Today’s post is the first of many from one of our eMMissaries, Nichole Mann. She is the Director of Nursing Student Services at Indiana University East in Richmond, Indiana. She is also the Project Management Consultant for the Indiana NEEDS Initiative, a statewide partnership of 14 schools of nursing committed to developing and implementing holistic admission review, mentorship programs, and funding support for students underrepresented in the nursing profession. In this article she talks about the importance of coaching, an important concept within the mentorship sphere of activities. Of note, she also talks about building nurses, so this is an article that is also very timely regarding our battle against COVID-19.
When I started exploring academic success coaching, I didn’t know that it would interweave itself so intensely with everything else I do, personally and professionally. I was passion chasing. Coaching was pitched as a way of being better at what I do, and that was enough to get my attention. The real value of that coaching work I have immersed myself in over the past few years, though, isn’t actually about skills. It came from the process of becoming a coach.
To appreciate the rest of this story, there’s one thing you need to know on a deep level: I really love my job. Probably more than I should, frankly. If you ask who I am, one of the first things I’ll say is that I’m the Director of Nursing Student Services at IU East, a regional campus of Indiana University. When people ask what I actually do, I tell them, “I make nurses.”
I often think of a favorite parable: A man walked through a busy construction site where a new cathedral was being built. Curious, he asked the first person he saw, “What are you doing here?” They told him, “I’m an architect, I’m designing the building to be both attractive and structurally sound.” He saw someone else, and asked the same question. “What do you do here?” This person said, “I’m a foreman, I’m overseeing the workers and ensuring that the project is finished on time.” Then he saw a small, frail older woman with a broom, carefully sweeping up behind the crew, taking time to seek out every trace of dust and move it to its proper place. He asked her, “How about you? What are you doing here?” She replied, “Me? Why, I’m building a cathedral for the Almighty God.”
This perfectly captures the spirit of what I mean when I say that I “make nurses.” I say it with humility for the work happening around me, an acknowledgement that everyone who touches a student here is actively working to train up a competent and caring nurse. For my portion, I oversee the supports that guide and uplift students outside of the classroom. Academic success coaching came into my sphere when I was serving primarily as an academic advisor and has grown with me as my role expanded out to include other student support programs, infusing all my work with something new.
As an IU coach-trainer, I walk other student affairs professionals through the skills of coaching: things like active listening, asking powerful questions, suspending judgement, and creating safe space. The “coaching way of being,” though – that’s the money. It’s easy to get caught up in doing it “right” with regards to the skills of coaching, but it’s the coaching way of being that makes coaching interactions so powerful and organic. As the trainer, I must show coaches that the skills are a means to something more. A coaching way of being doesn’t happen in the training room. It happens when coaching becomes real. At its core, a coaching way of being is when you begin to default to the assumption that the person you’re talking to is a capable, knowledgeable expert on their own lives and, in the right circumstances, you have the power to guide them toward the piece of themselves that already knows exactly what to do.
In higher education, like so many helping professions, we’re pulled in many directions and have competing priorities on any given day. This can make it feel simultaneously essential and impossible to engage in the frequent, substantial coaching interactions that shift it to a “way of being” as opposed to a skillset. Doing coaching teaches you the confidence, humility, and patience to be a coach. As I started to see myself become a coach, as opposed to just doing coaching, I felt a deep sense of empathy for professionals who wanted those satisfying, meaningful interactions but felt lost in the prescriptive. They truly believed that there was no room for exploration and curiosity within all of the trappings of the work they do. I’ve made it a point to start challenging that idea. I started by taking it to a group close to my heart: the Indiana Academic Advising Network. In the past year I’ve offered two presentations, one in person and one via webinar, on integrating coaching questions within the context of academic advising. In those presentations, I asserted that advisors could use a coaching approach to dramatically change the dynamic within their everyday interactions with students. By infusing the intentionality, respect, and curiosity of coaching within the conversations that are already happening, everyday contacts have the potential to become transformative. I tested my suspicion that a coaching way of being could be willed into life a little bit at a time by teaching advisors how to tap their curiosity to find one powerful question per interaction. I showed them the structure, talked about the skills, but I didn’t try to condense an entire curriculum into 55 minutes. Instead, I asked them to just try on a coaching way of being and see what it felt like.
When people around me started to try on coaching, I began to notice the energy that bloomed. They wanted to talk about it. They wanted to grow. That energy keeps me passion chasing. It led me toward the eMMissary program and keeps my own curiosity in full bloom. The coaching way of being pushes me to grow through service and emotional generosity. It’s both exhausting and exhilarating, and it keeps me awake in the best way. I really, really love my job.