So I gave my day training course on Questioning and Listening skills for Coaching and it went very well. I got good feedback from my tutor and the students, who all seemed to take something new away to think about.
I was also pleased that I got a chance to put in to practice many of the techniques I’ve learnt in the last couple of years, and that, considering I hadn’t done this before, I was pretty relaxed and wasn’t fazed by any questions. Thankfully I do know the subject quite well and I was careful to only cover subjects that I am knowledgable about. And where I was making suggestions about possibilities (such as whether coaching can truly elicit triple loop learning) I made sure that people understood the limitations of my own experience and presented it as an idea rather than fact.
One of the things I learnt from the session was that putting out a radical new idea to the group at the start of the session really opens people up. I started off with the “map is not the territory” concept, which is pretty mindblowing to those that haven’t come across it, and then opened up a discussion on the impact of this on two-way conversations. Heads were still spinning by lunchtime, and it’s my generalisation that as a result, some of the more awkward students were very participative.
So all in all a successful start (and probably end) to my training career. I was pleased to learn as much from training as being trained. I’m just glad it’s over and I can get on with the coaching again!
