What changes after the programme

I came to "Group Psychology and Leadership" wanting to learn to read a group’s unconscious language and to manage at the level of "fine tuning". The course fully answers that need: it became far clearer to me what a group is silent about, where tension and aggression come from, how to work with those processes, how to properly set up the "entry matrix" for working with a team, and much more. Being inside a psychodynamic group myself was especially valuable — a space where you can challenge and change your own patterns of relating to people, and see your own projections and hidden motives. Thank you to Ekaterina and her team!

IPDC became a space for my professional growth. It’s a place with freedom, experiment, dialogue, room to try and fail, supervision, public speaking. A great deal of practical work — of which you always want more. The process group makes it possible to explore yourself and others, to observe development and dynamics inside and outside the group. My advice to students: speak up when you feel an inner need or discomfort, respond to the leaders and lecturers, agree or disagree. Feedback works wonders!

I had already worked with groups before the programme. But after the first year of study my stability as a group leader grew, and I became more confident running a group process. Without noticing it, my practice changed: the focus shifted from individual work to working with group processes. It became easier to see and work with complex group dynamics that I used to avoid, consciously and unconsciously. A great programme — not only for psychologists but for managers, executives and business owners. I was in business as a manager, and now as an owner, and I can say that understanding group dynamics makes career growth and running a business considerably easier. Recommended.

The characters of a book I had been reading all year suddenly stepped off its pages and were talking with me in reality — that’s how meeting the programme’s graduates felt, after a year that had run entirely online. However comfortable a remote format is for study, in-person meetings make you feel keenly what it lacked: human presence. On 23 April 2021 I received a certificate from the Institute for Psychodynamic Coaching (IPDC) for completing the annual course "Group Psychology and Leadership", specialising as a psychodynamic coach and group leader. My heartfelt thanks to Ekaterina Belokoskova-Mikhailova, the institute’s director, for the theoretical knowledge gained and for her highly professional running of the process therapy groups, and my gratitude to Maria Shumikhina for leading our tutor groups.

Before taking Ekaterina Vladimirovna’s course, I thought group analysis was such complex knowledge that it could only be mastered after three years, or better five, of training in everything else. The course dropped all those projections for me: it’s a clear, structured, practice-oriented training. It will be useful to anyone who works with groups, or who is drawn to it and feels shy about it. The sheer number of practical examples from real experience will close your "blind spots" — and if not, those cases get worked through too. The group felt very safe thanks to a wonderful leader: her interpretations and her openness in discussing problems from her own groups were an unexpected gift. Technically everything is very well handled — I relisten to the material to catch the substance of a question. This is a group analyst who will unquestionably widen your range of solutions and possible interpretations, and give you another angle — the symbolic one, and, above all, the practical one.

"Slava, why do you need a coach? You’re a coach yourself!" — I sometimes hear that from acquaintances. The truth is that people in the helping professions, especially those who work with executives, need coaching precisely because of that: working with top management is a great responsibility, and you need to reflect and develop, professionally and personally, on a regular basis. I was lucky: studying at the Institute for Psychodynamic Coaching (IPDC) let me work with an entire team of highly professional coaches, each for a different need of mine. One of them, a genuine guru of the profession, Phil Towle, spent three years in the early 2000s working daily with the band Metallica — yes, our rock idols are also, in their way, a working team with its own group dynamics, and the musicians later said in interviews that they only managed to keep the band together because of that work. When a team has strong, talented people, they often need outside help so that their energy goes not into internal competition but towards a shared goal — that’s the essence of synergy. The question of how people work together becomes especially acute for teams going through transformation. Our job is to accompany teams on the way to their goal, making them stronger and more effective.

Why do some organisations thrive while others barely stay afloat? What gives an organisation its inner resources? An organisation has its own unique unconscious. These processes are invisible, and executives or employees rarely become aware of them, but they affect the organisation as a whole and the individual manager alike. How do you learn to understand that unconscious? I found answers to these questions in the "Psychology of Business" course — an excellent, well-structured course with interesting cases and useful assignments. And a wonderful teacher too — the psychoanalyst and expert Ekaterina Belokoskova-Mikhailova. Highly recommended.