Understanding the impact of The Lived Experience
Our work at Mastering Your Power is to understand not only how to coach others but initially how to navigate our own complexities and acknowledging bias, so that we can then support those that we coach to do the same.
We talk a lot about the lived experience - in fact at MYP we place it at the centre of what we do. Each of us have our own lived experience which has been developed over time from our unique series of interactions with the world - good and bad. Not only that we have been shaped by the systems and groups that we have been born, raised and now live, as part of - we all have our own level of exposure and expectations set. All of these influences and experiences have created an 'overlapping of identities' i.e. race, gender, class also known as 'intersectionality'.
Acknowledging, accepting and embracing who you are as a result of our life experience so far is where coaching becomes the enabler for personal development and growth...but, as we hope you can now appreciate, it is not straightforward!
Examples of The Live Experience effect on our decision making
Love it or loathe it what BBC Freeze The Fear did illustrate is that our lived experience shapes our response to a situation and that facing our fears can be as much about jumping off a bridge or diving under ice as much as knowing when not to do it. Pretty powerful stuff!
Same goes for the recent series of SAS: Who Dares Wins and in particular the backstory to winning recruit Shylla Duhaney - after being voted as the recruit most people found to be ‘untrustworthy’ because she had spoken the least it was her DS, who was able to make her feel comfortable enough, to confide in what was really going on.
‘Just growing up as a Black girl, I used to get stereotyped as the angry black girl. And I’ve just always been made bad, slapped with emotions,’
Reflecting on her coversation Shylla added: ‘I was trying not to breakdown but what Remi said just made sense and I could really relate. It really helped me feel like someone else gets what’s in my head.”
If this is something that you’d like to talk more about please do get in touch or start a conversation with us on LinkedIn
