Dr Julia Wolfson

Julia coaches leaders, teams and frontline workers in residential care, health and education. She loves to coach as a way to support leaders to create an enabling environment for the self-agency of clients, students and their teams to flourish. As a lifelong student of Process Work, Julia is drawn to its multi-levelled philosophy of reality, with inner and outer dimensions of power that support purposeful, practical and relational happiness.

Her experiences across the global north and south in local communities, NGOs, and government organisations spans 40 years.  Julia first learned about Process Work when part of a leadership team in a social care organisation in South Africa in the 1990s, serving people with diverse abilities and states of mind.  Nelson Mandela had just been released from prison.  Her facilitation skills were no match for the intensity of conflict that broke out among colleagues. 

A friend gave her a book by Arnold Mindell, Leader as a Martial Artist.  Here she found a language for her experiences, and a way to discover within the impossible, inherent beauty and direction in a meaningful non-pathologizing way. 

Julia later recognised how the experience of dismantling inner and outer apartheid in herself and the organisation mirrored the changes in this transforming ‘rainbow nation’ as Mandela coined it.

The experience awoke her inner quest to study and follow Mindell’s view of process as an innate direction, combining a reliable intrinsic pattern with an intentional pragmatism and a welcoming attitude towards unintentional stumbles and surprises as learning guides.

Process Work has given me a palette of awareness tools to use personally and in my work, as mirrors of each other: To create a sense of home on the inside and outside, a survival kit for low power emotions and triggers, and to find a way forward with more wholeness in polarising situations.

Julia studied Process Work facilitation, leadership, coaching and conflict work with the international Deep Democracy Institute (DDI), a travelling school with regional hubs in global hotspots, co-founded by Ellen and Max Schupbach. She continues to study and work with a vibrant community of fellow learners and teachers around the world.

Julia shares lessons from her international experiences as a coach and facilitator through the lens of her Process Work studies, in her book “Applying Deep Democracy in Human Services: Diversity, Inclusion and Innate Powers.”