In July this year, Karen Pratt gave us an outlook of her involvement in the Coach Activism Project – a response to the refugee crisis in Europe – which was about to start at that time. She has been involved for a couple of months now and is sharing her experience and insights with us.
In an earlier newsletter I described the opportunity I had to be involved with this project. It has been a pilot project between June and December this year offering coaching to volunteers who are working with refugees both in Greece and Canada.
I was initially asked to provide a 1 hour online training in some TA models that could support people in this complex and diverse work. We spent an engaging hour discussing the power and safety of the 3 levels of contracting, the OK-OK communication model and the Drama and Winners Triangle. I was then invited to be one of the coach supervisors on the project so have been privileged to continue to be involved in this project, running online supervision groups for the coaches. By the end of December we will have had 6 sessions.
And of course, to model good practice, our group of supervisors was very excited to be able to be supervised on our supervision by Peter Hawkins – an international professional deeply involved in the development and training of supervision. It was wonderful to see how people in all tiers of the project willingly offered their expertise and time pro bono.
Themes that emerged were the challenges of keeping boundaries and not Rescuing; being supportive to people who were working in complex situations, without wanting to “make it better” for them. The coaches who volunteered for this project are all amazing people who do want to make a positive impact on others. So there were moments of them having to realise that they needed to allow their clients to use coaching in their own way and reach successes that were right for them, not measured by what the coaches thought. There was a realisation of it being OK not to know, and merely holding the uncertainty in an I’m OK -You’re OK space.
Certainly the most useful models to reflect on their process during the supervision, were the levels of contracting, OK-OK communication and Drama triangle. On the level of doing, they often realised that they hadn’t done clear enough contracting, especially on the psychological level where shared hopes, dreams, fears, assumptions etc could be named. And then on the level of being, it was mostly the invitation to work from the overdone nurturing Parent -the Smothering mode in the OK-OK model and Rescuer on the Drama triangle, that got in their way of thorough contracting and recontracting.
In our own supervision we noticed some interesting parallels as well. One of the most fascinating was that the coaches have been allowed to choose their supervisors and groups for each month, so most of us have had a moving population of coaches -never the same constellation each group. We reflected on how that sense of “homelessness” and not belonging was potentially unconsciously mirroring right back from the refugees.
The steering committee is doing thorough reflection on the feedback reports from all the role players in the project, and will consider what will become best practice for a project like this in the future. It seems likely that we will move into a 2nd phase in 2017. There have been heart warming stories from the coaches about volunteers who initially were very unsure about coaching and how to use it, moving to make significant decisions and changing their sense of themselves. Several have asked for the coaching to continue past the allotted 6 sessions. It feels great to have had TA as an integral tool in this international project – once again showing how easily accessible and life changing TA tools can be!
Karen Pratt, November 2016