What is your response when you make a mistake?
If you are like us, you probably get disappointed, frown, and close your body.
Your body has an influence in your emotions and state of being.
When you frown and keep your body closed, it gets difficult to be brave, creative, open, which you definitely need to learn and to grow.
In the Professional Coaching Diploma programme, our students learn to “be (a) coach”. They practice core coaching competencies such as presence, evoking awareness, active listening, and facilitating growth. And of course, they make mistakes, mistakes are our footsteps in the learning journey. As we know our attitude about mistakes plays a key part in learning, we implemented a new approach to call out “mistakes”. When we do self-reflection: we lift our arms into the sky and shout “how fascinating”. When we give feedback to the other, we say “it was fascinating to observe…”.
We are grateful to Benjamin Zander for inspiring us with this idea. You can see him working with a music student suggesting “How Fascinating” in the video below.
We also highly recommend his book “The Art of Possibility” which he wrote with Rosamund Stone Zander.
If you would like to practice this new attitude into mistakes, join us in the upcoming workshop BeCoach Connect! We are not saying you will be making a mistake but you will definitely have lots of practice for coaching. At the end of your practices, we will ask you what do you want to celebrate. We will celebrate your wins and we will celebrate the mistakes or rather learnings saying “How Fascinating!”.
Looking forward to meeting you there!