A Coaching Model Created By Razan Jalajel, Career Coach, PALESTINE
G.R.A.S.P. stands for Gaining clarity, Realizations, Awareness, Self-learning, & Personal growth. Working in a high-tech startup can be considered very challenging due to the fast business growth. This often puts employees in a place where they need to work long hours, maximize efficiency, and make quick decisions independently.
For individuals to be productive and focused at work, they need a work environment that acknowledges their efforts and appreciates them. It is also important to have good harmony and team chemistry in which colleagues respect each other. One of the challenges to maintaining this is that people tend to become anxious in stressful events and may have an unpreferable attitude that negatively affects other employees.
Accordingly, I have been using the G.R.A.S.P. model to coach employees to connect with their emotions, appreciate the smallest things in life, be present, and also be empathetic towards their colleagues by gaining clarity, become mindful about their realizations, create awareness, make new learnings about themselves and the experiences, and then personally grow.
The Story Behind GRASP
I have always wondered what is happiness and what can make a human being happy… I did not join ICA looking for additional income or a career, I started my journey because I was curious to learn something new after achieving a senior position in my profession.
After a year of this journey, I stopped for one second and said to myself “I am actually happy”!!! This thought was key for me to discover full enthusiasm and excitement to uncover this new secret that led to my satisfaction and acceptance of life and its present. In summary, it is all about the small and simple things that life offers, it is about being present in the moment and focus on living it rather than overthinking what the future will bring or overkill myself with regret over mistakes I made in the past.
Living in a place with tension and political instability, being surrounded by friends who are not happy nor satisfied with their jobs or life choices, and the need for me to professionally coach and support more than a hundred colleagues has led me to start thinking about a model that will help people who seek me find a new taste of life that comes from the heart and touches the mind.
About the Model GRASP
GRASP stands for Gaining clarity, Realizations, Awareness, Self-learning, & Personal growth. These words represent the flow of this coaching model and it intends to equip coachees with some new techniques and perspectives to overcome their challenges and achieve personal growth in return.
The GRASP coaching model is specially designed to assist millennials with feeling less stressed about their routine in daily life, to appreciate and enjoy their life journey. This model will help keep thoughts simple and clarify challenges, which is seen as a blocker for moving forward and maintaining motivation to achieve the desired outcome.
Gain Clarity:
Clarity comes from opening a space for clients to talk about their issues. People tend to talk more than they listen. It is rare for individuals to find another really curious person and is eager to be fully present. This is key for opening up and elaborating further on the issue. A coach asks powerful open-ended questions to support their clients in gaining more clarity on the core issue rather than overthinking and as a result overcomplicate the matter. This will require room for improving emotional intelligence by being conscious and present with the client, creating a space of openness and empathy, observing, challenging the client with these observations, checking on emotions and feelings, and allowing room for silence for further thinking and reflection.
Realizations:
After gaining clarity this opens room for becoming mindful about some realizations and connections that will support the client in understanding their inner believes and values that may be the cause of their challenges. The power of realization is the AHA moment the client has or the thought that comes after they start realizing how their mind works. This is the time of discovery and excitement for my clients.
Awareness:
This is where this coaching model starts to put words to the realization and glue it to the mind as a new self-awareness that enables the client to be thrilled with the power of their mind and how they can use it to enhance their potential and find their passion, see it as the truth that sends them free, become masters of their assumptions, have a clearer picture of what and where they want to be now or in the future. This will help clients focus on what matters and enables them to think of new opportunities. Define where they wish to focus their energy and what they want to achieve rather than being distracted with irrelevant thoughts. This brings a sense of peace and calms to the body and the mind.
Self-Learning:
This is an excellent method for reflection to gather what came up from a specific situation, and how the client dealt with it. This opens room for gathering more knowledge, lessons learned from it, and in return, this will enable clients to learn about themselves and filter what they want to carry along the road and what they want to drop out of their shoulders.
Self-Development:
This process of gaining clarity, realization, awareness, and self-learning is key for clients to go towards their personal development. This is a lifelong process that requires baby steps in assessing skills and qualities that they want to aim for while setting the goals they want to achieve in life to achieve their maximum potential.
GRASP is a model that enables clients to repeat every time they feel stuck or not in control:
- Overcome limitations that come from within;
- Reduce overthinking and be present in the moment;
- Reduces stress and fear;
- Move forward and focus on passions;
- Take full responsibility for their actions;
- Stay motivated and engaged.