My experience of becoming a Crew member after 3 days of supporting for Coaching for Leaders and Professional Coaches course from VCI last weekend gave me a lot of emotions and lessons learned.
Observe the newbies from embarrassment for the first practice sessions until they become more fluent in terms of questioning skills, listening, and dancing with their partner in their coaching.
I remember myself 2 years ago, exactly the same, I was hesitant to coach for the first time, also saw many challenges as well as development opportunities, and rekindled a dream of becoming a professional coach.
Being a coach is difficult, no joke. It doesn’t mean that you go to a course, learn the framework or just read a book or watch a video and you can coach. The whole process requires a lot of skills, including being present, listening skills, observing, and intuition too.
An extremely remarkable lesson that I have experienced myself as well to share with new coaches is TRUST THE PROCESS. Because oftentimes, we like to be innovative and creative, we like to make our mark, we don’t like to follow the rule. But here’s the thing, If your foundation is not strong, no matter how much creativity you have, it will be like building a castle on the sand. At first, it’s very interesting, but it won’t go a long way, it’s not sustainable. Me too. I used to put in a lot of what I wanted. But as a coach, what I want is different from what my coachee wants.
Not every practice will make you perfect, not long hours will make you fly. I have learned this from two masters (Master coach Tran Tien Cong and Dr. Trinh Thang). Frequent practice will help us become strong and proficient, but if we do it the wrong way, it will follow over the years and gradually become a pattern. Until we realized, that it will be extremely difficult to fix.
In the past, I also set a goal to achieve 100 hours, then 200 hours, then 500 hours of coaching. I Just worked hard to gain enough hours, and I think that if I have enough hours, I will be able to fly. But the truth is what I did, and how I did it in those 500 hours led to What did I learn, did I make the same mistake, and am I getting better every day?
My lesson here is to make it right at the first steps. It was a gift given to me for my very first stage of coaching and I still use it now, it is extremely effective for me and my journey. Now I share it with you. (I named it 3Đ in Vietnamese, quite hard to translate it into english for it short name)
Do the right steps (làm đúng)
Do all the steps needed (làm đủ)
Do it regularly with patience + Observation + Reflection (làm đều)
To illustrate this, I put the painting of a bull by Picasso below. He created a painting with one line from the first solid and basic foundations. And what we see is creativity, and innovation, all are the tip of the iceberg and the vast majority will want to have that tip, but very few have the patience to go to the end.
Photo source: Google
