Building a Global Learning Community

By Bev Weise, Co-founder & Executive Director

One of the values we espouse at Refugee JumpStart Coaching (RJS) is the value of becoming a Global Learning Community: “Valuing continuous learning and professional development for coaches and clients alike, providing opportunities to learn from, and enrich one another”.

Today was an inspiring example of how we are truly living our values! There were 29 RJS coaches on our monthly Zoom Coaching Connection Call meeting, from countries as diverse as the US, Bulgaria, Canada, Nigeria, Belgium, South Africa, UK, Brazil, Portugal and more! We learned from former Syrian refugee and RJS co-founder, Hussein Alzribi, as he reflected on common mindsets of refugees, based on their challenging journeys and circumstances.

Understanding Refugee Mindsets

Mindsets that included: A Victim Mentality; Power Dynamic Perception; Survival Mode; Learned Helplessness; Identify Crisis; Dependency on External Validation, Isolation and Withdrawal, and a Distrust of Systems and Authorities.

He described these mindsets and the impact it sometimes had on him, personally, and on his fellow refugee friends. Coaches then interacted in small breakout rooms to share ways in which they could identify unempowering mindsets of their refugee clients and what transformative coaching strategies could help move them to more empowering mindsets—encouraging them to take charge of their lives.

Energy, Learning, and Collaboration

The energy in the “room” was palpable, the learning, substantial. The ideas were creative and the collaboration, inspiring. We were living our values of being a “Global Learning Community”. We learned important lessons from a refugee with lived experience, who openly reflected on his own earlier mindset challenges he needed to overcome. Coaches learned from one another—sharing their experience and wisdom in what it means to be a transformative coach.

It’s one of the ways this organization is so very special. We enrich and learn from one another—Coaches and refugees alike.