A community of diverse practice.
Our mission is simple: we co-create a community of diverse practice, providing support to empower Institute Members to change their world for the better.
A place to learn the method, and to practise it.
The Understand Your Shadow Institute is a community of practice — a place to learn and apply a method proven with enterprise leaders and teams. It encompasses a network for the wider Understand Your Shadow community, together with specific and advanced training for coaching, facilitation and consultancy in the Understand Your Shadow method. All four training modules are required for Institute Membership.
The Institute is open to professionals who work with people — especially practitioners, consultants and HR specialists — seeking to further their professional development. Becoming a Institute Member includes the training itself, and members sign a licensing agreement renewed annually. That agreement maintains the highest professional standards, and it means members are supported throughout their use of the method. Training is designed for individual practitioners; corporate training and licensing are by enquiry.
Four training modules. An annual licence. Ongoing support.
A four-part pathway.
Every Institute Member completes four programmes — the Shadow Types Survey Debrief Certification, the Shadow Types Online Immersion, Group Facilitation Training, and Practitioner Training. A discounted bundle includes all four.
Renewed every year.
Members sign a licensing agreement, renewed annually. This is how the Institute maintains the highest professional standards — and how members stay supported throughout their use of the method, rather than certified once and left alone.
Support that keeps going.
Institute resources support ongoing personal and professional development: staying connected with others in the field, updates on cutting-edge archetypal research, online and in-person Labs, and an extensive library of materials and on-demand gatherings.
Ancient wisdom, modern practice.
The Understand Your Shadow method is a mix of ancient wisdom and modern practice. What it trains is a shadow-literate eye and a steady voice — for yourself, and for the people and systems you work with — grounded in patterns that have been observed for as long as people have told stories about themselves.
Its immediate lineage is Shadow Work® — more than three decades of facilitated practice in meeting the hidden parts of ourselves — from which the twelve Shadow Types and the APRO Dynamics model grew. Institute Members work with the senior trainers directly: in labs, in gatherings, and in co-developing the method as it matures.
Training is delivered live by the Institute's senior trainers, who register, guide and support every candidate on the pathway. The Institute formalised as the community grew; its remit is to keep the standards high, the members supported, and the method in good hands.
The Understand Your Shadow Institute
27 Old Gloucester Street
London WC1N 3AX
United Kingdom
For general enquiries about the Institute — membership, ethics, complaints, press — please write to hello@understandyourshadow.com or use the contact form. For practitioner enquiries, the directory contains individual contact details for every member.