So, we’re off! ICF Converge 2019 was officially opened by ICF CEO Magda Mook and global chair Jean-Francois Cousin at 9 am this morning and entering my hotel room I realize I have been feeding my brain uninterruptedly for a good 13 hours by now. Sessions, break hour conversations, afterwork mingling and a couple of extra evening events, no time for pausing. Or to be honest, of course there is the option to take a pause, I just don’t. I am here for a few intense days and want to make the most out of it together with this amazing group of fellow coaches. The stories you hear, the sharing, thinking, learning and connecting. Thank heaven for my coping brain that allows me to go all in and don’t shut down on me. 😊
So, what are my take-aways from today? Of course this will only be scraping the surface, there is so much going on in my mind right now I couldn’t even give it all if I tried.
Take opening keynote Frans Johansson as an example. He gave a really interesting presentation on navigating unpredictability, introducing a few rules on how to navigate successfully. I did like the way he creatively visualized to us how inclusion and diversity expands our teams and even so it is tempting to stay narrow and in the box. Yet I realized my main take away was something completely different. As he started up his session, “flying us in” towards his topic he did so with the story we know so well by now. The story of how everything is moving so fast that we are loosing track. World moving so fast and being so unpredictable we can’t keep up. And I suddenly noticed myself thinking. “I don’t believe that.”, “That’s not true”, “we’ve all been there – going from baby to toddler in months without having any idea of what we are learning or why, but we managed perfectly well”. Not sure where I am going with these thoughts but what if that story we keep repeating about the world of today is not true? What if we are all caught up in the same narrative without reflecting on what that actually says and whether there are other stories. I’ll park that thought for now and sort it out later but there was obviously something emerging there. Love it when that happens. When a new image suddenly appears and I see something I did not minutes ago. It’s like that image where you see two faces, and then suddenly a vase (or the other way around). I’ll probably come back to that in a later blog post some day when I have figured out a little bit more about what I saw.
From there I went to another mind-bending session. Emotions: Facts vs Fictions where Lisa Feldman-Barret did some serious myth busting on brain-knowledge. Research shows emotions are not at all read through universal facial expressions. Actually, the old psychology research images are simply western tradition stereotypes that are coded similarly by westerners in about 40 % of the cases. That’s it. That means 60% of the times they are read wrong. Understanding emotions is rather a complex system of decoding an intricate system of context, bodily input and vision. The emotions you read on other people’s faces are actually guesses you make in your own head. Neither are emotions built-in to our brains from birth. Emotions are something our brains build as a way of sorting what it is experiencing and predicting what will happen next. Affect is brain trying to guess what the bodily signals mean to make a prediction on how to act. (Imagine the impact that flip of the charts could have on child education – will have to go back here to later on). Lisa really got me hungry for more reading. Luckily, she has a book out and a new one coming. Will probably read those but mainly I want to go to her sources, read the meta-studies and actual reports.
““Your brain makes bodily changes meaningful as an episode of emotion.””
An hour of meeting up with old friends over lunch and then off to Marcia Reynolds who is always my go to-speaker when around. I have heard her many times and keep coming back. She is a constant learner too, always interesting to listen to what is occupying her mind right now. And thank heaven – she brought the live demo coaching back again. There used to be live coaching session all over the place on ICF conferences when I started attending them. Great learning to listen to good coaches coaching. And then they disappeared and presentations became more of “I’ve got this new book, let me tell you about it”, went over to “let’s do this exercise together” – so glad I got to see some actual live coaching today. May that be the beginning of a new era. There is so much learning in listening and watching. Like today, my focus went on voice and body language of the coach and how that works when different form the client. Presence. It is all about presence and coaching the person that is in front of you, not the problem they may have.
From there I went to a session I thought could be useful. Perhaps mainly for me. *smiling* Hoping to get some tools I could use myself and maybe inspire clients with. “You are already late – secrets of time management…” and realized I’ve got that. I now the secrets, I just don’t apply them fully, keeping out of distraction, no multi-tasking, keeping a time budget, checking e-mails focused 2-3 times a day etc. I can only agree with Andrew Mellen – it is not really time management, time can’t be managed, it is what it is, it is self-management.
By the way – did you now statistics say adults tell 200 lies every day, 2/3 of them to ourselves. “I’ll do that in five minutes…” , “I’m sorry to bother you”, “I can handle back to back meetings”. Will be interesting to see the effect of looking at it from the self-management angle and forget about time. It is what it is.
On to another session confirming I’ve actually got some knowledge accumulated. When listening to Jim Smith in a really good presentation of how body can be a tool in coaching and bodily signals open up to accessing intuition I became aware of how natural that is to me nowadays. How that is integrated as part of my coaching and how that deepens the impact of my work. When I stress up and stay in my head I give a completely different type of coaching than when opening up all my senses. Lesson learned and still new angles and an inspiring coaching exercise where we were three coaches taking turns on coaching a fourth one, realizing the difference in questions rising from the same conversation and the same instruction. Coaching truly is a personal professional conversation. Pick the coach that matches you where you are right now.
Last session for today was on literature and how it can be used in coaching. A treat for a book lover like me. Nicola Bunting who was presenting used to be an English professor and is now a coach. It comes natural to her to use literature and poetry references as a way of expanding thinking and I totally agree with her on that reading a book is a cost and time effective way to try out another set of thoughts and another life. I’ll take it from her when she says: “literature expands vision and a sense of what is possible”. Keep reading your fiction people, it is a lovely way to gain new experiences and insights without leaving home.
Topping all this learning off with break hour conversations on sessions attended and sessions missed the only thing I really struggle with is getting enough tea and electricity through the day. Tiny teacups and constant note taking on my tablet and social media activity on my phone drains my devices and myself. Tomorrow I bring my own bigger cup = tea problem solved. Electricity I’ll keep sorting out by putting my devices on charge whenever possible during presentations – I am developing a strong ability to spot an available connection in a room – no way I am wasting my break hours standing in a corner charging my phone or my tablet. There are too many interesting conversations to have…