One brave step in coaching

By Ros Healy, Associate Head of the Centre for Employability, University of Central Lancashire

A sub-group of the Putting Research Outcomes into Practice (PROP) (and guests) consisting of nine participants met over a two day period in Wharfedale in early April 2007. Our purpose was to put into practice the One Brave Step, which emerged as a goal from a PROP gathering.

Our One Brave Step was to inform ourselves about coaching and how it might enlighten our work with students and graduates, specifically in helping them in career decision-making and to develop a toolkit or resource that could be made freely available to our colleagues to support decision-making. The event was facilitated by Zoë Dawes, an experienced coach and trainer based in Cumbria (Chartwell Coaching).

Zoë modelled the sessions on a coaching approach so that we would directly experience the processes that help us make decisions. Before the meeting, we were encouraged to consider:

• What two things we would like to come away with from this workshop.
• What single question we would like answered through the workshop.
• Which model (or models) of decision making that we currently use - either implicitly or explicitly.

After a productive and exciting two days’ experience, this was followed up with:

• What was most significant for me from the two days?
• What does that tell me about myself and my work just now?
• What do I need to do to ensure that I keep hold of these things?
• When am I going to do that?
• If I had to share one thing from the programme, what would it be and who would it be with?
• What do I need to do to get more support for all of this?

So what was the outcome? After brainstorming as a group all the decision-making support ideas, we decided that a most useful outcome would be to each take one or more that we knew about and had used, to briefly outline it or cite links, books etc and to log these on our Moodle site. We would then make the resource or toolkit available to the profession in some way or another.

The resource is now available on the HECSU Moodle site.

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