(5) Coaching With Break The Wheel

You won't be on your own

Isn't that great!

• There are other coaches who you can consult or get feedback on, if you wish, over WhatsApp.

• Break The Wheel can gather feedback from youth and share it with you, or step in if required. 

At the same time, please be mindful of all other parties involved. Break The Wheel is the obvious third party—an intermediary and a programme owner for which you'll be coaching under. In fact, there may be a "fourth party", "fifth party" and "sixth party" too! These are Break The Wheel's partner organisation or school, the youth's parent/guardian(s) if the youth is a minor, and Break The Wheel's grantmaker, if the programme is funded. Please respect that every party may have their own requirements and guidelines you need to abide by.

What are the implications?

• In anything that you do, keep in mind the needs of other parties involved, not just your coachee's and yours.

• Together, we need to strike a balance between upholding confidentiality and programme accountability. 

Upholding confidentiality

First, all coaches should be aware of when to break confidentiality—in cases of (i) self-harm, (ii) harm to others, (iii) illegal actions, and (iv) medical emergencies. This is generally the same for school counsellors and other people who work with youth, such as social workers. This isn't about that; it's about sharing details of coaching conversations beyond these 4 situations. 

We all know that confidentiality is important for coaching to work. But if it's 100% confidential, no school or organisation would want to work with us, because they can't assess whether the programme is useful for them to continue allocating resources, time and effort to it. Likewise, no grantmaker would want to fund our programme, because they can't assess whether their grant is put to good use.

At the end of the day, all parties involved share the same goal—to see positive outcomes for youth. How do we strike a balance between confidentiality and accountability?

• We inform youth upfront about the boundaries of confidentiality (and their parent(s), if they're a minor).

• We further mention the specific scope of sharing in the coaching agreement, for youth and parents.

• We share only aggregated and anonymised info, not personal or identifiable info, and on a need-to-know basis (i.e. only what's relevant). 

Finally, we leave it to coaches' discretion on what should or could be shared. Now that you understand where we're coming from, we hope that you'll handle this responsibly. Think about it—what's relevant to share that the other parties would find it useful when deciding whether to continue the programme? Are there any situations where you would pause before sharing or exclude from your update after each session? If so, would excluding the info affect our understanding of the youth's development?

Timeline, and doing your part

Typically, we only start recruiting new coaches and onboarding them when we're likely to have a new programme coming up. If for whatever reason you're not selected (perhaps due to scheduling conflicts arising from programme requirements), it may be a while before there's another opportunity. We seek your patience and understanding.

Frankly, it's not easy for us to get new partner organisations. Coaching is unfamilar to many, and even if they do see the value of it, they may just not have the bandwidth or prioritise it enough. It takes a huge effort to engage others—in some cases, up to a year!

Hence, we'd love it if you could also chip in to do your part in the meantime:

• Please link us up with any nonprofit or school (secondary and above) you know who can refer youth.

• Raise our visibility by following our social media (Break The Wheel Instagram, Ride The Wave Instagram) liking our posts, engaging, commenting, and resharing. Instagram is our preferred channel as it appeals to youth, and organisations and parents do have accounts as well. We also post on LinkedIn and Facebook (BTW, RTW).

• Posting general thoughts on youth coaching (not coachee-specific thoughts) on social media and tagging us.

• Looking out for events such as booth fairs that we can take part in, and helping us out with these events! We do simple self-discovery games and activities at these events.

Other volunteering opportunities

1h "bite-sized" workshops. Recently, potential partner organisations have been more keen to develop programmes that involve small-group workshops in parallel with individualised coaching. The sense is that this may be more suitable for youth because:

• It provides more structure for youth development, where they attend a thematic workshop first, gain some ideas for further self-discovery, and talk to their coach 1-on-1 afterwards to concretise their commitment and action.

• Youth will have opportunities to mingle with coaches and may thus feel more comfortable and confident to proceed with 1-on-1 coaching.

• Youth may also be able to support one another in their personal growth journey through group facilitation sessions, and form accountability buddy partnerships with fellow youth.

Let us know if you have any topics that you'd like to propose for such workshops. We'll support you in curating the workshop.

Lead roles. As a small nonprofit that wants to grow, we need some people to step up further to play bigger roles if they're able to. We would be grateful if you could volunteer either as a programme lead or in your professional capacity e.g. as a finance lead, social media lead, outreach lead, parents liaison, or in projects such as website enhancement.