Week 4 Coaching Assignment - Part four: Reflective entry

by Muriel Guillod 

This week has been the second week where we had the opportunity to exercise and develop our skills as a coach and open up ourselves as coachee. The dynamic in our group is very good, making it really easy to speak freely while also easing the learning process. Here as some of my reflections, learnings and thoughts about this journey…

First of all, being coached is something which makes me grow a lot. I don’t have a lot of issues to confide in someone, as long as I feel I can trust that person. In our group, people are so open-minded and approachable that I don’t fear any judgement or the need to refrain myself to say something. Still, by learning about the process of coaching, I learn a lot about myself. For example, I start being more aware of my behavioural repertoire, and try to decipher my own “mind patterns”, by analyzing some of my past experiences step by step and understanding what went well or wrong in each stage. The exercise of this week made me realize how easily you could get yourself in trouble if you don’t pay enough attention to your environment and only unconsciously select some information instead of others. I will train this ability in the future in order to be capable of fully opening my sense to what is happening around me and being even more able to show empathy. My coach is always listening carefully to what I have to share and helps me reflect on my behaviour and finds ways of improving situations in the future.
 

On the other hand, being a coach teaches me a lot too. I learn to listen more actively to people and really try to put myself in their shoes and imagine being the one living their situation. While listening to their stories, I always take a few notes, which helps me summarize it afterwards and get a better picture of the whole story as well as ask good questions to help them reflect on their experiences. This whole process of reflecting together with the coachee helps them to catalyze and move forward. 

Finally, I would like to share some of my personal learnings from this week. I really appreciated sharing my experience, as it was something which has happened to me in the past several times, although each situation was never quite the same. So far, I have been stuck in a certain behavioral pattern and I do believe I received some really good clues as how to change such a situation in the future. Another really important thing is to gather as many information as possible and not to focus on certain aspects, for instance on personalities, and to think about the informal roles in a relationship and how relationships form and develop. The coaching session of the week was also well aligned with the book we will be presenting next week, so it was easy to draw some parallels and increase my learnings even further.