By Adina Tarry
Sam Humphrey and Karen Dean drew on their book about the world of a coach and being a coach, rather than about coaching or coaching clients, to prompt reflection in participants.
The session, Coaching stories: Flowing and falling of being a coach, presented by began with Dean introducing herself and the background to the book, with a reference to her earlier career. She worked for eight years with some 700 people delivering more than 3000 hours of coaching, including to cruise ship teams. This constant and significant volume of practice provided the opportunity to reflect on her work and identify trends and patterns in her coaching. Subsequently this material was turned – together with Humphrey – into stories not about the client but about being a coach.
This reflective focus on extensive experience highlighted the challenges and rewards that coaching work can generate. A combination of dilemmas, trial and error, and sometimes mistakes, all of which are part of the process of continuous learning and gaining experience on the journey of becoming a seasoned coaching practitioner.
The practical side of the session consisted of delegates being invited to split into four groups reflecting their level of coaching practice against the stages of: settling out, doing, integrating and being.
One story of Flowing was read by Humphrey about her childhood memories and the way she used to rescue injured birds and place them in a comfortable box, nursing them to recovery, before letting them fly away and very carefully handling them to avoid any further damage. This was a story about nurturing someone in need, attachment and the fine balance between the desire to help and protect but also the duty to work together towards separation, to allow and indeed encourage the independence of those rescued and recovered, to lead their lives.
Attendees were then invited to reflect and comment in their small group, around two questions: What did this illustrate for you? And what has this done to provoke your learning? Thoughts were then shared with the wider group.
A second story was read by Dean, this time about Falling. She shared her personal experience with a client she really liked and admired and how by becoming subjectively attached to and protective of that person, she ignored at times the rigid contracting rules when she could have stood firm. But also failing to respond immediately with a natural human reaction to one specific call, when she chose to redress the balance of past subjectivity by taking a process-driven option which irreversibly broke the trust and the warmth of the relationship. This was a story about the fine boundary between emotions and subjective reactions, alongside formal contracting and set processes, that exist in the coaching interaction. With the inevitable challenge of knowing when to respond to the call from a client in need, by an empathic human touch or by drawing boundaries of detachment, in the knowledge that both have a place, at the right time.
Again, the reading of the story was followed by the same process of discussions within each of the four sub groups, which identified the level of experience that the different practicing coaches in the room had reached. Following the small-group discussions the wider group was invited to share thoughts and comments with everyone in the room. The session was highly practical whilst using story telling as triggers of individual and collective reflection and learning.