Professional Development Opportunities

Wikipedia define Professional Development opportunities as this:

“Professional development is learning to earn or maintain professional credentials such as academic degrees to formal coursework, conferences and informal learning opportunities situated in practice. It has been described as intensive and collaborative, ideally incorporating an evaluative stage”

Therefore learning opportunities equal the the hands on kind of learning. ‘The doing stuff in practice”. Professional development opportunities are informal and of a ‘try it and see’ nature. I consider myself to be an ‘experiential learner‘. By this I mean that need to opportunity to ‘do’ the thing, to ‘take’ the risk, and to have the feelings from doing so. Often this means I get to feel the bruises too as I can rarely know if a new thing is right for me until I have tried it. And I have tried a lot of things! I have developed some pretty strong strategies for bouncing back more swiftly.

I believe most individuals also benefit from a certain amount of trial and error too. No matter how senior or highly qualified a person is sitting in the theory rarely gets them far. In fact sometimes the more cerebral a person is, the more they benefit from stepping out of the internal game of mental ping-ping, by choosing ways to create practical learning opportunities for themselves.

Coaching is the space within which to design just that kind of challenge for yourself. Of course we can work our way through a myriad of theories and models and interventions together.  Nothing really works better however than creating an opportunity to do something different, actually doing it, and debriefing it with your coach afterwards. This is where to real learning takes place. often we surprise ourselves in this process.

We might try something we assumed we would adore and have aspired to for eons. Sometimes we can find it’s not what we thought it would be. Then we need to know what to take from that and how to use it to define and refine our next developmental step. Sometimes clients have suspended their judgement for long enough to try something they thought they would abhor. Then they have been amazed to find something nourishing within the experience. It is easy to assume we ‘know’ all about something before we even come into contact with it….

So coaching is an experiential process. It’s not all sitting on a room and talking about professional development opportunities. Coaching is about designing these opportunities that will serve your unique professional development and then stepping out of the coaching space in order to make that happen.

Career coaching is definitely a verb when it takes place with this practitioner…. if all we did was talk about it then nothing would ever change. Take action, create professional development opportunities that are designed by you and for you, and your professional development becomes both purposeful and potent

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