Co-Active: Process

Continuing my Co-Active coaching training with course 3/4, Process. Earlier this year I took Balance (2/4), and Fulfillment (1/4), after taking Fundamentals last year.

Once again, I took the 5 days. This time it coincided with moving, which was a bit of a nightmare organizationally – especially as our apartment wasn’t ready on schedule and we were living in a hotel. So I was taking the course from 10-1430, then frantically running around Rotterdam trying to get things organized. I can’t imagine trying to do a course like Fulfillment under such circumstances, but luckily, Process is all about being with the emotions.

Whilst Fulfillment is about living your best life, and Balance is about getting unstuck, Process is about being in the moment, especially the hard ones. We learned about emotional range, and work on expanding our own, because you can’t take others where you can’t go.

What I got out of it

• One of the core concepts in Co-Active coaching is “The Client is Naturally Capable, Resourceful and Whole” – this feels more present than ever to me after this segment. Truly seeing someone that way is so core to being with them in the space of difficult emotion.
• Before this course, I thought I spent a lot of time on people’s feelings, but now I see how often I let them label and move on. But whilst we use the same labels (“insecure”, “anxious”, “lonely”), underneath them our experience and meaning is often wildly divergent. I will continue to explore the distinction between when to take the shortcut (label) versus when it’s worth taking the long way round.
• As ever, I confronted some of my own emotions. Once again, I got front of the room coached and it was both brutal and clarifying.
• Perhaps not something I got out of it, but it feels remiss not to mention it: this was the first course where I had a bad experience in one of the breakouts. I’m not talking about coaching that didn’t land, because it’s a learning experience and giving yourself and your classmates space to try and fail is part of it, but a sequence of events that felt genuinely quite horrible (especially given how this course is really about getting very vulnerable) and left me upset and anxious in subsequent breakouts (although the others were extremely lovely). This was the first time I really felt the downsides of the online format, which I felt both made that situation more possible and exacerbated it.

What’s Next?

• My next course (Synergy) is now pushed back to February so I have a break for a bit.
• I’m continuing to practice and maintain contact with my classmates, which is nice. I much prefer taking this online, but I do miss the opportunities to meaningfully connect with other people also on this journey.
• I continue to love my work coaching engineers, and am looking forward to taking on 1-2 more clients over the next few months.