This page intentionally left blank
Stage 1 – Creating Comfort
5
The environment is everything that isn’t me.
Albert Einstein
While Creating Comfort is about establishing a basis for coaching, what it is NOT about is sticking in a familiar ‘comfort zone’. The CARE model advocates nurturing the ‘well-being’ of a young person throughout the coaching process, but this has to be balanced by an appropriate level of challenge. The aim for coaching after all is to find the leverage to enable young people to accelerate their learning and maximize their potential, and that won’t happen by sticking to familiar and comfortable ways of doing things.
Figure 10: Key words for Stage 1
We can use the illustration of a sports coach to think about high challenge for a moment. The idea of coaching really began in a sports context, and some people still consider that coaching for learning should be the same as coaching for sporting achievement. For myself, although I think there are similarities, there are also crucial differences, because – as educators – we know a lot more about learning in general than we can apply.
For instance, an ex-Rugby player now in journalism has written ‘There has to be fear and respect for your coaches and your management. That’s what sport is all about’.1Obviously I wouldn’t be advocating that you instil fear in young people, but how about generating ‘respect’? The experience of the Wales Rugby Union team gives a dramatic illustration of the difference coaching can make in sport when respect is involved. In 2007 the team won only 5 out of 15 matches, and crashed out of the World Cup at the group stage, beaten by Fiji. As is often the case, this poor form was accompanied by a lot of back-biting and Chinese whispers. Then along comes a new coaching team, Warren Gatland and Shaun Edwards, with more importantly, a new attitude. The coaches were fearless in team selection, dropping players and rotating the team so that no player was secure in their place. Alongside this toughness was honesty; if a player was dropped they were told why, then it was their choice whether to strive to do better or sulk. The honesty was a thread that ran through all the coaching interventions: mistakes were highlighted but there was also an explanation of what the player needed to do to get back into the team. The result was that the Wales team were shifted out of their comfort zone, a new sense of self-belief was created, and they improved their performance to the degree that they beat all opponents to win the Grand Slam in the Six Nations tournament the following season.
What can we take from this example to inform our own practice of coaching for learning? The main thing for me is the honesty. Perhaps not as brutally honest as in the tough male world of Rugby Union; rather, for our purposes, an honesty tempered with sensitivity to the needs of particular young people. A difficult balancing act; and getting the balance right will be different with each individual. But in my experience, an open and honest attitude, not avoiding key issues but rather giving helpful yet challenging feedback, engenders respect in a coaching relationship. Remember it’s the quality of the relationship that is the core of coaching (see Chapter 3) and the respect has to be mutual for relationships to be productive. And being honest with yourself about yourself will be the starting point for gaining respect from other people.
Thinking Space 2
Anne D. is very sure about her stance in coaching. The essence of her approach is that she, as she puts it, ‘holds her own space’; she is able to maintain herself as a real person. Anne’s example illustrates a crucial difference that can determine the success or otherwise of relationships. On the one hand there is being secure in your identity as a person, and, from that stance, choosing to use different skills and behaviours in response to the needs of another person. The other stance is ‘putting on’ techniques you’ve acquired in the role of a coach because you think it’s the thing to do, rather than responding to the needs of another person. That’s more like role playing being someone you’re not – which doesn’t command the same respect as you don’t come across as a genuine person. Anne finds that young people can soon sense whether someone is being straight with them or merely employing a technique. She was talking with a young person the other day who had lots of previous involvement with social workers and other support workers. At one stage the young girl said, ‘And now you’re going to tell me that I’m a lovely person under it all!’ Anne replied that actually, that wasn’t what she was going to say at all. ‘Well,’ said the girl, slightly mollified,
‘that’s what they all say any way.’
Rapport
There was a very good reason for making the previous point about being honest with yourself and establishing yourself as a ‘real’ person before leading on to the ‘how to’
of creating rapport. As rapport is created by being able to match another person to the degree that you can understand their world – their map of reality – it’s vitally important to be able to recognize the difference between ‘being yourself’ and being drawn into ‘being like’ another person.
As Anne puts it she ‘holds her own space’ which is her way of expressing that she has a clear sense of her own identity. From this ‘grounded’ position she can exhibit a range of behaviours to meet the needs of the young person she is coaching. When people say to you ‘I can’t be any different, it’s just the way I am’, it’s a good indicator that they haven’t understood the basic difference between the person and the behaviour. My response is usually to say ‘It’s not you, it’s just a behaviour, and behaviour is something that can be changed’. Creating rapport is about behaviours;
it’s not about trying to be like another person – that would be mimicry rather than matching. Matching is something that happens unconsciously and instinctively when we have an affinity with another person. It’s when that ‘connection’ doesn’t exist that we need to think about how we can consciously create it.
Stage 1 – Creating Comfort