Lesson 11 Blog Post Reflection

Briefly explain how you might use process consultation in your personal life.

In reflecting back to the beginning of this course, it didn’t take long for me to consider ways in which process consultation could be applied in my personal life.  There is a tremendous value placed on collaboration and the P.C. working with the client towards shared goal.  To that end, I think that this practice could assist with “problems” that exist with my family.

Just recently, my 11 year old daughter was telling me that she was nervous about her upcoming softball season because she wanted to be the lead-off pitcher.  She was expressing doubts that she was “good enough” to be the lead-off and was worried that the other pitcher, who was new to the team and also the coach’s daughter, might out-perform her.

Instead of just telling her what I thought about things she could do to address her concerns, (which would have been more focused on physical actions, like practicing with a ball of socks in our basement against the wall), I decided to talk with her more about her feelings of anxiety around this.  I was very mindful about asking questions vs. telling her answers.  I asked her questions like, “why do you think you are feeling nervous”, “is there anything that you could be doing differently to help with this?”, “what has worked for you in the past when you feel like this?”, “is there anything that is outside of your control?”.  Her responses to these questions were really interesting to me and it was incredible how she really thought about her answers before stating them.  At the end of our conversation, she was able to differentiate things that she could control (and what she was planning to do about this) and things that were outside of her control (which she realized was not worth worrying about).

This technique was a much better way for us to talk through her concerns.