Planting the Seed - Unlearning to learn.
If you identify as a leader, there is a good chance that you love learning. As well as being a knower, you are also open to learning what you don’t know.
Last week, I participated in a coaching program to renew my Professional Certified Coach (PPC) certification.
Since becoming a coach, I have participated in various coaching courses, either out of pure interest or to meet my continued coaching credits, which form a part of the renewal process.
The course was brain-focused and examined coaching through a neuroscience lens. Over the past few weeks, I have been completing the modules from the intensive training.
These coaching practices are very different from what I’m used to. My other schools of coaching methodology are Ontological coaching and coaching with the Enneagram; these coaching lenses focus on the whole human.
Working purely with the brain was new territory for me as a coach. One thing I know for sure, having worked as a coach for over a decade, is that the best coaching tool is presence. My full presence and attention allow me to drop into where the client is and what part of my coaching toolbox could be useful for the client at that moment.
There were seventeen of us on the course. Many participants were not yet coaches, but most were leaders within organisations who wanted to add coaching skills to their work. A few, like me, had their own practices, and I believe I had been a coach for the longest time, bar the two very skilled facilitators.
Early on, I realised I would need to adopt a beginner's mindset to benefit the most from the course. I would need to put aside everything I thought I knew and everything I do know to create the mental space to learn, engage with, and understand new concepts.
I had to unlearn, to learn and re-learn.
If you identify as a leader, there is a good chance that you love learning. As well as being a knower, you are also open to learning what you don’t know.
But are there areas of life where you are not willing to be a learner?
Talking to a parent complaining about ‘the youth of today,’ I pushed back a little. I said that I have learnt so much from my teenage children. I have learnt about politics I had no idea about, and I have learnt about how young people have codes at parties (we never had codes; if a drunk female friend went into a room with a guy, we never questioned it.) I have learnt about online dating apps (which were not around when I was dating) I have learnt about gender fluidity (which was ‘not allowed’), and the power of changing pronouns (also not allowed when I was younger).
When my children bring their friends home, I am open to learning. As a respected older adult in their lives, I try to listen more than I talk. I ask them questions, sometimes through a coaching lens, so that they can come up with their own answers. I only give advice if it is asked for explicitly.
It is easy for adults to believe that we know everything. Do we know many things? Yes. Do we know everything? No.
There are teachers everywhere.
It is more than just the chosen few who qualify, who have the proper education or credentials behind their names.
We must be willing to let go of what we know so that we can be expanded in more meaningful ways.
Unless we permit ourselves not to know, to step into a beginner’s mind, we miss some of the most important aspects of being human, allowing all humans to teach us.
Wishing you a weekend of experimenting with a beginner’s mind. xx
The Gift of Asking Live Program - Starting on June 17th
Registrations: Close today at 12pm AEST
For less than a coffee a week, become a paid subscriber to The Harvest.
The Harvest - Which story is the right one?
We cannot go backwards. We can use past knowledge and understanding to enhance and honour the present, but we cannot return to the past—to the old story. We can use the old story to inform the new one.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Harvest with Kemi Nekvapil to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.