Coaching Climate Avoidance

Transforming Fear and Resistance Into Agency

Many coaches are fluent in climate science and systems thinking — yet the real challenge lies in engaging clients who are climate-avoidant: leaders, boards, or teams who deflect, minimize, or feel paralysed by climate reality.

In this session, Thinkers50 Leadership Award nominee Caroline Stokes, author of AfterShock to 2030, shares her practical framework for helping clients move from fear to curiosity, and from avoidance to safe, regenerative action.

Together we’ll explore how to recognize avoidance patterns (freeze, fawn, surface level alignment), how to use provocation-with-care to challenge assumptions without shaming, and how to translate awareness into a 30-day micro-experiment that encourages agency.

Participants will leave with language, tools, and emotional grounding to coach more effectively at the edge of climate anxiety — where the future of leadership transformation begins.

By the end of this 60-minute session, participants will be able to:
1 Recognize and name the three main climate-avoidance patterns in clients.
2 Use provocation-with-care questions to open difficult conversations safely.
3 Apply regenerative listening practices that replace emotional extraction with recovery.
4 Guide clients to design a 30-day experiment that turns awareness into practical action.
5 Maintain their own emotional regulation when encountering resistance or fear.

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