The 3rd EAGE Global Energy Transition took place from 7th to 9th November in The Hague. I had the chance to participate with Esther Bloem and Lucia Levato, in the organization of a workshop to provide some activity examples and an overview of the coaching program, “Navigating career challenges”.
Survey Results
Following EAGE 2022 in Madrid, where we presented first our initiative, a survey was conducted to grasp some insights on how some EAGE members can feel about career goals. The majority of the answers reveals that most members expect changes in their career in the next 5 years. In the meantime, they don’t particularly feel fully prepared to face these challenges on their own. The results also show clear needs to understand better strengths and values, to define next career move aligned with their strengths and values, and to understand how to maintain energy level and motivation. Developing opportunities and growth within the energy transition were also identified as a key point of interest.
Interest and Engaged Participation
About 60 people, about 25% of the conference attendance, have decided to stay and to participate actively to the workshop. Quickly the participants picked out a profile among the 9 proposed profiles (from Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine) and created groups. They took then time to share some thoughts about their choice with some commonalities. We saw engagement, smiles and even heard some laughs.
Another activity was to fill a dashboard with satisfactory level for 4 areas in life, such as health, work, hobbies and family. Participants were asked to identify one challenge they would like to tackle. It is an easy exercise: we have always problems in our lives. Some issues stick with us for some times, some are popping up out of sudden, … Sometimes, we wish that one day, we will have no problem at all. However, in life is, there is a constant: Problems never stop. The goal is not not to have any problem, but it is to solve problems and to choose them. As solution to today’s problems are the foundations for tomorrow’s problems (Manson, 2016), let’s take the habit to enjoy the process: solving problems today to resolve better ones tomorrow.
Finally, using solution brainstorming, each participant in turn suggested one action to help a little bit in the resolution of the challenge. This exercise goal is toward the power of exposing and exchanging ideas, listening to others’ views in order to bounce many ideas, to call imagination and to find a better solution together than on our own.
The Coaching Program
The coaching program was presented as organized around 5 contents.
The 1st week starts with the context understanding to make a clear snapshot of the current status and to focus on the question who are you. Participants are asked to take a director position which means to take the decision power, along with full responsibility of actions and decisions. You have the right and power to decide.
On the 2nd content, the focus is on where we want to go with the clarification of our vision and strategy. By defining strategy and visions based on our own values, you are asked to take a leader position, who is defining a personal North pole or ultimate goal.
The 3rd content is on managing your career, balancing your resources including energy and action to answer the question how you want to go and to progress. You are asked to take a project manager position who understands how to plan and prioritize
based on time, resource and quality.
These first 3 contents are aligned with the idea of self-awareness and improvement taking full responsibility, setting goal and defining a plan.
After planning, what is usually happening? Often, we see the mismatch between the plan and the outcome. This is the time where we can face all types of misunderstanding, mistakes, errors and even feeling of failure or lack of success. This could be a phase high in emotions with some loss of motivation and even some discouragement. Through the interactions with others, we learn quicker and more efficiently. It gets clearer what we can do and what we could improve. Identifying challenges and setting the inspiration to overcome them, helps us in improving ourselves and our interactions with others. So, in the 4th content, the focus is on building the awareness of the quality of our interactions with others.
Finally, the last content is dedicated on adjusting and learning to improve what and how we do, by revising our strategy. We will see how to go further, how to synergize, through cooperation, opportunity seizing and even opportunity creation.
To summarize the course is organized in 5 contents to help in activating the spiral of being, learning, doing, and becoming as well as the cycle of adaptation, evolution, monitoring, resilience.
Feedback & Actions
We receive encouraging and supportive feedback, which motivates us to go ahead, pushing this initiative further. In the future, we are considering using LessonUp app to get anonymous feedback in real time during our sessions.
Don’t hesitate to contact us, Esther Bloem, Lucia Levato or myself for any question or suggestion which could benefit the program and the EAGE community.
Finally, we would like to thank the EAGE for the interest and support in this initiative.