This year, I’ve had the immense privilege of supporting and facilitating an amazing group of coaches who have been preparing their submissions for professional accreditation with the European Mentoring and Coaching Council.
What I noticed at the beginning of the week was how many of us are conditioned from an early age to see such exercises through a lens which could be broadly framed as the question, ‘am I good enough?’
Whilst the EMCC applies considerable rigour in its assessments, it does so through a deliberate lens of celebrating the arc of each individual journey towards mastery; how each person started, what key events shaped their motivations and how and where they choose to focus their practice both now and in the future.
Each story is rich, inspiring and basks in the light of unshakeable strength and undeniable truth. I am confident you would want to have every single one of these coaches in your corner because of this.
Hardly the stuff of annual appraisals, performance assessments or fudged forced rankings that are still all too commonplace today.
As Robert Rosenthal famously demonstrated in 1964, the expectations we have of other’s abilities, our behaviour towards and micro-interactions with the individual members of the group and the whole collective, influences the performance outcomes achieved.
Positive expectations and interactions influence and yield positive results.
As the turbulence in our world continues, I propose we must now resolve to reframe our expectations of, and behaviour towards, others and our institutions through the lens of Rosenthal’s findings.
Apply challenge and rigour, yes, but celebrate them and where they are in their journey to mastery as your primary focus and start point and it will be so.
Accepting this, who will you choose to acknowledge and celebrate with today?