Online Group Coaching for PGRs

Location
Online
Dates
Thursday 21 July 2022 (15:00-16:00)
Contact

graduateschool@contacts.bham.ac.uk

We know that doing a PhD can be challenging at the best of times and at the moment it can be even harder than usual.  Lots of you are struggling with managing uncertainty about your projects, adjusting goals, building good habits, managing the inner critic or procrastination, and coping with uncertainty about the future. 

We are launching a new online group coaching programme for PGR students. It will run 15:00 on Thursdays every week during term time.

A coach is not an expert in your academic field, but an expert in helping you to develop these transferable skills and the ability to coach yourself through these challenging tasks. A coach is also not a counsellor – it is not to deal with deep wellbeing issues but instead to help you develop effective working approaches and coping strategies (if you need help with wellbeing issues please visit our postgraduate support section instead). In the sessions, you will be taught a “self-coaching model” which provides the framework for the online coaching and which you can use in your own time.  A trained coach will then offer you the opportunity to be coached one-to-one while the other students watch.  

It will run in live “panel” mode on Zoom, so the coach and the coachee do not see the other participants but the audience can contribute to the session via the Chat and Q&A functions.  In this way, the volunteer gets a highly personalised and valuable coaching experience and the viewers get the opportunity to hear how the coachee reflects on and resolves the issues that they are facing.  

Given the often shared experiences of PGR students, we expect considerable learning to emerge from such observation. Sessions should be treated as confidential and should address general issues (as listed above) rather than specific wellbeing issues or problems with supervisors.

Anyone can volunteer to be coached on the day. We are particularly interested to hear from people struggling with procrastination, project management, and/or the writing process, but all topics are welcome! The individual coaching part would last about 15 minutes. No one will be forced to be coached; even as an observer, you will learn lots just by learning about the self-coaching model and watching others getting coached. So, even if you don’t want to be coached yourself, please come along.

You don’t need to sign up. You can log in by joining the webinar and using passcode 121365. You will l need to log in with your bham.ac.uk Zoom account to access.


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