Coachee Entry 1

My coaching meeting with Kate Mills was fun and productive. We discussed coaching from the perspectives of the coach and coachee, as well as our intentions for our meetings and a few skepticisms we shared, stemming from our previous experiences with the coaching process, or what people called a coaching process.

We also parsed out the differences we perceive between coaching, mentorship and generic leadership. Respectively, coaching is a good tool for CCT 616 because it carries more of a collaborative tone than generic leadership or management, but it doesn't require the social chemistry or emotional investment of long-term mentorship. Of course, there are emotional investments in any collaborative dialogue, but the short-term nature of one semester makes coaching a fun fit and an appropriate dialogue to explore.

Within the context of coaching, we talked about active listening and how each of us conducts it. For me, active listening means staying focused on the speaker and silencing any impulses to respond so that the entirety of the speaker’s message (and context) can be perceived before the mental response process kicks in. Contrary to the lecture, I cannot “check-in” with my own listening while I am listening, as, for me, this distracts from the speaker and is likely to lead me down a cognitive rabbit-hole regarding how well I am listening or can listen. By the time I tune back into the speaker, I may have missed important information, much like how a distraction can make someone miss the first part of a joke, rendering the second part meaningless. Kate can use the personal listening check-in to help refocus herself during the listening process, so it was good to hear that that can work for people. We share a lot of similar perspectives on things, but there is a difference in how we listen, and I look forward to how that contrast plays out in our meetings.