Coaching with Speculative Fiction w/ Nelly Nguyen

Featured Coach:

I'm a big fan of Nelly as a person. I came to be inspired often by the way she engages coaching as a practice. And when I first heard her talk about "Coaching with speculative fiction", knowing her love for metaphor, literature, science fiction, and all sorts of high level nerdiness, I knew I wanted to see this in the Lab. In our October Lab we finally get to see her in action, and I can't wait to be a fly on the wall! In her words: "What if the worlds we love, like Star Trek, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, or X-Men, could become more than stories we consume? What if they could become mirrors, metaphors, and uncharted space for how we make meaning, imagine radically new possibilities, explore and express our values, take on new roles, or face our fears in an utterly safe space?" If this resonates with you, you will not want to miss this Lab!

Bio & Approach

Dr. Nelly Nguyen, PCC, is a learning design and innovation strategist. She partners with organizations, teams, leaders, and communities to create safe, playful, and reflective spaces that cultivate the systems, processes, practices, mindsets, and literacies required for the paradigm shift toward sustainable collective flourishing.

As a gifted polymath and systems thinker, Nell works particularly with visionary leaders, gifted individuals, multipotentialites, Third Culture Kids, and others who sense that conventional frameworks do not fully capture their complex and layered processing style and who thrive in creative, purpose-driven environments.

Drawing on her academic background and senior leadership experience across industry and education, her work integrates patterns across the sciences, wisdom traditions, and business innovation. Her interventions are informed by learning science, positive psychology, sports analogies, universal wisdom, and play.

She is known for her inclusive, interdisciplinary work; her exceptional ability to facilitate creativity and innovation at a strategic level; her ICF-accredited Science to Skill Coach Training program; and her pioneering “coaching with speculative fiction” approach.

She is the founder of Applied Life, a network of professionals bridging science into meaningful practice for systemic change. She creates impact through consulting, executive education, learning design, coaching, and writing. She is the author of the forthcoming books The Lotus of Thriving (with Prof. Dr. Christian van Nieuwerburgh and Dr. Diego Hangartner) and Science-Fiction Saved My Soul. Her Good Life Dojo invites others to approach ethical and wise living through the lightness of play.

More about Coaching with Speculative Fiction:

Coaching with speculative fiction is a creative, story-based approach that combines the imaginative freedom of the arts with the meaning-making power of narrative. Rather than treating science fiction or fantasy as escapism, it invites clients to step into a safe, playful distance from everyday constraints and ask, “What if…?”

Coaching becomes the bridge that helps clients move from being bystanders or consumers of stories to becoming creators of the journeys ahead. In this reflective space, imagined worlds function as a contained environment for exploration, where ideas can be tested, narratives reshaped, and alternative futures envisioned with intention.

Coaching with speculative fiction can transcend dualistic thinking and biases more easily than conventional cognitive methods. It strengthens mental flexibility, critical and systems thinking, creativity, and perspective-taking. It opens space for bold ideas, especially for executives navigating complexity and for marginalised or underrepresented individuals to experience positive mirroring and self-actualisation.

Through metaphor, narrative exploration, guided reflection, and original “worldplay,” clients access intuitive resources and rediscover what remains uniquely human even as AI advances: the capacity to imagine, make meaning, wrestle with ethical questions, and consciously shape the future they want to create.