Transcript of video below:

Good morning and welcome to my second video blog. The overall arch of these blogs is going to be about my journey to aligning my passions with my career. But at the moment, the focus is going to be on me becoming an agile or ways of working coach at Telstra, which is, as mentioned my last blog, huge first step towards aligning my passion with my career.

So, there’s a couple of things I want to talk about today. The first being that, since our last, my last blog, I have realized what a privilege it is to be given this opportunity to learn about being a ways of working coach. I didn’t realize at the time how unique it was around the world. And I did know that I was very lucky. But I didn’t realize that I was uniquely lucky. And I’m really pleased that Telstra willing to invest in training 50 of us to become coaches, they selected us for our mindset, and they will teach us the technical items.

It’s been a fabulous journey for the past three or so weeks is our last blog. One of the things is I’ve had to do is unlearn. My role in the past is one of the things I’ve had to unlearn. I’ve had to stop being focused on delivery of actual, you know, projects, I’ve had to stop expecting to be busy for 10 hours a day and not going to my work done. And being under a lot of pressure constantly, it’s a different kind of pressure; that pressure to learn. And it’s retraining my brain to learn so much, there’s been days where I felt a bit lost because I think my brain was full. And I needed to time to process and take the knowledge in before I moved on to learning something new. So that’s all been an adjustment and an unlearning which has been really good for me, I think.

The next thing I’ll talk about was how we are learning. So, to start with, we kicked off with a four day coaching camp, which was very intensive, but really well paced. We came out of the that with a lot of new knowledge and also a learning backlog. So, all the things that we knew, that we didn’t know, that four days is a bit of a roller coaster of ‘’there’s so much I don’t know’’, to, ‘’Oh, I think I’ve got this’’ to ‘’Oh my god, there’s so much I don’t know”, again. So that’s been a really, that was a really interesting four days and very enjoyable.

The way we are being assessed is through a series of badges. So to become coaches, there’s a minimum of five badges we need to earn. And we are on our pathway to do that. So I have my very first badge. And I’m a little bit addicted to badges already. The other badges I need to learn, earn sorry, through facilitating, through coaching and through other aspects of the skills that I need to gain. I love the idea of a way of saying “Yep, we’ve witnessed this person doing this, and we know that they’re okay to go out into the wild’’.

The other way that we’re learning is that we’ve been assigned to mentors, I have three actually, I got very lucky: three for the price of one. And they are fantastic. They have assigned us to agile teams. So, we are witnessing, observing their ceremonies. Over time, we will hopefully be able to take part in facilitating some of those ceremonies, and gain our experience and knowledge that way. Our mentors, they’re really supportive as you’d expect from a mentor. But our mentors, I feel particularly glad that we have who we have. They’ve been really good.

The next part of my journey is to keep learning of course, but also yesterday, we had to nominate the areas, the missions in Telstra that we would most like to work with. No guarantees, of course, but the fact that we got asked about our missions is really cool. So I got to select I had a great time yesterday going through some of the missions in the areas will be moving to and picking my favourites. Very excited to find out which one I get assigned to.

The learning through observing, through training courses, and through my own, you know, research and books, videos, articles, will continue obviously in parallel. And there are other areas are getting involved in as well, such as facilitating training courses, and things like that. So it’s a really exciting time for me, and I will be back in a week also to tell you about what the next steps have been. Thanks