A week away from ICA

I have been away from ICA for a week.

It is really amazing how much it seems that ICA has become a part of my life. The week I have been away  it is as if I had left some family members or some very important activity (which it is). I went to Ohio, to follow a Business Coaching course, and actually met a fellow ICA student in person, as well as an ICA trainer! So, it turns out, we are not virtual people but REAL people.

The training was intensive, but it was clear from the start that what I have learned at ICA was going to be very helpul in orienting and organizing the information we got. However, the course went from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, and half a day on Saturday, so by the end I was completely overloaded with information… on top of the 6 hour time zone difference.

I am back home in Madrid now, restarting my ICA classes and starting to get ready for Supervised Coaching, which starts in a few days… August 4th. And I am the first one up!

More on the July break

During the July break at ICA I have been reviewing my course notes on the modules I have finished. I already did this with the Foundation and AC100 modules, and found it very enlightening: so many things go on during a class that when reviewing and writing up the notes I take while it’s happening, I see that a great part of it just seemed to have disappeared from my mind. It’s a great way to refresh the content. At the same time, I take the opportunity to do the reflection, answer the questions, etc. I then produce a Word or similar document with all of this. Actually, just going through the learn notes again really brings up a lot of “new” information.

In line with this, I started to go over the Power Tools module, and started with the first one “Commitment vs. Trying”… Well! I have been at it for a couple of days, doing the reflection, posting the questions, etc, and still NOT DONE. There is a lot of meat in this module, I see. It is actually an unabashed exposure of the UAC concept (which by the way, keeps reminding me of the “conflicting commitments” concept of Kegan/Lahey).

Listing three projects that I had committed to and actually carried out, was quite easy.  But when it came to putting down three that I had committed to but have not managed to do… now there’s a different story. Not because there aren’t any, but because it seems that it is always due to diffuse reasons, unclear motivations, not really feeling like it (the organizing of my appartment, for instance) or even, because I don’t know how to proceed (and, it seems, I am not about to get help), in the case of my issues with relationships.

So, it has been very powerful in several ways. Actually, just allowing myself to be with these questions, holding them in my mind, so to speak, seems to me to be helpful in itself. It helps to raise consciousness and awareness of how different I feel inside when I am actually working towards what I have committed to, and when I keep procrastinating, or even refusing to see it as something I can do anything about.

Let’s see if I make it to the second Power Tool!

By the way, I am still not clear either on my Coaching Model nor on my Power Tool…

During the break

These past couple of weeks ICA has been at idle speed: no courses and little action on the discussion board (although Laurene answered my question about my research paper immediately).

I have taken this opportunity to read up on a different issue: business development models that I am studying in order to develop the one, or ones that I will use with my Coaching Business. A couple of weeks ago I finished going through the E-myth for the third time (the second time in the last 4 months) taking notes and I wrote a 2 page summary of its underlying concepts. I also did a Mind Map of the path it suggests. This mind map really helps now in organizing “next steps” with the business clients that I have. The idea is to do the same thing with other books I have targeted (extract a business model of some sort, or rather a busines development model), take down the underlying ideas and do a Mind Map of the suggested structure.

The next books, as far as I can now see it are:

• Book Yourself Solid
• Growing a Business
• Beyond Booked Yourself Solid
• the structure underlying the Action Coach business dev model,
• The basice Business Plan model (is it a good Bus. Dev. model?
• PBCA

This is actually quite a bit of work, now that I think about it, but I hope it is worth it. I am currently going through BYS, and it is clearly more geared to a professional practice than to a business. I am actually working through the examples, so it’s taking me quite a bit. I want to work through the examples because: a) it gives me a better feel of the sort of anwswers that come up, and  how difficult it might be for a professional to put himself through this; and b) I am actually getting pretty good ideas. However, I think that since what is left is the spelling out of the last Marketing Strategies, I will start to go over it again if I can, this week, with a view to extract the underlying info and structure.

Next week I will be in Ohio, taking an additional business coaching course (PBCA), which is my next step in my idea of developing my business presence here in Spain.

If this seems more like an entry on my business than on my ICA journey, I guess it is