Elena Espinal Photo

Elena Espinal

  • Thought-leader on leadership development and coaching, future design & team building

Elena Espinal Biography

Dr. Elena Espinal (PhD) is an ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC), with 29 years of experience in leadership development training and coaching, facilitation, strategic planning, and team building services.

She was born in Argentina, moved to Mexico in 1998, leaving behind the foundation she created with Jim Selman, of the first School of Coaching acknowledged by the Secretary of Education, and her company Team Power (México), dedicated to prepare high performance teams. She has worked with people from different cultures (indigenous, and people of different social and cultural backgrounds). Elena has worked in more than 30 countries all over the world, with individuals and organizations, especially Europe, Kenya and Tanzania, Israel, India, China. Elena is bilingual (English and Spanish), and she also speaks French, Italian and Portuguese. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies, Governments and NGOs, with great results for the clients.

In the past 6 years she has been committed to working on establishing Diversity and Inclusion in Companies and Governments. She has set up the first groups of 54 blind coaches creating today an organization for generating work for them, called: Coaching con Visión (Coaching with Vision).

As a Company Leader she has been the Director of Human and Organizational Development for Jugos del Valle, from 1998 to 2003, and from there on the General Director of Lideres de Mercado, a Company created to develop the people of Point of sale in Mexico. This company has grown from zero to 50 mil. dollars annually within 5 years, and is one of the 10 biggest in Mexico´s market in the industry. She left the company in 2011, to return full-time to her work as a Coach.

As an educator she founded, and now manages the training program Mastery in Organizational Human Development with Coaching at the University of London (Mexico).

Dr. Elena Espinal’s background is in Biology and Medicine. She holds a Doctorate in Dentistry (PhD), a Masters in Pathology, and has been a Researcher at the National Commission of Atomic Energy, as well as CONICET, through which she has lived and worked in England, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark. She is Lic. in Psychology and Master in Health and Human Services, with deep knowledge in Ontological Coaching, Philosophy, Systemic Coaching, Positive Psychology and Team Performance. She also holds a Masters in Human and Organizational Development from the University of London (Mexico).

Together with Fernando Flores she runs the workshop Beyond Coaching, where leaders and coaches work to relate to the future in a more flexible way.

She is acknowledged as an outstanding lecturer. She presented a TED conference in México in 2012, and was responsible for coaching all the conference speakers of TEDx DF for 2 years. She has presented her work in various events in nearly every continent of the world, including several ICF Meetings.

She has been honored by the Argentine Association of Coaching (AAPC) as a Master Coach and as Honorable Member with Julio Olalla, Fernando Flores and Jim Selman.

She has worked with leaders from the following organizations, among others:

Cultural change in very big organizations:
The Public Service of Canada (leadership education)
Colgate
Jugos del Valle

Developing high performance teams in Executive Boards:
SanCor (Argentina)
Grupo Editorial Expansión (México)
Channel 9 (TV) Argentina
Editorial Santillana
Grupo Expansión
Janssen Laboratories
SM Ediciones
Nestlé (México)
Johnson & Johnson

Inclusion and Diversity
Sight of Emotion (Ojos que Sienten) México
Accenture
Universidad de la Selva (Chiapas, Mexico)
Banorte (Biggest Mexican Bank)

Leadership and role changing
American Express
Janssen Laboratories
Akzo Nobel Comex

Future Design
Lóreal (United States)
Government of Chaco (Argentina)
Governement of La Rioja (argentina)
Forestal La Soledad (Venezuela)
Amway (Spain)
Conagra

High Performance Teams:
Coca Cola
Novartis
Roche
MAPFRE (México)
DHL
FedEx
Amro Bank

Leadership
Partido Acción Nacional (Campeche, Mexico)
Telefónica de Argentina
Banorte
Janssen Lab.
Pfizer
Conagra

Executive Coaching
Nestlé
Janssen
Johnson & Johnson
Banorte
Editorial Expansión
Editorial Santillana
Editorial MS
DHL
Coca Cola
Lóreal
Colgate
Jugos del Valle
Public Service of Canada
BASF
American Express
BIC

Elena Espinal Photo

Elena Espinal

  • Thought-leader on leadership development and coaching, future design & team building

Coaching Contributing to Create the Future

Session length: 90 minutes

2020-01-30T17:00:00-05:00 Thursday, January 30th 17:00 EDT

Since I started coaching, 30 years ago, one of the unique characteristics of coaching was its orientation towards the future. Nobody does coaching to fix the past.

How do we ask about the future, when we are not clear about our relationship with the future?

Alan Kay (1972)said that the only way to be more or less sure of the future we will inhabit requires us to invent it. There is already a good amount of people, inventing the world that we are going to inhabit.

Change, innovation, and disruption mean that large companies with great histories are left out of the market in a few years.

Will coaches be able to generate conversations with the leaders that assist them in the construction of these futures? Can we challenge our clients in their linear thinking about the future? How power plays a role in this relationship?

The ICF has done a great job with the competencies because it has allowed transforming something that was an art into a technique. I think that now we need to start talking about the sensitivities to relate to changing times. In this preparation, we will learn that learning is a sub-product of action, and dealing with uncertainty is part of daily life.

Let's talk together about the relationship with the future.

Key Learning Takeaways

  1. Change their relationship with future.
  2. Observe contingencies and emergencies that could generate a disruption.
  3. Distinguish some sensitivities as relationship with uncertainty, relationship with learning, moods, control.
  4. Distinguish that who I am is not what I know.