Assignment #2: Coaching Call Response (week 4)

After our initial coaching call in week 3 I think that my coach Sara has done a great job of creating goals for our talks, asking the right questions to engage in deeper thought, listening to my responses and encouraging me to explain my ideas and state them clearly. We started this week’s talk by discussing the three assigned conversations that I had in the week. My first conversation was with a large group of people which tempted me to jump in as a leader and made it especially difficult for me to abandon my usual role as “mover”. However, it also opened up a great opportunity to be a bystander. The bystander role can be difficult in one-on-one or small group conversations because these types require a bit more contribution from everyone involved, but with a bigger group it is easier to take on a listening role. 

In this conversation I did my best to suspend my opinions and neither agree nor oppose the ideas put forth by the group. Instead I gave a general perspective of what was proposed and a brief overview of the pros and cons. We talked about how Isaacs defines suspending as “bystanding with awareness” and how this sort of approach to conversation is unfamiliar to me. 

As a teacher, Sara often facilitates discussion and is usually found filling the roles of mover/follower and bystander so she was very helpful in providing some insightful points on her perspective. 

Moving on to the second and third conversations we talked mostly about what I would have done differently to make my conversation with my mom a bit more productive. I think that my mom’s feelings of being attacked and undervalued could have avoided if I had shared the four-player model with her prior to beginning our conversation. It would have been helpful for her to understand the model and to choose a role that she most closely identifies with (instead of me placing her in a role and being judgmental in my approach). Having her choose her role would help to make her more aware of her conversational habits and create a sense of accountability for her actions. We discussed that having a sense of awareness and understanding about your own role and how you contribute to discussion is key in shaping more productive conversation patterns. If she had identified with the role of mover on her own then she would have naturally been more in tune with her patterns and would not have faulted me for “blaming” her and making her feel attacked.