Innovative coaching for school students and young professionals

Innovative coaching for school students and young professionals

Circl students

Circl is a coaching company offering innovative leadership training for school students and young professionals. We asked Sarah Haville, the Circl Programmes Lead, to give us the company’s best pitch for the work they do as they showcase a different way to engage with young people. Circl is addressing several modern challenges: the shift towards automation, mobile phone addiction, and the way consumers are applying social conscience pressure on companies. We hope this post brings a different perspective to working with younger generations.

Three words. Three short words.

Your chest tightens.

Your eye contact desperately wanting to break. They are looking expectantly at you, so you hold it. You’re looking deep into their eyes searching for an indicator, a little seed as to what thoughts are racing through their mind.

In this moment, it’s not about them, or some would say it’s all about them. They’re playing their coaching role well, holding space for you to take that leap of faith and jump into the unknown.

Deep breath in.

What should you share?
What do they want to know about?
What will they think about you?

Deep breath in.

What do you want to share?
What do you want them to know about you?
What will you think about what they think about you?

So here goes.

‘Who are you?’ is a question we ask at the beginning of our Circl programme. No one has a ‘right’ answer to this question and no one knows what they’re about to hear. It’s an immediate leveller and invites vulnerability. In the above scenario, would you be able to identify who was a professional and who was a school student?

Coaching is not elitist. People across the range of diversity can and should be coaches. We train business professionals and school students in coaching skills, together, at the same time. They both play the part of coach and coachee. A professional not only develops their own coaching skills but also develops themselves that bit further than traditional leadership programmes they may partake in, because they are being coached by 16-17 year old students too.

Why is this structure more impactful?

Because we’re reflecting the modern workplace and the evolving future of work. With different inter-generational and inter-demographic relationships at play it’s now more important than ever that we reach beyond the mere honing of skills through peer coaching, and that we push past the boundaries of traditional student mentoring.

Professionals engage with the experiential side of Circl, the high stakes of working to make a real difference to our 16-17 years old students. As a result, employers are seeing only positive impacts developmentally and socially.

They feel connected to using coaching to progress the social mobility agenda, supporting students from low income backgrounds to get exposure to different workplaces. But they also have a chance to develop their own coaching skills and build an effective 1:1 coaching relationship.

So, who are you?

Please note: EMCC UK does not endorse the specific companies or products referred to on this blog. Our intention is to offer our members a diverse range of views and approaches to promote discussion and inform practice.

Photo of a Circl coaching pair: Circl