Week 6 Coaching Assignment

By Noora Haraholma

The theme of this week’s coaching assignment is suspension which includes inward and outward parts of the process. The first part concentrates on noticing our emotions and thoughts and the second part involves presenting our view and sharing what we are noticing. In order to practice suspension we were assigned to call somebody who we find difficult to talk with. I decided to talk with a person who I used to be very close with in the past but with whom we grew apart. Since we are nowhere as close as we used to be I often find it hard to talk with him and understand his points of view.

Since we haven’t seen each other or talked with each other for a long time, our conversation mainly focused on updating what is going on in our lives. For the most of time I really liked talking with him and hearing what he has been up to because we have lived on different continents for the past six months and thus, our lives are rather different from each other. Everything went quite well at the beginning. He made some assumptions about my life that were nowhere near correct and made me rather pissed off. However, every time he did that I tried to take a deep breath and let it go. Once in a while he could probably see that I was not too happy about him making assumptions on things that he knows nothing about and I am pretty sure he understood why I seemed annoyed when I corrected his assumptions. Luckily he learned to listen to me more and make fewer assumptions so the conversation got a bit easier while we were talking.

Despite him making stupid assumptions everything else went pretty well until he showed some really bad judgment. He told me that he was going to a party in that evening which would have been a fun thing if he hadn’t mentioned that he was supposed to have this one important meeting next morning. The meeting was scheduled with corporate partner that he wanted to sponsor this one event and thus, I think it would have been more than necessary to be in his best shape in that meeting. Because of the meeting I told him that it would be smart to go home early from the party but he told me that he was just planning to party the all night and go to the meeting without sleeping at all. I really wanted to tell him that he was being stupid and immature. Instead I tried to cool down and I think about how I would explain him that why that was not a good idea. I know that he usually likes good manners and thus, I told him that I felt that was not something he should do because it would be really disrespectful and he would not be able to give his best arguments in order to seal the sponsorship deal. He just responded to me that he had done something like that already before without anyone noticing and therefore he could do that also this time. I said to him that it is his own decision but in my opinion he should not do that. We ended the conversation quickly after that because he had to leave to the party. However, I was happy to find out the next day that he actually listened to me and went home early so expressing my thoughts in a calm way actually paid off.

Based on this conversation and its outcomes I learned that even though I would be pissed off I should try to calm down and try to express my thoughts in a well-structured way rather than just saying something in the heat of the moment. I should try to understand more why people think in a certain way (here he thought that it would be ok since he had gone away with acting like that before) and trying to articulate my thoughts so that they can understand why I think differently. Usually in similar situations I have just gotten really annoyed and said something really harsh which exactly has not helped the situation in any way.