What's on YOUR mind?

I have been thinking lots about blogging since I started last week and my biggest challenge has been to think about what I want to say and what is my purpose in saying it.



So now, already, after just one sentence I have two themes going on! One is about the purpose in whatever we do, the 'And So What?' question. I'll deal with that next time! The other is the thinking about what I want to say and what I need to say first.

Often my thoughts don't come along in any particular order. To focus what I really want to say I usually need to do what I refer to as 'downloading' first. I try to recognise that this is true for many of us. I encourage all my clients to think about what they need to say first at the start of every coaching session and workshop I run.

So what exactly do I mean by downloading? It's the bit I have to do before I can think clearly about something specific. My MSc in Coaching described it as a technique called 'front of mind'. It's the bit where I encourage clients to say what's immediately on their mind before we can progress with the task in hand. For instance, if a client arrives a few moments late for a meeting or a workshop, then their downloading may well be the traffic they have battled through, the exciting phone call they took as they were leaving, the argument they had with the cab driver. In being given space and opportunity to download this information for a few moments and it being acknowledged by the coach or the rest of the group it allows them to put it to one side and move into the real focus of the meeting. Not downloading can have a similar effect to asking your laptop to do too many tasks at once, it gets stuck and does nothing at all!

Front of my mind at the moment is the Charity Ball I'm running to raise funds for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust next weekend. I had a very odd experience this week when a client called me in the office to discuss a piece of work she had submitted for an ILM assessment. I had offered to give her feedback and told her to give me a call. However, when she did so, I was bogged down in writing and rewriting table plans. Who to sit with whom? The perennial curse of the event organiser, the pivot on which the success, or not, of an event seems to turn! So when my client phoned there was no way I could flick the switch in my brain to think about whether she had fully addressed the question of the place of executive coaching and mentoring in leadership development! Fortunately, she was understanding enough to allow me to explain my lack of focus and we laughed about a friend's wedding she had helped plan the previous year. I was then able to find the notes I had made on her work and we happily turned our attention to that.

There is definitely a lesson for me in allowing people to download, to say what's at the front of their mind before asking them to focus on the real business. Maybe it's about being human and connected with everyone we meet regardless of our purpose in meeting them. We each have our own agenda going on in our heads, loading our agenda into someone else's thinking without acknowledging theirs first seems a certain road to me to 'stuckness'. So, I'm determined to make more effort today to ask 'What's on your mind?'.

And in the meantime, keep your fingers crossed I get the table plan right.....!!