Day 2 of the Course

Morning:
The gloves are off; attendance and tardiness are noted. I can’t help myself but be early. Is that a bad thing? I think not. Note that I am speaking in the “I statement” mode. Of course, regardless of repeated warnings about the black line when showing up late, several people still came late.

We plunge head long into theory of life skills. The review of what the definition is is good; most of us remember too, it seems. The five areas that you apply life skills coaching are referred to as DACUM (designing a curriculum): self, family, community, leisure and work.

The ideas we’re generating about how to apply these new skills could be applied to one of the areas, but really they intertwine and blur across. This is good. It makes application easier as a coach and allows some different approaches to other areas.

For instance, if I’m looking to do a session on something work related, I can take a lesson plan to works on community as it will relate into work. Or even something about leisure. Who doesn’t like talking about leisure?

The discussion (or perhaps reminder) that these skills are best applied to adult education is good. There are some adults that won’t or can’t engage in group sessions and determining as a group is a good idea. No sense being the bad cop all the time as the instructor; let the group help decide where the group is going.

We have 13 areas of theory to cover. They are nicely broken into smaller digestible pieces, and we get breaks fairly frequently. I hate the feeling of head bobs as I get tired. It’s not the subject or speaker, just a room with oxygen being sucked out and sun pouring in. It has been a while since I’ve had to sit and learn for 8 hours a day.

Finding the sweet spot of the skills is working towards balanced self determination. Not too much about ME and not all about OTHERS. Somewhere in the middle where we can all win. Is there truly a win-win situation?

Afternoon:
We continue with a bit more theory. We talk about the philosophy of life skills. This covers all of what we’d covered so far and makes it all look cohesive.

Trust the process. So they keep saying. Part of what’s happening in the class is that we discover more about ourselves. The behaviours we discuss and practice help us so that we can model them when coaching.

Trouble is that when you aren’t quite at the right level to model all behaviours, it requires a little more thought to make sure you’re doing it properly. It’s like trying to make sure you use “I statements”. Practice makes perfect, I guess.

Same with trying to give effective feedback. I know I should discuss how something feels to me and its impact on me when trying to talk to someone else. We try to discuss topics by exploring how something ‘feels’ to us. Problem is that I don’t think I’m good at doing that (or others it seems).

When trying to express feeling, we tend to start statements with “I feel” but that is just a different way to say “I think” or “I believe”; not a true statement of feeling. So we now have a list of feeling words to use in the class. This should help when trying to describe a true feeling.

We also have been assigned a group project today. It’s a teach back session that we need to do on Wednesday. The team has some forming and storming to go through until we norm into a team. We get some good ideas together on how we’re going to do our segments and make it fun at the same time.