Week 4 Coaching Assignment

By Noora Haraholma

This week’s coaching assignment is about reflecting a situation where I downloaded an incorrect belief about somebody because I took leaps up the ladder the ladder of inference. This story is not so recent and it is more like a whole situation than an individual conversation but it describes perfectly a situation where I made assumptions that were not correct after all.

A while back I was a team member of a committee which was working on organizing a really massive event with hundreds of guests and a budget of tens of thousands of euros. The committee consisted of a chairperson and six team members. Each of us team members had our own specific tasks that we were responsible for and I was responsible for invitations and coordinating the guests. The tasks that I was responsible for had been divided to two members of the committee in the past. However, I was the only one responsible for those this year and therefore I had quite a lot work to do. I was really stressed and I did not have any other person to turn to so I would have needed some help from our chairperson.

However, our chairperson was definitely not the most approachable person in the world and she had very blunt way of saying things. She had a tendency to tell us what she was thinking and if she did not like some idea she also stated that quite clearly. She was definitely more task- than people-oriented so usually in the meetings she was just going through all the things that we were supposed to do and checking that everybody had done their part instead of asking us how we were actually doing and whether we would have needed some help.

Based on her behavior and the way she lead the committee I started to think that she is probably not willing assist me with my tasks and I only started noticing when she was not acting friendly and did not pay attention when she was nice. Because of all this I started thinking she did not want to do anything herself but instead let us do all the hard work for her. Our chairperson never told me that she does not want to help so I had no actual data to back up my assumptions.  Sometimes I was talking about the whole situation with some of my friends who knew the chairperson but did not work for the committee backed up my assumptions by saying that she was not always so friendly team player.  Since nobody questioned my assumptions about her and I was not able to do so myself I started to believe that they were true. Therefore I never went and asked for help with my excessive workload even though I should have. I actually ended up keeping my beliefs about her until I ended working with her on a different project and she volunteered to help me out with some of my tasks. After that I learned that not all of our first impressions and assumptions hold true.