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I never intended to complete a Master’s degree. In fact, I was determined not to. After the gruelling experience of writing a dissertation while working full time more than thirty years earlier, I had promised myself there would never be another one.

At the same time, I was very keen to undertake academic study for the sheer pleasure of it. I’d recently retired from working full time, I had qualified as a professional coach a few years before and wanted to dig deeper on the benefits of coaching.

¹û¶³´«Ã½ University wasn’t the only university I considered but I was attracted to its blend of academic study and practical experience. And so, I enrolled and embarked on the 2-year Diploma in Coaching.

I loved it. I really enjoyed the workshops, meeting new people and whilst the assignments weren’t easy undertaking them did reveal the understanding I was looking for whilst at the same time developing my coaching skills.

As I worked through my second year my resistance to doing a dissertation started to soften. I started to think that it may be quite refreshing to do a deep dive into a subject I was interested in without the pressures of fitting it in around work. Initially I thought that subject may be along the lines of wellness coaching, but I found myself increasingly being interested in the ripple effect of coaching.

By the end of my second year, I’d signed up to complete the MA.

I was a coach on a leadership programme in Wales commissioned by The Royal College of Midwives and Welsh Government for midwives and maternity support workers. I was interested as to whether the coaching the participants received rippled out to the benefit of their colleagues and the women and families they care for. Conducting my research with a cohort of successful participants of the programme was a unique opportunity.

One significant difference between this dissertation and the one I had undertaken decades before was the rigorous process of ethical approval. It was practically non existent before but this time it was a little overwhelming. However, working through the process and dealing with the issues that need to be considered, hold you in good stead once you get the green line to proceed.

An important change which evolved was to pursue action reasearch. This meant that once I had my initial findings, I would identify actions that could enhance and strengthen the ripple if it existed. This sounded really exciting and offered the opportunity to develop the leadership programme I coached on.

However, shortly after receiving ethical approval I experienced a relapse of Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition. My energy disappeared, my concentration deteriorated and studying became impossible. Taking a temporary withdrawal felt like failure at the time, although it was absolutely the right decision.

A year passed, I fully recovered but the thought of writing 15,000 words was daunting. So, I applied for permanent withdrawal. At this stage my personal tutor offered a meeting to talk over my decision. At the same time, I read a LinkedIn post written by my course tutor on the ripple effect of coaching. My interest was reignited. Within a few days I’d withdrawn the permanent withdrawal and returned to complete my dissertation.

And I loved it. The interviews with the participants, the process of thematic analysis, discovering patterns in the data, identifying actions, sharing my findings with the programme commissioners and seeing my findings resonate with the participants. It felt as if I was producing a piece of work of value.

There were, of course, times when I felt a little overwhelmed particularly as the submission date approached. The challenge of keeping within the word count, ensuring the references were all correct and the appendices were in the correct format. But throughout the process I never felt I was working alone. My supervisor’s guidance and the Collective Academic Supervision (CAS) sessions challenged my thinking, provided reassurance when I doubted myself and kept me moving forward. I got to the submission date and pressed the Submit button. A few weeks later I’m the proud recipient of a MA with Distinction in Coaching.

The distinction matters, of course, but what mattered even more was discovering that research can make a genuine contribution to practice. My dissertation didn’t simply answer a question about coaching; it has, hopefully, already influenced conversations about the future development of the leadership programme I studied. For me, that is what postgraduate study should be about.