If you feel called to explore, I invite you to schedule a conversation and sense how developmental work might serve your own unfolding.
Do you feel called to explore?
I invite you to schedule a free 30-minute consultation. We'll explore what's alive for you, whether this approach feels aligned, and how we might work together.
