When Virtual Reality and Coaching meet, or how VR can help to better identify your behaviour under stress ...

I Love Virtual Reality. I also love personal development, and that is the reason why I joined a Coaching Skills training from HEC Executive.

In one of the classes we were introduced to The Process Communication Model? (PCM), which is officially defined as follows :  an innovative tool which enables you to understand, motivate, and communicate effectively with others. [...] Process Communication makes it easy to:

• Simply observe and understand your own behaviour,
• Understand the behaviour of others and know how to communicate with them effectively
• Analyse conflict and miscommunication and know how to find resolution and a return to effective communication.

Going through the personnality inventory questions was really full of insights, but the origin of it left me with an open thinking. It was originally designed by Taibi Kahler, and refined by Dr. Terry McGuire, Lead Psychiatrist for Manned Space Flight at NASA , who was responsible for the selection and placement of astronauts as well as their health, physical and mental.

He used PCM for his last 18 years as the primary psychological instrument to predict distress behaviours of mission astronauts.

Running the an initiative aiming at introducing colleagues and customers to virtual and augmented reality (see previous article ), I had the chance to observe over the last months various reactions to immersive experiences, from riding a roller coaster, defusing a Bomb with the help of remote indications or walking on the thin plank held in the air 60 floor away from the ground ... Connecting the dot, I can say that some people really displayed distress behaviour while facing these VR experiences.

So, for the last session of my coaching class, I have decided to put all my fellow coaches through 2 experiments and see how their reaction are aligned with their ProcessCom profiles.:

1 KEEP TALKING AND NOBODY EXPLODES

This experience is about defusing a bomb, providing that it has to be done as a team : one player is facing the bomb, and the others have a physical manual in their hands to guide the "defuser" through the steps required to defuse it. (more details on the official page : https://keeptalkinggame.com/

What we will observe here is

A) How the "defuser" faces the situation and provides information ( feelings, opinions, perceptions, reactions, bomb setting ... ) => Focusing whether on understanding , the task at hand, his/her own feelings ... or the ticking clock.

B) How the "guides" are able to organize, collaborate and agree to provide the best information to the "defuser" => Focusing again on the factors for understanding , the task at hand, own feelings ... or the ticking clock.

C) How the whole team succeeded in the mission and whether the communication evolved negatively as the countdown comes closer to zero. => In a feedback session, gathering feeling of the experience, and emphasizing the evolution of communication across the 3 rounds

2 RICHIE'S PLANK EXPERIENCE

This experience is about walking on a real physical plank, while wearing a virtual reality headset simulating the very same plank 60 floor high from the ground ... and eventually taking a leap. (more details on the official page : https://toast.gg/)

What we will observe here is

A) How far can the "walker" go ?

B) If he/she jumps, what is his/her reaction when crashing on the floor ?

C) But most importantly, how does he/she feels about this experience, which is highlighting one of the principles we are taught in Coaching class but couldn't really verify : the brain can't realize the difference between reality and imagination - in the present case virtual reality.

This last point was raised from a more philosophical POV by Beatrice Rousset and without spoiling her great post, she was really moved by her VR experience in her own beliefs and models.

Want to know the outcome ? Wait for next post ( coming soon ) ...