Small Steps and Broken Stones

Kurt Rowe has been working with Breast Cancer Care for over eight years and knows us inside out. Here he is talking about the Presentation Skills course he delivers for us.

Kurt Rowe on Presentation Skills from Alex Dawson on Vimeo.

From ‘Bodyline Autopsy’ by David Frith….

A Winchester variation on rugby football involved players standing still while an opponent booted the ball at them from point blank range. To flinch was to bear the shame of it for life.

Lovely. Who said sport should be fun?

I made this video ages ago, but I wanted to make sure I had Dom’s permission before I posted it on the web, for two reasons. Firstly, the quality is bad and it doesn’t quite get across what the MATT exercise is all about. Almost, but not quite. Secondly, I wanted to ensure that Dom was happy for his ideas to be made available to everyone else. Fortunately, and I knew this before I asked, Dom is one of those more enlightened souls who likes to colloborate and share. A lot of learning suppliers guard their content so strictly that they inevitably begin to close themselves off to new ideas. They get stale and they become old-fashioned. I much prefer working with people who embrace ‘cloud-thinking’, who share ideas and new approaches and understand that they’ll be in demand because of the quality of their delivery, rather than their store of jealously-guarded content.

My final word on this is that it’s great to see a facilitator who sees this kind of exercise as a really key component in their delivery of a learning event. I’ve seen too many examples of games and exercises being treated friviously by facilitators, fit only for clunky ice-breaking and ‘bonding’, so it’s nice to see a carefully crafted exercise, built on sound principles, that can generate some powerful learning.

Dominic Morris on The Matt Exercise from Alex Dawson on Vimeo.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of completing my Diploma has been the opportunity to look back over the last nine months or so of learning and reflect on the ways in which my coaching practice has changed and developed.

I’ve recognised that the way that I write notes during a coaching session has undergone an evolution of sorts and that the notes I produce now are radically different from those from the sessions that were taking place last September and October.

Back then, I was trying to capture the session in the same way that I wrote when I was attending a lecture at university, lots of frenetic scribbling, desperately trying to keep up with the lecturer, bullet-point after bullet-point, traditional sentence structuring and a very linear approach. This was my tried and tested way of making notes, honed through years of school and further education, so it made sense that I would adopt it when I started working with my learners.

I soon became aware that not only was this style of note-taking proving to be a distraction during the session, in that capturing so much of what was happening on paper was preventing me from looking at the learner and seeing what was going on with them in terms of their body language, but it was also starting to feel like an overly-laborious process when it came to writing up my notes, post-session. I was reminded of my mum, a marriage counsellor, who would spend hours at the kitchen table, painstakingly writing her session notes.

Now, I daresay that Mum’s process was right for her and right for her clients. But it didn’t feel right for me. In terms of note-taking, I came to appreciate (with the help of my FCM!) that I wanted the onus to remain with the learner. I wanted them to take the responsibility for recording what actions they wanted to committ to and when they would complete them by. After all, they were their actions, not mine. However, I also recognised that I enjoyed taking notes and that if I did them in a different style, a more natural style that suited the demands of a coaching session, then they could still serve as a very valuable reference point for me.

I began to write my notes in a more ‘mind-map’ style and soon found that this method was much more effective for me. Firstly, it was much less labour intensive, with less words written and more opportunity to really focus in on the learner, maintain eye contact and sharpen the listening. Secondly, I was able to keep the notes to just one page and create a map of sorts that would chart the journey of each session. Using words, arrows, bubbles and symbols I could see how one of the learner’s thoughts had lead to another and how those thoughts had combined to create a beautifully crafted idea or solution. On the page, the learner remained at the centre of the process and the (perhaps) too rigid ‘beginning-middle-end’ structure of linear note-taking was done away with. Thought patterns and themes became more easy to spot and the whole process began to feel more creative, rather than a chore.

With one of my more technologically minded learners, I used a website called Exploratree to copy the mind-map I had created in my notes. I sent them a link to the map, which they could then adapt or edit to suit their own needs and style.

I find this kind of technology exciting and I hope that it’s going to be just one of the ways in which I continue to experiment with the way that I take notes.