Why Coaches Are Peacemakers
Coaches take on many roles in their quest to help teams and organizations build a productive and brilliant culture. Enabling a peaceful working environment helps lay the groundwork for a future that everyone wants to be part of.
By Caroline Stokes, founder of FORWARD
In the last week of September, I spoke at the United Nations’ World Peace Day celebration in Los Angeles, on this year’s theme: Cultivating a Culture of Peace.
Inspired by the UN’s “peaceful participatory process”, I created an easy-to-use framework for the audience to immediately find solutions at work.

At first blush, I couldn’t understand why I had been invited. Then I realized. Coaches are peacemakers, peace seekers, dialogue enablers, maladaptive pattern detectorists, solution finders, truth bombers, achievement doulas, success hunters, vision crystallizers, ticking bomb disarmament experts, and head of human relations security — all in the name of finding a way forward via the power of neuroscience and coaching practices.
Seriously, it’s about finding peaceful ways forward that everyone can get behind. When we choose a more peaceful way, we can first — most critically — create the right dialogue in our own mind. Then, with another person, we can discuss a way forward in a more productive and collaborative way, which will ultimately develop towards groups of people in teams, stakeholders, and the organization to build a productive and brilliant culture that everyone wants to be a part of. Everyone wins.
However, as my friend Allan Murphy always says to me, “Even the tiger needs to sleep sometimes.” And when the tiger doesn’t sleep, it’s stressful to the brain and then the human isn’t exactly embodying or projecting peace.
Six hours after leaving the UN’s World Peace Day Celebration, I’d had only eight hours’ sleep in a 48-hour period.
At 5am, at Gate 65A at LAX, I found myself doomscrolling on my phone and caught my cynicism and negative thoughts.
I’d only recently made a new pact with myself that when I noticed that was happening, it was a signal that I needed to connect with someone. To learn something, or help someone, just to create a spark.
So, I turned to the man sitting next to me at the gate and I did something I’d never done before. I asked him outright if he had a minute to talk because I needed a moment of social connection.
And guess what?
He accepted my request!
Coaches enable peaceful working environments to optimize best outcomes.
My fellow passenger had a dental practice in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. He shared what he’d learned at his dentist conference on the latest advancements in 3D printing technology, enabling patients to have their crown made and fitted in the same sitting.
Then he shared a few videos of himself conducting microscopic dental surgery where he stood, with perfect posture, to perform an operation that would typically be back-breaking and career-limiting work.
Immediately my geek science quota was filled. I had learned something about the advancements of dental surgery and the technology around it, and it felt good to have human connection and witness how he was helping people get on with their lives.
He then asked what I was doing in LA. It was nice to be asked. I briefly shared my UN speaker story and he immediately said, “Oh, you’re a peacemaker.” I hadn’t been called that before.
Mic drop: of course! Coaches enable peaceful working environments to optimize best outcomes.
So, now I’m going to call myself a peacemaker. 😉
Discovering that even the UN could understand the necessity for coaches to help doctors, people in education, musicians, and engineers made me see that they are indeed correct. As the organization says, the International Day of Peace “now must also be a time for people to see each other’s humanity. Our survival as a global community depends on that.”
Many thanks to Dr Manorama Gupta for inviting me to join your celebration. You are all changing lives.