Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Journaling and Group Coaching

Back in 2007, I wrote a post about Journaling as a Group Coaching Tool. Since that time journaling continues to move to the fore-front as a great coaching tool. If you are not yet incorporating it into your group coaching work, this fall you may want to give it a try.

Journaling can become a wonderful tool to capture goings-on, as well as a self-reflective tool to process what has occured in the span of a day, week or conversation.

Mark Smith in Keeping a Learning Journal from Infed.com suggests the following four approaches to journaling:

"A good starting point is to use four basic elements:
Description of the situation/encounter/experience that includes some attention to feelings at the time.
Additional material - information that come to our notice or into our minds after the event.
Reflection - going back to the experiences, attending to feelings and evaluating experience Things to do - the process of reflection may well lead to the need to look again at a situation or to explore some further area. It may highlight the need to take some concrete actions. In this 'section' of the entry we can make notes to pick-up later. "
(Smith, Mark (1999, 2006), 'Keeping a learning journal', the encyclopaedia of informal education, www.infed.org/research/keeping_a_journal.htm. )

Some useful journaling resouces can be found at:

CoachingToys online store - CoachingToys continues to carry a myriad of journals and journaling tools which coaches can benefit from
A Squidoo Lens on Journal Writing Prompts
Penzu.com - A private, online journal

What journaling resources do you enjoy using? As always, please feel free to share below.

Warm regards,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, PCC, CPCC, CPT
Author of Effective Group Coaching

2 comments:

MarcManieri said...

Hi Jennifer! Loved your article and checking out the other journaling opportunities. We use a service called JournalEngine (www.journalengine.com). I'm biased of course b/c I happen to be a founder of the company, but many people and coaches are enjoying its features. It offers complete customization; an online, private/secure journal; a way for coaches/admins to deliver content to its clients or members; and its also a social network so members & clients can share journals, communicate, collaborate and grow together. Would love your feedback!

Cheryl Lyon said...

One great source of journaling prompts is http://writingbliss.com. They offer a wide variety of writing programs, many at very low cost, or even free. I have used the Inner Journey series myself and recommended it to my clients.

I could put together my own set of prompts, but Writing Bliss has done it so well and at such low cost, why bother?

And in case you are wondering, I am not affiliated in any way with Writing Bliss - I'm just a fan!