Coaching to Flourish · Season 4, Episode 04
Coaching Across Cultures with Nick Wright
Nick Wright
Cross-cultural coach and organizational development consultant based in the UK, with fifteen years of experience across the NGO sector, charities, and churches, working with people in seventeen countries across five continents.
Most coaching models were built on Western assumptions: that the individual is free to choose, and that coach and client meet as equals. Nick Wright has spent fifteen years testing those assumptions in NGOs, charities, and communities across seventeen countries and five continents, and he has watched them break down in real time.
In this conversation with Raj Anderson and John Andrew Williams, Nick shares the mistakes that taught him the most, the words of wisdom an international group of coaches gave him about how to work across cultures, and the three principles that now anchor his practice. It is a practical, honest look at what changes when you stop trying to master every culture and start showing up with humility and curiosity instead.
Whether or not you coach across cultures, the core of this episode applies to every coaching relationship you have.
What you’ll learn:
- The two Western assumptions baked into most coaching: individual autonomy and equality between coach and client, and why both can fail outside a Western context.
- Why direct, goal-first coaching questions can feel blunt or even like a test in cultures where relationship and trust come first.
- Five practical principles for coaching across difference: relationship, intention, values, openness, and congruence.
- How to recover when you get it wrong, and why the courage to try and ask forgiveness beats the paralysis of trying to be perfect.
- Nick’s three anchors for every session: prayer, presence, and participation, and what it means to treat coaching as a genuine human encounter.