Two weeks ago, on a short break to Barcelona with my sisters and my Mum, my middle sister called out ‘There’s Jonathan Ross’. Looking at a tall, but ordinarily dressed bloke in sunglasses, I said ‘No it’s not.’ (I know, I was actually expecting to see someone in a lime green crushed velvet suit, with navy blue suede shoes) but Denise was having none of, and strode off in the direction of the guy as he walked away from the Burberry Store. (She can be very determined when she has the scent of a celebrity in her nostrils.)
It was then that Jonathan Ross smiled and said ‘Hello.’
He was very, very charming … he let us take photos, had a quick chat and talked about his family. (He even tweeted me after I tweeted my thanks to him.)
For the next 2 days, my youngest sister, Juliet, repeated the phrase ……. ‘I can’t believe we met Jonathan Ross ….. IN BARCELONA!’ so many times I feared she had lost the ability to form any other words.
My mother said (again, over and over and over, and in what I assume was a thinly veiled jibe about the men her daughters have shackled themselves to) ‘He was such a charming man …. You don’t see that anymore.’ Sighing, heavily after every such utterance.
Denise kept saying, ‘if it wasn’t for me..’ then staring wistfully into the distance, which from sharing a house with her for years, I know means she will quote her ability to spot a celebrity leaving a luxury clothing store as a reason to buy her a drink / shoes / agree with any argument she is making at some point in the future, just when I think the incident has been forgotten.
In addition to repeating these phrases, we dissected the 10 minutes we spent with him – how Denise spotted him; what he was wearing; how he smiled; how we smiled; how he touched my mother very politely on the arm to make sure she was in the photograph; how he checked that we had the photos we needed; why he didn’t take off his sunglasses – many, many times. We looked at our encounter from each of our different perspectives; what we thought when we realized it was him; how we felt; who we would we tell first (normally each other, but a shared experience had confused us a little).
It was about a week later that I realized I had done to Jonathan what I do not do enough in professional practice – reflect on an event with a view to learning from it and improving future choices and actions.
Critical reflection is not something I enjoy doing – my heart sinks when I note this is required for any part of my coaching studies – and yet, ask me to consider a brief meeting with someone ‘off the telly’ and there’s no holding me back. (Seriously, my daughters have warned me if I mention ‘his’ name one more time they will move out – I have started to refer to him as ‘Sid’ to confuse them.)
Obviously I need to reframe reflective practice – in future I will add the sentence ‘and what difference would it have made if Jonathan Ross was there’ to the title of every Reflective Essay I am asked to produce.
Maybe if you get stuck on a task, look at it from another point of view, another version of ‘What would Jesus do ?’ (see Coaching Blog 8 for that reference !) and approach it from a new angle.
