Relational training and how to get to 'flow'

Waterfall near Sapa, Vietnam

Does it matter what trainers teach?

Over the years I have run training programmes for a wide range of organisations and institutions. Based on my experiences, I’m not sure if it matters what trainers teach as long as the learners can see the relevance of the content, and the style of the training is ‘relational’. I am borrowing the term ‘relational’ from coaching authority Erik de Haan, who says that the quality of the relationship between the coach and the coachee is key to the success of the coaching relationship. For me, the success of a training programme depends of the level of trust I am able to build within the group of learners, and between the group and myself.

Does it matter which methodology trainers follow?

De Haan believes that lessons from psychotherapy can be applied to coaching. When I was trying to decide which coaching methodology to practice, I was immensely reassured to read in de Haan’s book Relational Coaching that “according to the vast mount of experimental data now at our disposal” there is no difference between one psychotherapeutic approach and another. To be effective, de Haan says, coaches need to commit to one coaching approach, and focus on building a working alliance with the person they are coaching.

It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it

The same principles apply when I am co-training. I believe the relationship between the trainers and the learners is key to the success of a programme or workshop. ‘Relational’ training helps learners to travel further towards their learning goals, and makes the learning stick. Years ago I went on a course about how to design and deliver participative training for adults. I still have a handout called ‘How to build a co-training relationship’. It contains a list of key questions that co-trainers need to ask each other before they step out in front of a group of adults. Using these questions has helped me to build a number of open, trusting and creative co-training relationships that are at the very heart of what I do.

Relational training and ‘flow’

Co-training, and being relational, is how I think trainers can help learning groups get into a state of ‘flow’. The main characteristics of ‘flow’ as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are:

•                Intense and focused concentration on the present moment

•                Merging of action and awareness

•                A loss of reflective self-consciousness

•                A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity

•                A distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered

•                Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding.[1]

These are the key elements of all my most memorable co-training experiences. There comes a moment in a training programme where the group is totally engaged and involved in what is happening in the present time. At this moment I instinctively know what to say, or whether to stay silent. I feel I have the ‘agency’ to help participants to make sense of what they are experiencing, and to translate what they are seeing, hearing, thinking and feeling into something that has meaning and relevance for them.

For me, this is the most powerful and beneficial learning experience one can have because it is long lasting and transformational. People who have experienced ‘flow’ tend stay connected, and continue to learn and grow together long after the programme is over.

Getting to ‘flow’

How can you help a group to reach a state of ‘flow’? I believe you have to be totally committed to co-training and to working collaboratively. You have to do everything you can to build a working alliance with the participants. I also think you get to flow by demonstrating a combination of opposite behaviours:

•                Good planning and being able to depart from the agreed schedule

•                Starting where the group are at and encouraging them to push open some mental doors and windows

•                Sharing your own experience of the training content and holding your knowledge lightly

•                Demonstrating respect for the group, and for your co-trainer, and being able to laugh at yourselves and with the group.

Is relational training a kind of placebo?

Not at all. The point about relational training is that adults will always choose what they want to learn. When you build a working alliance with learners, you encourage and support learners to make meaning for themselves. And for me, this is the most effective way to learn.

[1] From the Handbook of Positive Psychology, C R Snyder, Erik Wright, Oxford University Press, 2001

For more about how I work with groups, please see my main website KellowLearning.com

2013 A year of transitions

High-five on the farm

January Taking myself to the market

This is a blog about how I made the transition from employed to self employed. According to Dan Pink to sell is human.I took myself to market and I sold! I try to sell myself quietly, and I also notice how other people sell themselves to me. One day, after a meeting with another trainer, I asked myself: “What on earth made you think you would be comfortable working with him?” Crossing him off my list of potential collaborators was disappointing, but inevitable. We were poles apart in terms of values and approach.

February Becoming a coach

February was intense. In order to obtain a coaching qualification, I had to write essays, prepare a presentation, and practice my coaching skills ahead of my final assessment. I spent hours coaching, and being coached. What got me through the exam was the support and encouragement that I received from the tutors, and from my group. What I gained was a renewed curiosity and enthusiasm for learning. Best of all, I saw how I could use Gestalt theory to enhance my approach to experiential leadership training and development.

March It’s not what you know

I saw how teaching models and frameworks out of context just doesn’t work. You need to start where your learners are, and work alongside them. Later I read an article on executive education that included this quote from Roger Martin, Dean Rotman School, Toronto: “Knowledge is of minimum use unless it enables the recipient to take action”. He’s so right.

April Collaboration can be hard

Having convinced myself that the trend in leadership is collaboration, I tried to collaborate with people I know. Wanting to work with someone, and making it happen, however, are two very different things. What do I always say when I am teaching project management to other people? “You need to agree what you are trying to do, how and why, and you need clear roles and responsibilities”. The were various reasons why some of my efforts at collaboration failed to get off the ground. They included not being clear about the target audience, underestimating the need for marketing, not having the right business partner, different working styles and times zones. I should listen to myself more…and try again.

May Dialogue not one way conversations

I treated myself to a leadership programme. It was great not to feel responsible for other people’s learning. What worked best for me were conversations with leaders, when there was real dialogue. What I didn’t like was meetings that were more akin to interviews, where we asked all the questions, without thinking to disclose any information about ourselves. For me, unless everyone in the conversation is willing to disclose and be challenged, there can be no real learning. I was most touched listening to the probation officers, and the ex-offenders, talking about themselves, not in the same room. One of the speakers reminded me of the street-wise police that I met in the job that occupies one line of my CV (See September).

June Stressful but successful

Delivering projects for new clients taught me what consultants really do. Consultants are contracted to deliver agreed outcomes. To do that, they need to be able to manage and support their clients in different ways. At the end of a stressful but successful project, I learned (again) that I have a tendency to imagine problems that do not exist. It all ended happily.

July Black Swans can be positive

A friend of mine recommended me for a job that landed on my desk like a positive ‘Black Swan’: 1) It came out of the blue 2) It had a positive impact on my business and 3) afterwards I created a narrative for myself to explain how it was in fact predictable. If this is randomness, please can I have more of it. And I look forward to returning the favour, because I do believe what goes around, comes around.

August Feeling grounded, the importance of.

I learned that when people are struggling with a task, and are losing confidence in their ability to find a way forward, the most useful thing I can do as a coach / facilitator is to ground them firmly in what they already know. All I have to say is: “What do you know?” I believe people have the answers to their challenges and dilemmas within them, and can be helped to discover them.

September Bridging a gap in my CV

I had dinner with a group of people I last met more than 30 years ago when we all worked at the Ministry of Defence (MoD). I was there for nearly ten years, and yet the MoD occupies one line in my CV. I was nervous. My concern was that we’d spend the whole evening talking about accumulated husbands, wives, children, property and pensions. I was wrong. We talked about office misdemeanours, and that person whose name none of us could remember. And, yes, the revelations were delightful.

October Experiencing a different world

My niece Vicky invited me to spend a day with her in the Scottish Borders, on a farm where she has spent time as a veterinary student. At the end of a single-track road, in a valley, by a stream, we picnic-ed with the farmer and his shepherds. They were tagging sheep, before sending them to market. The fleece on the sheep was creamy and rug like. I felt privileged to be invited into Vicky’s world of sheep, cattle, horses, dogs, and farmers, going about their business.

November KellowLearning.com goes live

After months of planning and writing, my website went live, and I was glad. The writing of it sometimes felt like a chore, but because of this, I now know what I do, and why.

December Getting a community complex

I got involved in a bid to have a neighbourhood planning forum recognised by the local council. Despite living in the area for almost five years, I didn’t expect to find so much complexity on my doorstep. Of course, doing what I do, I should have known better. My motives for getting involved were not entirely selfless. I wanted to get to know my neighbours. On that score, I think 2014 is going to be another year of transitions.

PS For more information about leadership and learning, please check out my new website www.kellowlearning.com

Developing Leaders: What can you teach in one session?

Some people start with theory. I start with the participants

As a trainer or teacher, how do you engage learners in a conversation about leadership? Leadership is complex and context dependent. Some people begin with leadership theory. I start with the participants, and draw out the experience of leadership they bring. This blog is about the best participative leadership exercise I ever invented, and you can download the complete exercise with instructions by going to my new website, kellowlearning.com

‘To see ourselves as others see us’ Robert Burns

Leaders need self-awareness. If you don’t know who you are, why would anyone follow you? Self-awareness helps to build trust and confidence. Self-awareness can’t be taught. We have to learn it as we go through life. It can be an awful pain, learning who we are, and how we impact on other people. But knowing who are, and how other people see us, we can choose to do more of the things that help us to win friends and influence, and less of the things that confuse or irritate people.

Can we teach self-awareness?

Or can we teach self-awareness? Some years ago I developed a set of leadership competencies based on what I have learned from working with leaders in the context of sustainability. Using the competencies as framework for self-assessment, I created a participative group leadership exercise that I have run with all kinds of people in all kinds of places. The whole thing takes just over an hour.

The Leadership Odyssey

I call the exercise ‘The Leadership Odyssey’, because participants go on a short learning journey, with other people, and together they explore their leadership skills and attitudes. 'The Odyssey' is a good example of how I like to work. It's fun going virtual island hopping, and people learn things while they are having fun. In a short space of time people can begin to discover what they do well as leaders, and what they want to develop. 'The Odyssey’ works well at the beginning of a leadership programme as an ice-breaker, and a thought-starter. It can be run as a stand-alone exercise. 'The Odyssey' can also help people to generate ideas for creating their personal development plan. 'The Odyssey' is probably the best participative exercise I ever invented.

Download ‘The Odyssey’

You can download ‘The Odyssey’ complete with instructions by going to my new website, kellowlearning.com I hope you enjoy using 'The Odyssey', and please let me know you get on. 

For more information about leadership and learning, please take a look at my new website

A time and a place for learning

Time

My Dad used to say “There’s a time and a place for everything”. Usually, this meant that I was doing something that annoyed him. Time and place are critical factors in the kind of learning programmes that I design. I’ve always been interested in time and the impact that it has on people. When I was a student I was hooked on Anthony Powell’s ‘Dance to the Music of Time’, which follows the lives of a group of people who are changed by time. I also read Proust’s ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ in its entirety. I’m still not sure what ‘A la Recherche’ is about. But it seems to me that Proust is trying to make sense of what he has learned about himself, and the people he has known. He takes his time to explore the meaning of the loving, the dreaming and the cheating that preoccupy him. And learning, to me, is making sense of everything around us.

Place

I’ve always been sensitive to my surroundings, though you might not think so if you could see the state of my room. I work best if I feel comfortable, and I feel comfortable if I have natural light, order, and quiet. Noel Coward’s ‘Room with a view' will do me nicely. Mallarmé’s vision of ‘Luxe, calme et beauté’ would be an upgrade too far. If I had all that, I would do no work at all, because I would be too comfortable. As a trainer, I know that the look and feel of the working space can make the difference between memorable and forgettable learning experiences. This is true whether the learning takes place face-to-face or virtually. As Steve Jobs said, people do judge books by the cover.

Learning and performing

For me, experiential learning is a lot like performance art. Any learning experience requires the trainer to be set designer, choreographer and conductor. Natural light, space to move and a constant temperature of about 20 degrees create the optimum conditions for learning, creativity and strong growth. Dark, cold and cramped spaces do not work. And timing, as the best comedians know, is everything. Too much time, and people get bored. Too little time, and people get frustrated. The timing of the day matters, too. Too early, and people are not ready to learn. Too late, and people are too tired to engage. I think people learn best when they feel comfortable and challenged. And there is a tension between feeling comfortable, and feeling challenged, which a trainer can regulate by managing the time.

Five Days Learning in Bulgaria

Last week in Sofia, I worked with a team of LEAD Associates on a leadership challenge to do with energy in Bulgaria. In addition to all the people we met, time and place were key players. We apportioned time to different activities: five minutes for each person to talk without interruption in the learning trios, six minutes 40 seconds for a Pecha Kucha, 30 minutes for each conversation at the World Café, one hour for meals.  Longer for drinking coffee, tea and wine, and less time for sleep. The compact nature of the city centre meant that we could walk almost everywhere. From the cosy Hotel Diter, we moved effortlessly from one space to another. Our base in the hotel garden was airy, and the sounds of the city were energising. We used the streets for intimate conversations in pairs. We performed in semi-public spaces like the British Council, The Ideas Factory and the Tea House, meeting local people and sharing what we had learned. During the short intervals between these performances, we used the outdoor cafes in the squares to download information, and plan for the next meeting. We continuously formed, performed, and then moved on. What I learned is that good timing, and imaginative use of space were key to helping our learners make sense of the complex energy challenges and opportunities in Bulgaria. And what I will try to remember is that groups that take responsibility for managing their time, and can adapt to different environments, are more resilient, and have better learning experiences.

As my Dad used to say, ‘There is a time and a place for everything’.