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Thoughtsmiths Hundreds of conversations take place in your organisation every day. Change the conversations: change your organisation.

A wonderful achievement worth celebrating.Congratulations to Yvette Zoghby, who received her ICF Professional Certified ...
12/10/2026

A wonderful achievement worth celebrating.

Congratulations to Yvette Zoghby, who received her ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential in early September.

It was an absolute pleasure to walk alongside Yvette through the Thoughtsmiths mentor coaching process as she prepared for her PCC submission.

Yvette brings a wonderfully open presence to her coaching, allowing clients to feel at ease from the outset. She creates a calm, quiet space for deep, high-quality thinking, while her astute questions help clients find meaningful ways forward.

Congratulations, Yvette. We are delighted to have played a small part in your journey towards this significant milestone.

Transforming Insight is Thoughtsmiths’ coach training programme for aspiring coaches, leaders and managers who want to h...
08/10/2026

Transforming Insight is Thoughtsmiths’ coach training programme for aspiring coaches, leaders and managers who want to have better conversations, think differently about people development, and build practical coaching capability into the way they work.

At its heart, coaching is a thinking partnership. The programme explores how people think, learn and change, with a strong focus on the brain, building new neural pathways and learning through doing.

The next programme begins 10–12 March 2027, with three full days followed by eight 90-minute virtual mini-classes.

If you’re ready to develop the way you coach, lead and support others, enrol for the 2027 programme.

www.thoughtsmiths.co.za

You cannot learn to coach through theory alone.Real growth happens through practice, reflection, and the willingness to ...
06/10/2026

You cannot learn to coach through theory alone.

Real growth happens through practice, reflection, and the willingness to step beyond what feels comfortable. As past participant Mark Hatton shared, the practical components of Transforming Insight challenged him in a genuinely positive way.

Transforming Insight is our live virtual coach-training programme for aspiring coaches, leaders and managers who want to develop practical coaching skills they can use with confidence.

The next programme begins with three full days from 10 to 12 March 2027, followed by eight 90-minute mini-classes.

Ready to strengthen the way you lead, listen and coach?

Enrol now: www.thoughtsmiths.co.za/coaching-school

If you want Exco to fund culture work, don’t start by making the business case for culture work.Start with the problem t...
01/10/2026

If you want Exco to fund culture work, don’t start by making the business case for culture work.

Start with the problem the organisation already needs to solve.

Perhaps good people are leaving particular teams. Managers are avoiding the conversations they need to have. Sales and Operations are working in silos. A restructure has changed the organisational chart, but not how people actually work. Or the strategy requires more innovation, accountability or collaboration than you are currently seeing.

From HR’s perspective, the need for culture or leadership work may feel obvious.

Around the Exco table, though, it has to compete with technology, operations, sales, compliance and dozens of other demands for budget.

“We need to improve our culture” can be a difficult investment case.

“We have a problem that is affecting our ability to execute the strategy, and the way people are working together is materially contributing to it” is a very different conversation.

The work is to connect the dots.

What is the organisation trying to achieve?
What is getting in the way?
How are current behaviours contributing to that problem?
And what would need to change for the organisation to move forward?

Culture isn’t separate from the business when the way people work together is affecting the organisation’s ability to deliver.

That’s where the business case begins.

We explore this thinking in more depth in our latest article:

www.thoughtsmiths.co.za/downloadables

28/09/2026

Some lessons don’t arrive once. They keep showing up until we’re ready to pay attention.

In leadership, resistance can be easy to miss. It might look like the conversation we keep avoiding, the feedback we dismiss, or the familiar approach we keep returning to even when it no longer serves the situation.

So perhaps the question isn’t always, “What do I need to learn?”

Perhaps it’s:

What lesson have I been resisting?

A Thought Card worth sitting with for a while. Because sometimes the insight is already there. The work is being willing to see what it is asking of us.

www.thoughtsmiths.co.za

The real value of coach training is not only in what you learn during the programme. It is in what changes when you retu...
21/09/2026

The real value of coach training is not only in what you learn during the programme. It is in what changes when you return to your everyday conversations.

For Aqeela Van Der Schyff, adding the Transforming Insight Process to her toolkit means fundamentally changing the way she coaches.

That is what Transforming Insight is designed to do: give aspiring coaches, leaders and managers a practical, deeply human way of creating conversations that lead to better thinking, greater ownership and meaningful change.

Our next virtual Transforming Insight programme begins with three full training days from 10 to 12 March 2027, followed by eight 90-minute mini-classes.

Enrolments are now open. Find out more at www.thoughtsmiths.co.za/coaching-school

There is already an enormous amount of intelligence sitting inside our organisations. The question is whether we are cre...
11/09/2026

There is already an enormous amount of intelligence sitting inside our organisations. The question is whether we are creating the conditions for it to surface.

When people are genuinely listened to, there is more room for reflection, challenge, different perspectives and better thinking. We hear more than the quickest answer or the loudest voice in the room.

And that leaves us wondering: what might we learn if we listened more deeply?

At Thoughtsmiths, much of our work is about improving the quality of thinking, contribution and conversation within organisations, so that more of the intelligence already there can find its way into the work.

Wonderful to witness you in full swing, Jean Hazlitt, as you took us through the fundamentals of active listening, probably the most underrated workplace skill.

If you’re thinking your organisation could be getting more from the thinking of its people, we’d love to talk.

www.thoughtsmiths.co.za

09/09/2026

A milestone worth celebrating.

We’re incredibly proud of Abongile, who came through the Thoughtsmiths Coaching School and has now officially achieved his ICF accreditation.

It has been such a privilege to watch his journey develop from training through to this point. Abongile brings a particular quality to a coaching conversation. He holds space beautifully for people to do their own thinking, while bringing a sharpness and clarity that helps uncover what is really going on beneath the surface.

There is something almost laser-like about the way he notices what matters, brings fresh perspective, and creates the conditions for meaningful insight.

Seeing someone move through the Thoughtsmiths Coaching School, continue developing their practice, and then reach this milestone is something we never take for granted.

Congratulations, Abongile. We’re so pleased to have been part of the journey, and we’re looking forward to doing more work together in the future.

A good coaching conversation does not depend on having the right answer.Quite the opposite.One of the shifts participant...
07/09/2026

A good coaching conversation does not depend on having the right answer.

Quite the opposite.

One of the shifts participants explore during Transforming Insight is moving away from solving, advising and fixing, and towards asking the kinds of questions that allow someone to see their own thinking differently.

As Kim Cummings, Head of People Development at Confluent reflected: “Coaching is less about having the right answers and more about asking powerful questions.”

A powerful question can interrupt familiar thinking, uncover an assumption or open up a possibility that was not visible before. That moment of new awareness is where Transforming Insight gets its name.

We are not simply transferring information. We are creating the conditions for thinking to change.

Imagine what might happen if more of your organisations leaders could leverage the brainpower in their teams in this way...

www.thoughtsmiths.co.za

04/09/2026

One minute can change the way you enter the next one.

The STOP practice is a simple way to interrupt autopilot and create a little thinking space in the middle of a busy day.

S top.
T ake a breath.
O bserve what is happening in your body, your thoughts and your emotions.
P roceed, with a little more awareness of what you are bringing into whatever comes next.

It doesn’t need to take long. Sometimes the smallest pause is enough to change the quality of what follows.

We first came across this lovely practice through the work of clinical psychologist Elisha Goldstein.

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Muizenberg
7945

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Thursday 08:00 - 17:00
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