Theoretical Foundations
The traditions and thinkers that inform Cor Coaching and the Nimacor™ methodology
This practice emerged from twenty years of working inside systems that say one thing and do another, from a lifetime of pattern recognition, and from a deep intolerance for approaches that flatten people into problems to be solved.
But no practice exists without lineage. These are the traditions I recognised mine in — there's more on what I mean by that at the end.
If you haven't already, the Nimacor page is where this practice introduces itself. This page picks up from there — for practitioners, and for anyone who wants to go further still. Each section closes with reading. Some of it I've read deeply; some I've met mainly through its ideas. Treat the lists as trailheads, not a bibliography.
Somatic Practices
The body is not a vehicle for transporting the head to meetings. It is an intelligence in its own right — one that holds experience, stores memory, and knows things the analytical mind cannot access or articulate.
Western professional culture trains people to live from the neck up. Thinking is valued; sensation is noise. The result is people who are highly capable at analysis and increasingly disconnected from their own signal — people who think harder when thinking stops working, because they have no other tool available.
Somatic approaches restore the body to its place in the knowing process. The walk in Internal Navigation is the first intervention — re-inhabiting the body before the inner work begins. Making something physical — in a session, or on a journal page — during the visualisation engages the same layer: material that cannot be named in words will often find its way onto the page through colour, shape, or the right sticker.
The methodology is nervous-system-informed throughout — movement before stillness, warmth as regulation, side-by-side rather than face-to-face, ambient noise as background safety. Polyvagal theory explains why these choices matter: the state of the nervous system determines what is available to a person. Safety comes before insight.
Reading that resonates: Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score); Peter Levine (somatic experiencing, Waking the Tiger); Stephen Porges (polyvagal theory); Alexander Lowen (bioenergetics); Eugene Gendlin (focusing)
Systems Thinking
Organisations are systems. So are families, communities, and the internal worlds of individuals. Systems have patterns, feedback loops, and dynamics that operate largely below the surface of what is visible or officially acknowledged.
The Nimacor methodology is fundamentally a pattern-recognition framework. The card archetypes — the Haracor Weavers and the Korapilians — are not personality types or diagnostic categories. They are recurring patterns that show up across different contexts, different organisations, different people. Naming a pattern makes it visible. Making it visible makes it workable.
Systems thinking also informs the organisational theory at the heart of this practice: a system that reduces people to their parts cannot respond to their needs — and the pain people feel in mission-led organisations is that unresponsiveness, felt from inside. Few people experience it that way, though. When both the care they were promised and the care they came to give keep falling short, most don't conclude that the system cannot respond. They conclude that something is wrong with them. That disorientation is the fog. This is organisational dissonance — the gap between what an environment says it values and what it actually rewards. These are structural patterns, not individual diagnoses.
The work builds the capacity of individuals and teams to see clearly what is operating, separate their own signal from what the system asks them to carry, and — from that clarity — begin reshaping what can actually shift.
Reading that resonates: Donella Meadows (Thinking in Systems); Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind); Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline); Margaret Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science); Barry Oshry (organisational systems and power)
Narrative and Meaning-Making
People are meaning-making creatures, shaped by the stories they hold about themselves, about others, and about what is possible.
Narrative approaches rest on the understanding that the dominant story is rarely the only story — and that finding a different story changes what is available. The inner voice that has always been the enemy becomes a grumpy frog with positive intent. That is a genuine reframe, with real consequences for how a person relates to themselves.
The visualisation in Internal Navigation externalises the inner voice — gives it a form outside the self. Narrative therapy calls this externalising the problem. You can look at a grumpy frog. You can have a relationship with it. You can even feel fond of it. You cannot easily do any of that with a nameless internal pressure.
The Nimacor Deck does the same at the level of the system. Each archetype gives a recurring pattern a figure and a story — something a team can look at together, and talk about, without anyone in the room becoming the problem.
Meaning-making also runs through the broader practice. The essays trace how the commodification of labour became the water we swim in without noticing, and name what organisations would rather leave unnamed. These are acts of meaning-making at a structural level.
Reading that resonates: Michael White & David Epston (narrative therapy); Jerome Bruner (narrative and cognition); Viktor Frankl (meaning-making, logotherapy); Dan McAdams (narrative identity)
Non-Linear and Neurodiversity-Informed Design
Not everyone thinks in straight lines. Not everyone processes through words. Not everyone learns by following steps in sequence. And yet the dominant designs of professional life — meetings, documents, performance frameworks, coaching models — are built almost exclusively for linear, verbal, sequential thinkers.
This practice is built differently. The unlined, blank sketchbook removes the implicit instruction to write in rows. The stickers offer recognition rather than creation as an entry point. The explicit permission to let the conversation go where it wants to go makes room for non-linear processing. The note that distraction is welcome acknowledges how some brains actually work.
The Loom Between is built on the same understanding — draw a card, follow a thread, write when it's ready, come back when it isn't. The journal exists in modular forms because reflection doesn't run on a schedule or in sequence.
The linear, verbal, sequential model is a design choice, not a natural law — and different designs unlock different kinds of intelligence. Neurodiversity-informed practice questions whether the mainstream was the right design in the first place.
This runs through the whole practice. Nimacor emerged from grief and stories, not a strategic planning process. The methodology works the way it works in part because I built it with a brain that needed it to work that way.
Reading that resonates: Judy Singer (neurodiversity); Nick Walker (neuroqueer perspectives); Temple Grandin (different kinds of minds); Universal Design for Learning principles
Relational Safety as Precondition
Nothing real happens until a person feels safe. That is neurology, not sentiment. A nervous system in a state of threat does not have access to the same capacities as a nervous system in a state of safety. Insight, creativity, vulnerability, connection — none of it is available on demand. It requires conditions.
This practice is preoccupied with conditions before content. The setting, the hot drink, the opt-in principle, the right to stop, the side-by-side walking, the absence of a clinical framework — all of it is infrastructure. It is why the Pattern Clinic runs the way it does — cameras optional, mics muted, welcome to stay entirely invisible. It is what makes the work possible.
Person-centred approaches articulate this most clearly: unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathic understanding are relational conditions, not techniques — without them, developmental work cannot occur. My own settled nervous system is part of the intervention. Co-regulation is real, and it begins the moment someone arrives.
Attachment theory adds another layer: the patterns people bring to their inner worlds often mirror the patterns of early relational experience. I don't work with attachment directly, but the practice operates within its logic — safety first, then exploration.
Reading that resonates: Carl Rogers (person-centred approach, unconditional positive regard); Stephen Porges (polyvagal theory); John Bowlby (attachment theory); Dan Siegel (interpersonal neurobiology); Martin Buber (I-Thou relationship)
Humanism
Underneath everything else is a simple belief I won't negotiate on: people have their own answers.
I am not the expert on the person in front of me. They are. The methodology creates the conditions for a person's own intelligence — somatic, narrative, relational, creative — to become audible again.
This is a humanistic orientation in the precise sense: it locates wisdom, agency, and the capacity for growth within the person rather than in an external authority. The compassionate curiosity framing is humanistic. The opt-in principle is humanistic. The fact that the sketchbook goes home with the client is humanistic.
It is also, if I'm honest, a political orientation. Humanistic practice resists the tendency of institutions and systems to position themselves as the source of answers and people as the recipients of solutions. It is not neutral. It is a stance.
This thread runs from the practice all the way back to the books that shaped me before any of it — Momo, Frederick, The Little Prince, Pippi Longstocking, Ferdinand, Tistou. Protagonists who operate by a different logic than the world around them, who refuse to accept the world's way of measuring things as the only way, who protect the inner world against the demands of the outer one. That was the beginning of this. It still is.
Reading that resonates: Carl Rogers (person-centred psychology); Abraham Maslow (humanistic psychology, peak experiences); Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed); Viktor Frankl (logotherapy); Martin Buber (I-Thou)
A note on lineage
I didn't study these traditions and then apply them. I encountered them, and recognised them — as descriptions of something I already knew. That distinction matters. This practice is not applied theory. It is a way of seeing that was already present, finding its intellectual home.