Coaching: better than I expected

2013-01-12 13:45:00

Quite a while ago my dear friend Menno started a career in personal coaching. He's still a civil engineer, but as a side business he runs Rockover Coaching which is based on the co-active coaching formula. It took a lot of hard work, but he's now ready to start working with clients. As part of his startup year, he asked me whether I'd like to be a 'victim' and I gladly accepted. I may have an ingrained mistrust of coaches, but I know I can trust the guy who's been my best friend for 27 years ;)

Over the past few weeks we've used a lot of different techniques to explore various topics, such as:

• The wheel of life graph, to maybe pinpoint things in my life that I feel need immediate improvement.
• Communication between myself and Marli, mostly in situations where I fear conflict while there is actually very little chance thereof. This also focused on posture and being "open". 
• We used "perspectives" to look at my professional and political standing at the office. This works by first discussing how I feel and think about the subject, followed by exploring my thoughts and feelings on completely unrelated subjects (like the kale mash that Marli makes and like the Baumzipfelweg). We then try to find parallels for these feelings in the original subject, leading to a more positive view of the matter. Where I first was very critical of my own attitude and methods (because of how people had reacted), I now learned to also look at it like I'm a solid employee who can be counted on to cut through bullcrap to get stuff done. 
• We used "structures" to act as reminders for specific tasks or goals. Like the drawing of Dexter's talking dog, to remind me to shut my piehole more often. Or the pocket mirror on my desk, to check myself at times ("am I taking myself too seriously?"). He also challenged me to take smoking breaks with my colleagues, for more bonding.
• "Value mining", was done to discover more things that I find important in life. The keywords found would be used in later exercises.
• Visualization is used in many cases, to explore my feelings regarding various subjects by again putting them into a completely different jacket. Like yesterday, when we discussed my frustration about some of the goings-on in the Almere kendo dojo by imagining the problem to be an animal and going from there (what kind of animal? what's it doing? what are you doing? where are you? what's the place look like? how's the animal reacting to you? what does that do to you? etc).
• We started on the "Captain and his crew" exercise by visualizing and meeting my "captain". An internal second opinion if you will, "someone" I can approach with questions or problems and on whom I can count to provide another opinion than my own. Of course, technically this second voice will simply be an outlet for thoughts and ideas I have been avoiding or haven't thought of yet, but so far it's been very effective!
• Regarding my professionalism at work, I was asked to give it a score and asked which score I would like it to be at. We also explored what I think I would need to do in order to get there. 
• Thanks to both Menno and my colleague Rob I got my ass into gear with regards to my CISSP certification. With Menno I explored how I could achieve my desire to maintain and improve my work-related skills, while retaining a balance with my personal life as well as having fun.

So... After almost three months of weekly coaching I have to say it's a lot more fun and interesting than I thought before starting with Menno. I had a few other touch-feely courses (through work) before this, but none of those were as comfortable as this.

kilala.nl tags: life, work, enryo,

View or add comments (curr. 1)