The Interview: Em House
How a second-generation coach believed it was too "woo" until they discovered its purpose and their role in social justice movements.
Em House is a coach, educator, and therapist in Philadelphia. Prior to coaching they worked in outdoor youth leadership and sociopolitical organizing. What they have to say about identity, coaching, and social movements is so insightful. Check out Em’s LinkedIn here. —Steph
Tell us about yourself.
I love that you’re asking this because I think it’s important to socially locate ourselves. We’re not blank canvases and points of commonality and difference can be so important to be transparent about. Professionally, I have a private coaching practice and a therapy practice where I work with LGBTQ+ folks. I train coaches through the Co-Active Training Institute’s program; I’m a leader for CTI’s leadership program; and I’m a senior faculty member for the Roundtable Institute where I do justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) work in organizations. Finally, I’m a supervisor for therapists who are newer to the field. It’s a fun mishmash. As a human being, I live in Philly with my partner and our two-and-a-half year old. I’m a white, queer, non-binary person. I use they/them pronouns. I’m a home owner on unceded Lenni-Lenape territory. I’m a neurodivergent human. I’m a gestational parent. In terms of my sense of purpose, I think I’m here to be real, speak truths, and play in the mess—and I make room for others to join me.
What is your training and certification as a coach?
I trained and certified through CTI in 2014-2015. As I was emerging as a coach, I specialized in gender, sexuality, and body topics—and of course if you’re talking about the body, pretty soon you’re bumping into trauma, so I was referring people to therapists and found myself wishing I was on the other side of those referrals, too. I wanted to be unbound, to be free to ethically work along a fuller spectrum, which led me to earning two master’s degrees in clinical social work and human sexuality from Widener University. Then I attended the Gestalt Training Institute of Philadelphia, which has a lot of overlap with Co-Active coaching and which, I believe, is expanding to include coaching. In 2019, I earned my Professional Certified Coach (PCC) designation through the International Coaching Federation.
Tell us about your previous career; how does that influence you as a coach?
I got to coaching through reproductive healthcare, working at Planned Parenthood. I love that field; I love reproductive healthcare. The conversations you have with folks around reproductive and sexual health are so honest and substantive, especially when you approach them from a place of spaciousness, curiosity, and commitment to the person. They’re so powerful. I think that oriented me to real conversations, like let’s pull back social niceties and get to what is underneath—what matters here? Sometimes people who come to coaching from other contexts have to wade through more of the fluff before they can get to the heart of coaching; I think I was lucky to come equipped with an express route.
Did you have an “a-ha” moment when you realized the power of the coaching model for yourself?
Here’s where I’m a little different from most coaches—I’m the second generation of coaches in my family. I’m related to Henry and Karen Kimsey-House, the founders of CTI, and a lot of the Houses also became coaches and leaders of this work, so conversations about coaching were everywhere in my life. But for a long time I rejected it as a field because I made up that it was too “woo.” When I realized I wanted to do more in-depth person-to-person work, I thought, well, even if it’s woo, what if I just looked at coaching. My initial “a-ha” moment came during the first exercise in the Fundamentals course at CTI. It was a group mingle in which everyone asked each other, “what’s your dream?” and it blew my mind. I watched as everyone suddenly came off autopilot. There’s something palpable about dream contagion, about being in that kind of space and experiencing a sense of connectedness to everyone else, and I thought, oh, this is work that I need in my life. This is the work we’ve needed in our movements and in every single one of my workplaces. Asking questions like this would change nonprofit culture, for instance.
What are you like as a coach?
One of the things I love about being a coach is that I get to show up differently depending on who I’m with—depending on who that person is or what their growth edge might be. I think the through-line is that I show up warm, I show up real, and I show up deeply affirming. I show up bold but attuned. I’m giving myself permission to access my intuition more, too, with no attachment to it being “real”, which has deepened my coaching and expanded its creativity.
How do you access your intuition? Where, or how, does it show up for you?
Images are my first go-to; I’ll have an image of something and I’ll often share it as a metaphor. Or sometimes it’s what my body is doing as a micro-movement. Just the other day I was talking to someone and I noticed my foot kept pressing down as if it was on a brake pedal, and I realized maybe we needed to slow down.
What’s the alignment between your JEDI work and coaching? How do they inform each other?
My desire for folks is to grow into and heal through the wholeness of who they are—that includes all of their social locations and lived experiences. We all carry so much stuff about different parts of our identities, and a lot of that baggage can be connected to marginalization or privilege. In my intake paperwork as a coach, I’ll ask right off the bat what clients want me to know about their various identities and life experiences, and how they want me to be in relationship with them about those things. And in our first session, I’ll ask if there’s anything they need to know about me, about where we align or differ. Then we build on that.
We can become symbolic to each other based on our identities in ways that often don’t help. Sometimes we can flatten each other, rather than using identity as a way into multidimensional relationship. As coaches, or as partners, or friends, we can act from a place of ignorance because of our own privilege in ways that hurt others. But being able to build a conversation around it? And then do things differently? That’s powerful.
That’s so insightful. I mean, we give our own identities symbolic meanings—we become symbols to ourselves.
Absolutely. It’s nuanced work to understand who we are as three-dimensional people with lots of facets. And that dimensionality applies to our privileged identities too, right? Like I could say, “well, I’m just a problematic white person, so wtf do I know.” Or I could be accountable for my impact and not flatten myself that way. I think the question is, how can I build my capacity to stay, show up fully for the conversation, and be both accountable and totally human.
What do you wish everyone knew about coaching?
I wish potential clients knew that coaching can be so much bigger than they imagine—and to let it be bigger than they imagine. The topics we come in with are just access points. The other thing I’d offer is that you get out of it what you put into it: Don’t expect coaching to happen to you—show up and be the co-creator of the coaching. If you need to be challenged more, say that. Even if you don’t know exactly what you want to be different, get into conversation to start figuring it out together.
And then for coaches, I would say, first of all, welcome to the tough conversations. Invite them. Initiate them. Tell on yourself when you get it wrong. And let yourself be in the “rough draft” mindset—give yourself permission to get the words or the angle of the question wrong. People aren’t looking for the perfect question; they’re looking for you to be a real person with them. It’ll free up the coaching.
What is your vision or dream for the coaching industry?
My dream is that coaching and a coach-approach show up freaking everywhere. I long for more people to have greater access to really phenomenal holistic coach training. Right now, who gets to be in the room and who doesn’t? I want coaching and coach-like listening to show up in our movements, in the collective actions that we’re taking, and in all of our workplaces—restaurant kitchens, corporate offices, yoga studios—all of it. In our families—to have a world where kids are being listened to deeply, where they’re taught how to design alliances with their parents—what?! And I want the way we coach to grow and expand as our coaching contexts do.
I hold a ton of privileged identities. There’s tons of white coaches out there. There’s tons of coaches who have some kind of generational wealth. But when people in my networks say, “Hey, I’m looking for a trans or non-binary coach,” I’m one of the handful of people who get offered up. My dream is to become one of many.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.