Coaching is an essential part of everyone’s life that significantly influences the thought process, shape our knowledge base and worldviews.
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
Coaching always sounds to me as a practice of mutualism with no hierarchical power structures.
Listening
Listening(L2&L3) is the essential part which plays key role in shaping the coordination between coach and coachee. Listening gives more room to express the aspirations and thoughts of the coachee, which helps the coach to understand things in depth.
GROW
In my experience with local community, I’ve learnt many things while working with newbies. Taking continuous feedback from local leaders, accommodating their aspirations into community goals, acting as a network gateway in connecting people and other open source communities to work for common goals and catalyzing the community to work with definite goals and OKRs
The power of questions
Reading ‘Concepts of Physics by H.C.Verma’ in my teens made me admire the beauty of spending the time to think about questions without bothering about readymade answers. Socrates questioning method inspired me to make cooperative arguments to stimulate critical thinking. I strongly believe in “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”
and being a coach should be mindful of this principle.
Previous experience as coach
It’s been a good experience being a coach as part of working with many FOSS organisations and groups. In my experience, I’ve learnt that “You are not a leader until you have produced another leader who can produce another leader.” This inspired to set my main focus on ‘train the trainers’ and nurture more local leaders. I’ve organised train the trainers for Firefox OS in 2015 with 20+ local leaders and planning the same for MozActivate modules in the recent past.
