Week 3 - Coachee

I began my conversation with my coach this week by talking about my transformative learning experiences. What a GREAT topic of conversation. He’s lucky that I didn’t ramble on about it longer, because I could easily talk about this for hours on end. In summary though, I took a course my sophomore year of college called “Introduction to Literary Theory.” It sounds thrilling, I know…

The course was taught by a young guy with a nose ring from New Zealand (look up the work of Professor Simon Hay if you are interested in having your mind blown). Professor Hay is a gifted thinker who seems to have read every single piece of critical theory that has ever been written. He was presented with a group of about twelve kids who had read none of it. It was a struggle for everyone involved, but there was a shared drive to figure this stuff out – to unpack Fanon and Derrida and Foucault – and apply those thinkers to film. I think the fact that we watched movies brought the group together even more. While talking about a book can be a shared experience, the actual reading rarely is. But when you watch a movie, you are all there at the same moment, seeing the same thing but experiencing something unique.

Between the drive to understand what was being presented, the use of the film, and the absolute joy of listening to Professor Hay speak, we achieved an intense sense of shared purpose. We wanted to understand the readings, but we also wanted to find similar meaning in our world. I remember, he would often say, “…and that’s what’s so [messed] up,” as a constant reminder that our world was not a perfect place, and that we needed to be critical of it. Eventually, most of the students in that class would go on to take all of Professor Hay’s classes together. We struggled together for six semesters over the challenging material and the sometimes difficult idea that our world is a messed up place.

I don’t do Professor Hay even a fraction of the justice he deserves, but my point remains the same: I have never felt more accountable to and more dependent on my classmates as I did in his courses. I have also never seen my world, read a book, or watched a movie the same way since meeting him.

My coach also got me thinking about the idea of internal dialogue, and asked me questions about why I think I haven’t embraced this idea yet. My answers disappointed me a bit. In part, I have just been lazy. Changing the way you do things is hard and it takes energy. Second of all, I think that I have put so much mental effort into trying to figure out the group dynamics being described in the readings, many of which I cannot relate to. In a way, I guess I’ve seen only the forest and forgotten about the trees. A personal goal of mine, after speaking with my coach, is to be more mindful of the sections in the readings about internal dialogue and focus more of my energy on trying to use those techniques and strategies.

My fixation on the group element of the class sparked a conversation with my coach about my own sense of skepticism about “Come Together” in particular. Since age five, there have been a total of two years that I was not a student, and in those years I was a teacher. School is all I know, and in school students are told all the time to be skeptical – that it’s the only way to progress and to find truth. So in that way this course has been a difficult change. It’s not that we shouldn’t be skeptical at all, but sometimes I feel as if I am being told I’m TOO skeptical. The book and readings talk about the importance of being open minded and suspending, but I guess I get nervous about open-mindedness and skepticism being mutually exclusive. I have managed to be both my entire life. How come all of a sudden I am not being open-minded enough about the material? Why am I all of a sudden skeptical to the point that I am unproductive? These questions make me feel almost a bit defiant, and seem to fuel my skepticism to the point of cynicism a lot of the time, and while I know it’s not productive, and it will not help me understand the concepts put in front of me, it’s a defensive reaction that I am seeing in myself.

My coach talked about the importance of purpose, and how maybe if I felt more of a sense of purpose regarding this material, I would be more open to it. I think he has a great point. When Olen asked me why I signed up for the course and what I hoped to get out of it, I said it was a required course. I need to release that sense of obligation and resentment that comes with it, and just be open to the idea that this could be useful material for me. I could in fact become a better person and communicator if I only try to be open-minded.

Finally, we talked about goals. My coach talked about a group he had been a part of that was successful and transformative for him. He said one of the keys was that they all wanted the same thing out of the group. I wonder what would happen if we, as an entire class, had a shared set of goals. Maybe if we were working towards something specific that we all wanted, that would shape the effort and attitude of us all. I think it would be an interesting experiment…