Coaching as a Tool for Improving Leadership Skills participants experiences

 

Day 9th January 💙

The Spanish team travelled to Vilnius arriving late at night. However, that same day we started getting to know Lithuania. I was extremely happy  and surprised because of visiting such snowy and cold region which I am not used to

Day 10th January 💛

Some of us visited the architecture and culture of the capital and spent the day strolling through frozen streets to get to know better the country. At first I was enjoying so much visiting every where that I wanted to continue being a tourist.

Day 11th January 💜

Trakai, the castle and frozen lake was truly outstanding and we really were blissful by having enjoyed the excursion we did to the village. In afternoon, we took the bus to Sirvintos and took one that was no direct so we saw every possible village that there was in the countryside between Sirvintos and Vilnius. Arriving to the guest house, I notices everyone was incredibly social and it kind of seemed that we knew each other even from long before. This gave me great positive vibes that this Erasmus project was undoubtedly much better than the first one I assisted to.

Day 12th-16th January 💜

Journeys were passing and making friends. Enjoying activities was not a direct fact to happen. Every day was better than the day before. Now after finishing the program, every activities that we were doing was starting to make sense. We had to make sure that they trusted each other and wanted to work together in order to get a group.

 

I am willing to participate again. It is not only about the topic you learned but also the great people you got to know. I`m extremely grateful to this organisation and the facilitators for making this experience a great one. I wish to participate in other activities in future. Please continue making people come closer to each other, get to know all Europe and spread knowledge through non-formal education

Helena from Spain

For me, it was the first time that I participated in such program. I didn`t come with high expectations so I wouldn`t be disappointed. I thought I wouldn`t learn anything new. On the contrary, I learned so much that I still haven`t digested. I had the opportunity to meet new people and work with strangers to share my knowledge and introduce myself to the people that I knew only for 2 days. This finally made me feel so good. I loved it. The people in the course was very good and very well prepared. Also as participants, we managed to build a strong team and in the end we became a great big company. I also liked that there were boundaries and we kept learning something everyday.

My plans from now on are to return to my work with more knowledge and for sure when I have the opportunity again, I will participate in a similar program again. I would like to organize a similar seminar in Greece.

Antonis from Greece

I am glad that I had the opportunity to meet people from different countries and I learned about different culture. I liked to learn their traditional dances.

About the training, I can say that I learned new coaching techniques and how a picture could evoke a lot of emotions in a person.

Not everyone can be a good coacher. The people who choose to practice those jobs must have leadership qualities and a lot of experiences.

In this project, I learned new  energizers and games. In the end, I can`t wait to get home and share my experience with others.

Nicoleta from Romania

For this project, my expectation were to meet new friends and create a networking with people.

I really like how the project was designed and developed.

I would like to attend other training courses related to coaching and leadership in order to gain new skills for me job.

I really like all the processes and the participants contribute to develop and unforgettable project.

As a technical worker, I really need soft skills such as coaching g and public speaking

Fabrizio from Italy

Hello, I`m Dominykas and I will tell you my story about those days in Erasmus+ project. It was my first Erasmus+ project and I am very happy that I am here in this project

I came to Lithuania from Latvia on January 10. While I was going to Lithuania, I was thinking about this projects. I like this project because I met new people and became friends with them. I liked the activities such as name gaming and team building.In the first day, I was a little bit stressfull because my English was not so good and I thought that no one would understand me. But after first night I understood that everything was perfect. I liked the activities about leadership. They were quite interesting. Breakfasts, lunches and dinners were always delicious and good. There were great options for vegetarians.

Since I am from Lithuania, everybody in the course was asking questions about my country. One day we went to Vilnius and it was very good. I was guiding some of participants in Vilnius. I was very happy to explain my own Lithuanian history in English. But in the same it was hard, because i had responsibillity to introduce my country and I needed to make our history interesting for them.

 Our traineers were very good, they were not angry, Always I could ask for help. In day we had four sessions. One session took 1h 30 min and after session 30 minutes we had coffee break. So time was perfect. In this project, I learned how to introduce myself to other people. So now it is hard to say goodbye, because i had very good time.

Dominykas from Lithuania

Before the project, I was expecting for the training to be explaining what a coach and what a leader are. Also, I was waiting to learn leadership techniques that I can adapt at work or youth work

During the project, we pointed out what a coach and what a leader was with the workshop.  However, we could kearn more techniqueshow you can be a good leader in a small group or at your working spaces.

I did enjoy spending time with the rest of the group, learning  more about other cultures, sharing experiences and making new friends all over Europe.

Marios from Cyprus

 

My Learning Process

Lithuania 11-17.01.2024 Širvintos 😀

I came to Lithuania to participate in a Erasmus+ projects ‘’Coaching as a tool of Leadership’’. I didn`t really know what to expect but I hoped to learn something new and network with people from all around the world. I was very happy to visit Lithuania since I did exchange year in Vilnius and Klaipedia 2022 so arriving here felt very lovely.

In the first day of the workshop, I was very uncertain about what the goal of this training was but it got clearer when we started working together. I enjoyed working with different card games and discussing coaching and leadership topics with the group! It is always pleasure to meet new people and  new cultures. I loved our cultural evenings where we shared information, foods, drinks and dances from our countries.

It was very interesting to visit local school and have a workshop with them. I would haved hoped to have a bit more time to plan it more specifically, but at the end it worked pretty well and we made a nice team together woth the other participants from the Eramus+ projects.

This project encouraged me to keep doing youth work or getting back to it after having a break for a few years.

My main foccus was in the performing art studies and freelance work, but I am very glad for participating youth work projects related with arts. My passion is in the theatre and music and I think both are great fields when doing youth work.

Thank you for an interesting week! Learning and good times connecting with new people!

Lotta from Finland

I learnt about new team building activities.

I will present the result to my work team.

I expected to meet new people and share my knowledge for Erasmus and coaching.

I like the day that we went to school.

I like the team atmosphere and the knowledge of traineers.

A great experience that I recommed to each one

Anna from Cyprus

The first day of the projects started on 11h January. Before the projects, I was excited to meet new people. We started the activities after first day. Everyone attended events and we played the name game to het to know each other.

Everything was complete and beautiful at every stage of the project. We learned  new things about leadership and coaching every day. We took full advantage of the facilities of the place we stayed.

The best phase of the project was  the school visit. When I go to my country, my goal will be to convey the experiences I have learned.

Hazar from Turkey

Lithuania Process

In the beginning, I expected the project would be under standart. The average age in this training was like 24 or 25. As a 19 year old boy I thought I would be bored all the time. But I saw that this week was one of the best weeks I have lived.

Everything was perfect for me. I thought I knew leadership and coaching enough but after one week, I understood that I didn`t know nothing about this topic.

The best side of this event was that I had so many memories and experiences for my life.  I learned different words from different languages and different cultures. I need to open a paranthesis especially for traineers. They always treatwed me  the best way. They pushed me to do somethings such as participating the events and more. And the most important thins for me was that I learned life experiences from them. Again thanks to traineers for this event. Also Kerem, Gülsüm that were volunteers were amazing. Thanks for all the help

Taha Berk from Turkey

 

Hi, I am Mehmet. Before I came here, I was very exciting. This is my second time in Lithuania and Širvintos. I like this country. Because the people are very kind and friendly. It was very nice  to be with different cultures and get to know them and talk to them.

This time was a bit colder than my first time but I was still happy to have new experiences here.

As for my future plan, I will continue to be open to different cultures and experiences.

Mehmet Zeki from Turkey

 

My Learning Process

I was happy to participate in this project since I am in a leader position in my work. Coaching, however, is something I don`t  know much about. I also love learning in international groups.

The group was diverse in ethnicity, age and experience.  This is mostly a good thing. Maybe to get more professional gain from a project, it would be better to have only professionals (of leading/coaching) participate but sharing experiences, stories will always teach you something.

Spending a week with such diverse personalities also improves your communication skills, language skills and patience.

For me, letting gi of control is difficult, but working in a group you cant control everything. Personally, it is very good for me to let go on a bit, and let others take charge for a change.

I will definitely want to do more projects, both as a participant and a facilitator. I am too old for volunteering, but I would love to create volunteering possibilities for others.

Thank you for a wonderful learning experience.

Anna-Kaisa from Finland 

My Learning Journey

Coming from Budapest, I have expectations that the trainind course was about to coaching, coaching athletes, couching student etc. One thing that I noticed is that my collegues have different background and cultures. This meeting of different minds  is important further success of the course. I have experience as a teacher for 14 years so I let my collegues do the job. I let them speak and understand provided me with another perspective in learning which is working with different people. Although I noticed that different people in the course had something already in their minds. That`s why I didn`t assert my perspective. One thins is that we should be sensitive enough to learn from different people. All in all the learning journey shoul be based on common understanding. I believe participants and facilitators should be mindfull on backgrounds and letting people find space for their ideas and goals.

Airnel from Hungary

 

This is my first Erasmus+ experience so I had different expectations such as learning some stuff about leadership and communication.

I am going to start working in February so I don`t think that that I am going to attend another Erasmus+  project until summer.

The experience was amazing. I learned a lot about leadership and coaching tecniques. I learned how to be more confident and how to make a speech.

I enjoyed the workshop a lot and I enjoyed to work within a team in general.

I met a fantastic group that makes me motivated. The people were interesting and they were from all over the world.

I hope I can attend such projects next year and have an experience like this. Because I think that is useful to break from monotony of our jobs and it is very important to open your mind

Matteo from Italy

It`s my first time in a project like this and also about coaching and I can say that this training course was very useful for me. I learnt a lot about communication skills and coaching so I would like to say ‘’thank you’’ for doing this possible. I also learnt  a lot with collegues.

A lot of activities were very funny for me and some activities were very interesting and sensitive. In this course I thought a lot about my life and personal skills. This course helpmed me to improve my skills.

I know that this course will be useful in my life although I don`t work directly with children but I will do it in my personal life. The activity in the school was a challenge for me. But finally I can say that  it was amazing. I`m very proud of myself and also my team. We were amazing. I learnt a lot. Thank you!

Andrea from Spain

I came by plain in the first day. I wanted to know everyone, where they were from in order to make friends. Everyday we were doing different activities. Some of them was very good and I like them so much. I learned some good coaching tecniques, leadership skills, how to be more confident, how to improve my skills and I really liked the part where we learned about ourselves!

I will definitely come if I have the opportunity again. I really enjoyed the time that I spent here. People were very nice and friendly. We had a lot of things to share to each other. I can say that I`m really sad that we have to leave and who knows? Maybe we will meet again!

Eduard from Romania

Hello,

It was a different experience for me to be together with people from different countries. The knowledge I gained about coaching has helped me a lot. The organization had a very high quality. Being together wih people from different age groups also taught me different perspectives. Overall it was a nice experience. And I liked Lithuania but it is a small and cold place. Thanks for everything.

Eylül from Turkey

 

I came to this new place in the middle of the night on the first day after many hours of travelling from Greece. The next day, I started processing the new environment with the snow. Snowing was a unique experience for me because I am from Greece. I liked the structure, organization and method of implementation in the project a lot. Moreover, the projects gave me the opportunity to speak Englisgh, to meet new people from different cultures, backgrounds. Furthermore, the exciting thing was that even the differences betweenthe personalities and the nationalities wer managed to become not only a large working group, but also friends.

As for the educational part, we learned many different things about coaching and leadership that we may use them in the future. It was important that we exchanged views with whole team on leadership and guidance techniques.

Finally, it was a great experience to participate in this project and the people I met were amazing.

Kind regards, to all of you

Nicolas from Greece

 Before I came here, I had big expectations about the course and about learning everything in just one week, but of course, it is impossible. During the week, I realised that you can reach the same point with non-formal education as formal education but from different way by learning and thinking from yourself, developing eventually all skills a god coach must have and must use. The first day was such an intense day that we could not finish all workshops we did. Even if we started with a simple game  - at least it looked like a simple game-  after minutes of explanation and playing, we could easily find the main purpose of the activity. Every tecniques we had used can be applied to real life, as we saw directly woth our own eyes on the last session in the high school. Coaching, leadership, creativity, empathy and more tools were taught to student, participants, youngsters from 13 to 18 years. Thank to Musninkai high school, we were able to take off the skills everybody, but they even didn`t know it. With the effort and good management, we taught all of them what coaching and leadership were. I can say that they will use those tecniques in their lives and we encourged them to use it in every situation. They just needed some support and help. If they don`t know what to do, they will try to solve the issues with that they have learnt with us thanks to this project.

Samuel from Spain

 

 Even after years of getting various tasks as a leader, I still feel anxiety in these roles. For this reason, I applied to this projects but also I applied this projects because I was looking forwatd to camed back to Lithuania after one and half year.

The training started with self-directed learning about what coaching was and how its was different from teaching, mentoring and leading. After that, we tried out various games that help looking at situations, emotions with a different perspective. These are tools that help us getting out a bit of our repetitive patterns of thinking.

The next stage, we had to dewsign our own session and regulating it. Even though I have a great love for games, I found it was very hard to tolerate people talking, distrunting each other. That`s where other participants experiencce come into picture.

We learned a lot from he project traineers, we learned a lot from ourselves, but the spice of this week is the participants itself. For me the biggest oppurtunity was to observe how other people solve the situations that I have difficulties with.

I go home with new techniques, more educated and most important is to know so many lovely and interesting people.

Eszter from Hungary

 

At the beginning of the training course, I would like to learn some techniques and method to be a good leader in a team. I didn`t have particularly expectations about coaching because I didn`t know what it was.

During two days, we discovered a lot of things about coaching. These are my personal consideration about that:

1.       For my personal experience, I follow psychological path than a coaching path. Because I think that the psychological path goes deeper in the innder side of people and might be more effective to get know ourselves and be a good leader.

2.       I found some art coaching tecniques such as collage of pictures about who you are very useful to help people in group to talk about themselves in a easier and more comfortable way.

In the last days, we focused on team building and leadership tecniques. It was very formative experience manage process of project and implementing activities of non-formal education system to teach something to youngsters in Musninkasi High School. It helps me to build more confidence in myself and improve my public speaking skills. It also helped me to manage my emotions when  some children didn`t want to  involved our activities in the school. As a team, we collaborated to solve the situation.

About the group, I loved to know new people, their stories, their cultures and their languages. Especially thanks to Anna for her positivity and her support.

I think that I will miss all people that I have met here and the people that had participated to this project.

I also want to say special thanks to people who supported me to face complex event in my private life that happened in these days and made me so sad

Barbara from Italy

 

When I first heard about the projects, I was very excited. I had never been in Lithuania before and I was very curious about the country, the people and how was going yo make me feel.

I lost count of projects that I participated but each one of them was unique because of the people that participated and this one was no different.

I was expecting to see every unique characters and colourful presentation of each country that people participated in this projects and exactly thse things happened. It was amazing. I saw some things that I knew about some countries and something that I didn`t. I was like a child who absourbed everything around me.

Also the workshops were really interesnting. I learned that I used coaching almost everything I do. I work a lot with young people so that I managd to learn a lot of thins here through workshops. I am going to apply these tecniques in my work. And this is something that I didn`t expected, but it happened. I`m grateful for that.

Thanks for everything that happened here! I hope to see everyone at some points again!

Roxana from Romania