My part in a Global Summit

Towards the end of November last year, I took part in a Global Learning Summit run by my professional body, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). It was a bold venture – run over 24 hours with three time zones identified on the basis that different clusters of people would access different zones based on where they live in the world. It was, of course, run online using the ubiquitous zoom.

When I was approached to take part and looked at the design of the event, a colleague suggested to me (thanks Amanda) that it would be really interesting to do the same workshop in each of the three time zones and see how the participants varied as we virtually travelled around the world. An interesting idea!

It didn’t work quite as expected because we didn’t get the global reach of participants for own workshop that we had hoped for. But it was still a fascinating experiment. The EMCC approached me to do this because I had been accredited by them as a Master Practitioner Coach last summer. Given that context I thought it would make sense to offer a workshop about the new forthcoming book (more on that in a minute). This was a fantastic opportunity to share with other coaches my ideas as they were forming.

In my previous blog post I shared my thinking about the Concepts Series with outlines of the books that are still being developed. One of those – Coaching Alchemy – became a much clearer idea when I took a one week mini-sabbatical at the end of October. I have an outline now for what will become “The Inner Fire: a coaching alchemy”. I’ve only written a couple of thousand words so far – I am still researching ideas and outlining the format and structure. But for this workshop I certainly had enough to share and open up dialogue with participants to get their feedback.

This is the first time I have shared so fully my ideas and concepts whilst still in the writing phase. The participants who came along engaged in really useful dialogue – the conversations that ensued were really helpful as I continue to develop my thinking.

In a classic case of the ongoing need for coaching and work on the self, I found myself in the couple of weeks leading up to the workshops, in a massive state of self doubt and underlying panic. At first I thought this might have been the emergence of yet more Imposter Syndrome, but when I sat with the feelings and worked on what was going on, it struck me that this was probably more about “stage fright” rather than anything else. I overcame it on the day and the workshops went well. To aid the fact that we were delivering the workshop three times over a 24 hour period we pre-recorded an interview which Amanda did to explore my ideas. That formed the opening section of the workshop. We then moved into a discussion phase. I was really lucky not only to have Amanda working with me, but also the EMCC provided a facilitator for the zoom technology called Martin who was really helpful. Having spent a lot of time learning about zoom for other work that I have been doing over the last year, I’m aware of how much work is needed behind the scenes to make everything flow. It was a huge help knowing that Martin was there to take that off us so that we could focus on the participants.

There is now scope for a follow-up workshop which will take place sometime this year. That will be an opportunity to share more thoughts on the work as it develops.

This isn’t the blog post to go into detail on the content of “The Inner Fire”. I will share more on that in the coming weeks. Suffice to say, I am really excited about how the thinking around this is developing.