I became a member of the EMCC – European Mentoring and Coaching Council earlier this year and as part of my intention to continue and develop my coaching practice, I have signed up to a few of their webinars. They have a focus this year on their Coaching Psychology Special Interest Group and the first webinar in this series was on reflection in coaching – the power of writing things down.
The webinar was on a Monday evening and I felt simultaneously grateful that I could engage with the webinar whilst making dinner, as well as slightly irritated with myself that I was making dinner at the same time! I guess one of the positive legacies of Covid is that so much more is now run online.
Carly Victoria, a creative life coach and positive psychology practitioner presented her PhD research at the webinar on the impact of reflective journaling when combined with coaching. In her research she found that journaling before and after coaching sessions improved engagement with the coaching and coaching goals. For me this was interesting and made sense, although I have never tried to combine coaching with journaling either for my coachees or myself.
We then had an opportunity to try out some of the journaling techniques that Carly uses. It was a real privilege to take some time on a cold, February night, calmly journaling whilst listening to some relaxing music. Three activities were given. The first was to journal for a few minutes in response to the question “how am I feeling today?”, the second was “what do I want more of in my life?” and then for the third, Carly, showed us three images and asked us to write about whichever one engaged us the most. I really liked these activities and particularly the last one with the images. So much so that it inspired me to use images in two coaching sessions a couple of weeks later. I had been meaning to do this for ages so this was a good nudge.
Other things that I found out about during the session were Unglue – the art of using college in coaching – designed by Andrea Watts and rational emotive behaviour.
I found this session so useful and inspiring, it was a great way to spend a Monday night.