When I started my work with ICA, by Bob Vance
When I started my work with ICA I didn’t really know what to expect. I have never been a conventional student. My undergraduate degree was through a program in which the curriculum was self-designed with no grades. There were small discussion-based classes and a whole host of independent studies available to anyone who was compelled and motivated enough to design them and benefit through that style of learning.
Although I had always been able to do quite well in most areas of my formal education throughout my younger life, I had always felt that I was being dragged in directions that did not highlight what I learned most or use how I learned best. Even that insight was not available to me until after I began to engage in a learning system that was based on my own style and rate of learning. Suddenly I understood what real learning involved. I found out early on that I was able to learn more, more efficiently, and deeply; I worked harder, perhaps not in the usually expected or recognized way, but due to the degree of personal investment and interest, the material I covered was more easily integrated and held on to and accessed.
I learned how I learned. Finally.
And this is something, an experience of learning, I have valued and looked for ever since. It made learning, and understanding how I learn best, a deeply integrated part of who I am and how I live. It is, in a broad sense, a major part of what gives my life meaning, excitement and hope. I believe I have found that again through ICA.
I was nervous about re-entering “classroom” learning environment; even as ICA’s classrooms were described to me. For years I had succeeded to the level I had hoped for in various areas of my life, including in my income generating occupation, through hands-on experience, formal training and education integrated in time and action with actual paid work in the field. I could learn as I needed to learn, and apply and experiment almost immediately with the things that I was being taught, as well as read and learn through my impromptu teachers, my co-workers, clients and supervisors, as I needed to learn, in the time frame and rate that it was necessary to learn and apply that learning.
Perhaps my complaint with more traditional kinds of learning is that, separated by time and space from the actual tasks, systems, nature of unfolding problems and problem-solving, I always found that I lost much of what I had been taught, or that it simply could not apply in the real work without significant revision when compared to how it was presented in the rather sterilized and unreal environment of most schools.Even most internship programs could not bring the central nature of what the real work must involve into play for those who were the interns; a valuable experience perhaps, but not the real one in duration, dedication and level of day-to-day investment.
I go on like this because I think I have found in ICA an environment and an approach that best fits my style and preference of learning. Immediately applicable, presented by appealing to a wide range of personalized experience, theory, and sharing with individuals from an incredibly wide range of cultural, professional and personal world experience, the process of learning at ICA is “whole person” learning, involving all aspects and spectrums of how I learn. This has been a relief and a thrill. My biggest problem has been, so far, not to bite off more than I can chew in order to fit it in to the other demands of my busy life, simply because the process has been so deeply integrated in so many levels of my psyche: who and how I am, and what gives my life its forward momentum… simply put: it feels good.
I had been encouraged throughout my career to pursue higher degrees, but was always dismayed when I could not find a degree program that trusted me enough to know what I needed to learn, how I needed to learn it, and from whom. I knew what questions to ask, why did most systems of higher education patronize me by denying that fact? Besides, the expense was never to be taken lightly: if I was to pay so much, maybe even take out a loan, why would I settle for less than what I wanted in how, where and what I was to learn?
Along the way I also found, and forgive me if this sounds too critical or arrogant, that my developing and applicable skill set in my work in the social work field routinely surpassed the skill sets and applied techniques of many, if not most, of those in the field whom I met who had earned advanced degrees. Eventually I trained them, I outlasted them, and I had more success than they did. I was more excited by the work than they were for longer periods of time, and I was more flexible in my expectations of results than they. I was less frustrated because what I had learned came more from the clients and patients and the processes, rates and possibilities of real change I had witnessed first hand and had been a part of, and how I found ways to apply the research and training I undertook to apply to those specific real-life situations.
I am excited to find that the learning style prevalent through ICA is equally well-integrated and applicable in this way. Through peer coaching, tele-classroom coaching and information sharing, and the recognition of how personal, and even spiritual, the learning process can and perhaps must be, particularly in areas of helping others through difficult life passages and change, I think I will be able to build a higher level of expertise and go on to design my own system of coaching that describes and evolves out of what I know works and how I can best implement it.
Bob Vance
Sightline
Life, Family, and Vocation Coaching
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