Junior Girls’ Only Training

Later this year, 21/22 October, I am Course Director for a rather special weekend. I am running a Junior Girl’s Only training weekend for the Royal Yachting Association www.rya.org.uk. This weekend will be repeated every year for five years with the aim of creating a lasting attitude change towards performance equality. 55-60 girls age 8-15 will be in Weymouth for the weekend with all the coaches and support team being women.

While the main thrust of the weekend is becoming a better sailor, we are also running some sessions on raising awareness of on social issues that we think are holding the girls back in their performance. We can identify this because this age group sail mixed in the boys – one of the few sports to do so. We’re also decking out the Weymouth and Portland Sailing Academy with posters of sporting women, and holding a Sailors Forum on Saturday night to introduce the girls to some of the current top women in sailing, to introduce role models into their lives.

I’ve just been writing the workshop briefs. The subjects are ‘Leaving and Joining groups – making it easier’, ‘Friendships and Performance Teams – can you have both in one crew?’, ‘Similarities & Differences between sailing boys and girls – what are the best parts to take into racing?’ and ‘Assertiveness training’. The coaches themselves will decide how to make these issues into workshops. I am welcoming the parents to come and find out what we doing, since the issues our young women face are not isolated from society.

I am putting in various measurements through which I hope we can track changes in both attitude and performance over the 5 years – it is 22 years since I went to the Olympics and proved women are as good as men, and its about time that pioneering stops featuring in a top female sailor’s campaign.

The whole project is starting to gather steam now. I’m really looking forward to it.

Fierce Conversations

I’ve just been doing some work with someone who finds it difficult to talk to people when they’ve let her down. It transpired that she becomes very confrontational or else avoids the whole subject for as long as possible. I introduced her to ‘Fierce Conversations’ – a lovely technique that gives structure to all those tricky conversations in ways that get people listening to one another. Through this, things start moving away from the sticking point, although sometimes in unexpected directions. She’s gone off to practice.

Susan Scott developed the concepts in her book ‘Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life, One Conversation at a Time’. This thought, amongst her many thoughts on conversations, caught my attention:
‘The conversation is a relationship – it is the tangible expression of the relationship. If we keep adding to the list of things we can’t talk about, possibilities in the relationship become smaller.’

Hmmmm……..food for thought.