Thursday, October 25, 2007

I know what you did last weekend...

I am of course happy to have passed my Level 1 Coaching Assessment.
Having a nice assessor who was a Scout certainly helped. It was even better when half the class were Scouts and the other half were nice adults.

I kinda screwed up on the first day though, I got nervous and skipped the niceties. I introduced myself, asked where the people were from and went on to start the lesson.
And boy was I sweating buckets!

Missing out major portions of the lesson such as forward paddling and neglecting to brief the participants on the risks involved, I barely survived the first day.
Thank goodness for the briefing by the assessor, Vincent, after the first day.

I was feeling quite pathetic and down the 2nd day, however, it changed when I started injecting humour into my lesson and things started to flow better. Restarting my whole lesson, it ended up being sort of like a 1 day crash course for the participants.
I didnt really bring them far out due to some paddlers who didn't seem confident for a longer journey, but I guess they all enjoyed themselves.

The thing I feel best about is helping one participants overcome if only a little, his phobia of the water. He managed to do his capsize drill! Luckily he was a nice guy and teaching him wasn't very hard to do.
And of course I must thank Vincent for teaching me the incredible trick for helping participants who have difficulty doing the capsize drill. Teaching me even when I was doing my assessment!

Lots of tips and tricks learnt from him. I better write it down somewhere and accumulate them to pass on in future.

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