The Fellowship Forum

Welcome to the Forum, and open discussion and training time for the urban ministry staff members in Denver, Colorado.  For more information about our gathering check out the about page.  For upcoming topics be sure to review our calendar page.  For information about Open Door Fellowship (the Forum’s host), Open Door Ministries, or the Providence Network, check out the summary page or their respective websites.

Absolutely many things.

First let’s posit some descriptions of each of these three relationships and their relative affect on those invovled.
What is discipleship? -
- Discipleship is an older or/and more experienced person meeting with a younger
- More academic, bible study, involving curriculum or material,
- Training, helping people develop and grow in spiritual areas.
- Disciple infers follower.  Who are we following?  Being discipled for a specific purpose.

What is mentoring?
- Self discovery, less structured, etc.
- Based on relationship and trust built.
- Often story sharing and situationally-based.

What is coaching?
-  One could have a job coach or a physical trainer to grow in one area.
-  The goal in mind with a coach is to win or achieve a goal, discipleship doesn’t have as clear of an end point.
-  Life coach:  broad subject maters but built around meeting your goals and needs.
- 5 R’s of coaching: Relate, Reflect, Refocus, Resource, Review.

Second, let’s look at the relative motivations of those that coach, mentor, and disciple.  What type of relationship is developed?

Who is discipling?
- More of a teacher.
- An equiper, allowing them to discover.
- Wise person on a hill.  Someone to be followed, watched, learned from.
- Passing on a worldview, wisdom, experience.

- A very selective person who picks wisely.

Who is mentoring?
- Someone who has some experience that benefits the mentee.
- A friendly relationship to process situations and gain outside insight.

Who is coaching?
- A authority or heavy to help achieve some goal (with consequences)
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Finally, what are the intended objectives, assignments, and evaluations for each of these?

Why choose discipleship?
- Based on Spiritual maturity and their ability to pass that on.
- Willingness to experiment and try things.
- A discipler desires to develop Christian maturity into people’s lives that they will reproduce into other’s lives.
Why choose mentoring?
- People who need encouragement in a position or situation
- Giving permission for doing challenging things.
- A mentor desires to increase their impact leveraging their experience and relationships.
Why choose coaching?
- Transition points and changes in life.
- Desire to improve in a specific area of life or ministries.
- Coach would desire improve the overall performance of a group or an individual.

The power of listening is much talked about. Ironic isn’t it. Most of us assume we have sufficient listening skills even if we are able to identify others around us who consistently use their advanced listening skills to improve the environments and groups that surround us. Is it possible to learn how to listen better? Will it improve our lives, our work, and even our faith if we learn how advanced listening skills? Today we explore the sublime of the simple, the complexity in everyday communication.

First off, let’s describe active listening (watch a video description here):
1.  Empathetic Listening: We are trying to understand where the other person is coming from, what they are feeling or being motivated by.  We are striving to deeply understand their verbal communication as connected to their circumstance, background, and emotional condition.

2. Acceptance:  It is critical that we accept what is being said in order to understand the speaker.  This does not mean that we agree with or condone what is being said or even accept it’s truth value.  This does mean that we are postponing judging what is being said for the benifit of maintaining objective listening.  This is very difficult, but will allow us to more completely understand the intent of the speaker.

3. Take Responsibility for Understanding:  If we desire to understand what is being communicated, it will require us to engage in listening activities like paying attention, interrupting to request clarification, watching body language, asking probing questions, and summarizing.  These actions allow the speaker to clarify, to fully articulate, to redefine statements or words, to place emotional emphasis where they desire to draw our attention.

4. Use effective listening techniques:  Eye contact, non-verbal behavior (including positive positions and negative distracting behavior), summarizing, and allowing appropriate non-verbal pauses are all ways to excel as a listener.  These behaviors can be practiced and used in nearly all communication every day.

Now we are ready to tackle advanced active listening skills.

Developing Empathetic Listening:
1.  Asking open ended questions
2. Recalling personal back ground that might effect the current situation
3. Not assuming that you already understand the entire message without a completely understanding someone’s motivations, emotions, etc.
4. Refrain from assigning motivations (they’re mad, tired, etc) until you know for sure.  Also be careful not to dismiss their expressed emotions or motivations.
5. Ask clarifying questions that allow them and you to explore areas that seem unclear.  They might need to talk out an area of their feelings on a topic and you might need to be better understand those feelings or those.
6. Be aware of your body language and how it communicates to them that they are being listened to and that you actually care about their communication.  If you don’t have time to listen, owning it and making arrangements for a better time.  Reinforcing positive gestures and postures.
7. Advanced empathy skills for attending group members only.

Developing Advanced Acceptance:

1.  Visual expressions are critical.  If facial expressions are in line with the content of the message or showing an interest in understanding more then they will open up more.  If facial expressions are letting them know they disapprove or are becoming angry or are shocked then they will tone down or stop the message.
2. Paraphrasing rather than parroting-back helps the communicator modify the interpreted version of their statements to ensure the message is understood.  Simply repeating back what was said does indicate that words were heard, but rephrasing allows the speaker to hear how their words are being processed by the listener.
3.  When emotions are being strongly experienced by the listener, there might be a need to acknowledge those feelings to the speaker while communicating a commitment or desire to work through those in order to really understand what is being said by the speaker.

Taking Responsibility for Understanding:
1. The more important the content of a message, the more the listener will strive to receive the message accurately.  As we take responsibility to really understand others’ messages, they will know their messages are valued and that they are valued.
2.  Team leaders who are growing in listening are going to create environments where people feel their ideas are heard and respected.  Those environments allow people to feel safe enough to share their ideas and also safe enough to support group decisions, even those they disagree with.

The Forum closed with short dance routine performed by guest interpretive dance expert, Leland Venticual.  Thanks for that.

Have you seen it yet? …

Setting goals can be a daunting task.  We sit and imagine what things we feel we should do or might do, but often we don’t discipline ourselves to set goals systematically, and frequently, we don’t set goals that we can accomplish.  One reason we don’t accomplish goals may seem positive.  Because we often don’t systematically think through our goal setting process, we often set goals about issues that are immediately on our mind.  Those often are not the only, or most important, goals we need to accomplish for our job or our life.  As months roll on, we adjust our tasks to the environment of our work or life and accomplish things we had not thought to tackle while setting goals.  The downside of this mode of operation comes in the likely pursuit of the urgent and the tyranny of the noisy.  A second reason we fail to accomplish our goals is that they are impossible to accomplish.  More accurately, they are not a clear target.  Often as we approach the completion of a goal, we are forced to decide whether we are close enough or not. This drains all the pleasure of success out of accomplishment.  Allow me two quick examples.  First, Bob sets a goal for 2009 to work out more.  By May he is running twice a month although he had hoped to be running twice a week.  He’s also using a stationary bike two to three times a month.  He feels like he’s failing.  Second example is Jill.  Jill set a goal for 2009 to read more.  Specifically, Jill plans to read five books from her own bookshelf before her August training classes start. By February 1st she hadn’t read anything, so she selected her first two books.  By May 20th, she was finishing those two, but knew summer would be challenging.  Jill carved out some evening time she had been watching a TV show to increase her reading time, and by August she was well into her sixth book.  She felt accomplished and was voted most well read by her training class peers.

So how do we set better goals?
1.  Better strategery for goal setting.
2. Setting MT or SMART goals.

Our Forum conversation focused mostly on the the second of these two items. We discussed how to create measurable, time-bound goals for things that don’t appear measurable.  Those discussions afforded us exposure to proxies, surveys, and other metrics.

Some web articles related to goal setting:

- Mindtools.com on Goal Setting (with video)
- WikiHow on Goals (not great, but hive-minded)
- A career blog on developing a good mindset before setting goals.
- An interesting PhD dissertation from Standford on the Psychology of goal setting.
Some audio casts to listen to on goal setting from www.managertools.com:

- Setting Annual Goals Part 1
- Setting Annual Goals Part 2
- Setting Annual Goals Part 3