Listening, Perception and the importance of stillness for coaches

From a series of essays entitled: The Mindflex of the Coach ©Will Thomas 2009

By Will Thomas www.willthomasblog.com

Have you stopped to notice recently what’s going on in your head when you’re having conversations? Coaching, like all forms of mindful support draws on multiple levels of thought processing, as you balance the need to support your client with the need to challenge them. Your own agendas and gremlins can be ‘chuntering’ away in the background. As a novice coach,  some 10 years ago, I was regularly encouraged to “be an observer of both your client and of yourself” by my trainers. But what exactly does being an observer mean? Why is this so important in the coaching process? What does it feel like at the time of being the observer? And how can you cultivate this practice?

Levels of Listening

The Objective Observer position is a viewpoint we assume in our mind, where we are the observer not only of the client but also of ourselves. It is one of three perceptions I call Positions of Appreciation ( PoA).  There are some important reasons why being the Objective Observer is important, and some of them relate to the differing types of listening inherent in high quality coaching.

1. Active Listening
2. Reflexive Listening
3. Intuitive listening

Active Listening is the process of hearing what is actually being said by the client. The words they are choosing, the metaphors they construct and the body language they display. The second type is the so-called Reflexive Listening, and this is the coach’s awareness of their own internal thinking/feelings. This includes the internal dialogue they have about what they are listening to, and the thoughts and judgments which arise in their own self-talk. Reflexive Listening is also about awareness of the feelings and sensations that exist within the coach, as they attend. All of these ‘awarenesses’ are information, but may not be “of the client” in other words, our responses as coaches to a client’s communications are a series of guesses or ‘mind-reads’ created by our own model of reality. What the objective observer position does, is to bear witness to these communications, and still allow us to question their validity. For example, a client who says “It’s just the worst possible situation to be in at the moment”. This follows them telling you about a difficult debt scenario which also has pushed your own “hot buttons”. Whilst it can be useful to imagine being in that situation to understand their emotional and mind-related response, it is not helpful to the client to condone that view, indeed, their moving on from a position of entrenchment is likely to need a perceptual challenge from you, the coach. Therefore being able to move from the PoA of “Others ”offers you the opportunity for “feeling” their concern, to this allows you to appreciate the emotional charge of their situation. This can give you a compassionate edge to your objectivity, as you move to challenge the assumptions inherent in their statement. This challenge might then be couched in terms such as: “I’m curious about your last sentence, could I play devil’s advocate here?…..(gain agreement)…..who says this is the worst possible situation to be in at the moment?”. The shifting of the PoA allows you both to build rapport through trying on their emotional state and responding both in tone, body language and spoken words appropriately, and then move to a rational Objective PoA to challenge an assumption. Of course these moves from one PoA to another are all taking place within your own experience.

Shifting PoA

But how do you shift PoA? Some coaches find that they can find these PoA’s through raising their awareness of subtle shifts in the location of internal dialogue or sensations eg a dialogue may appear to come from a position in the centre of the head, for another, from the throat. Indeed the qualities of the information may also change eg there may be a tonality to a voice heard, or a quality to the pictures that are stimulated in the coach’s mind as a result of the words of the coachee.

The third element of listening that a coach is picking up, is that which is not being said. This is the Intuitive Listening. In this case, the coach is noticing what the client is avoiding, or not saying, or that the client is incongruent about. For example a client who changes the subject each time a question is asked about their relationship with previous bosses, in a session focused on their current problem boss. Alternatively, a client who says “I am so excited about the idea of this promotion”, and yet their body language shows no corresponding shift. This kind of listening is often done differently again, to that described for Active or Reflexive Listening. Coaches may describe a wave-like emergence of these realisations, devoid of logical thought – in other words what they might describe as “hunches”, or intuitions. I would not want to pre-determine or “install” a right way to recognise these hunches as I believe they are quite individual to each coach. Suffice to say, you will begin to notice these even more readily having read this outline.

Key learnings

In summary, what emerges from this article are three Positions of Awareness:

1. Yourself and your own feelings and thoughts (SELF)

2. Putting yourself in other peoples’ shoes or “trying on their patterns” (OTHERS)

3. The “fly-on-the-wall” position of objectivity, enabling coach to have awareness of self and other, and self and other interaction, in other words be able to see how the two are relating. (OBJECTIVE)

As coaches we are therefore expecting a good deal of ourselves in client conversations:

A. Take PoA’s 1,2 and 3 as appropriate in a conversation: SELF, OTHER and OBJECTIVE

B. Consider three levels of listening: REFLEXIVE, ACTIVE, and INTUITIVE

C. Combination of A and B eg REFLEXIVE-OBJECTIVE (being objective about your own self talk ie how am I doing as a coach right now), REFLEXIVE-OTHER (being aware of how my current internal responses to my client’s words might impact on them if I were to voice them), INTUITIVE-OBJECTIVE (weighing up the impact of my hunch about my client and whether this is real or not and whether it is valuable or counter-productive to voice it) and so on.

In the exercises at the end of this article, you will find a grid which invites you to consider the various combinations of PoA and levels of listening. You can use this to inform and analyse your own practice.

So if we are expecting so much of ourselves in the coaching conversation, how can we enhance our awareness and still serve our client? What I have described above, represents a host of potentially valuable information to coach and for the client, however since the perceptions of the coach in response to client are inherently that ie perceptual, there is an argument also that this also represents an impressive level of interference in your coaching process. A curious paradox therefore exists between the wealth of perceptual information available to a coach, and the value of this in choosing when to empathise, hold the space, challenge, interject ideas etc, and the notion that all of that perceptual information is in fact also interfering with the listening process. So how does one balance this paradox?

Stilling the mind

Eckhart Tolle, a highly regarded, secular spiritual teacher, advocates the cultivation of stillness in our lives. He says, in his book “Stillness Speaks”.

“When you lose touch with your inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lost touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world”.

Iw ould argue that this suggests a ‘platform of stillness’ that clears away interference and slows the internal chatter. From my own daily practice of mindfulness meditation, which I have been following now for some ten years (with notable lapses from time to time!), I can attest to the great benefit of quietening the mind, reducing the interferences (after Timothy Galwey) and allowing the simple truth of a situation to emerge. The pace of our lives in the 21^st Century is quite unprecedented. The speed of communication and the sheer volume of stimuli presented to us, moment by moment, probably exceeds that at anytime in human history. Whilst the practice of stilling the mind is something that the ancients have advocated since the dawn of human consciousness, I would argue that with the technological assault on our senses today, it is more than ever before, an essential. As a coach, with the auspicious responsibility we have to serve our clients, I would argue that some form of daily practice of stilling the mind is vital for untying the knots in the ball of wool that is the tangle of client and coach and all that exists within and between them.

Exercises and recommendations:

Consider the following matrix. Along the top of the grid are the three listening levels and down the side of the grid are the three Positions of Awareness. You might like to use the examples in the article to:

1. Build a description of each combination

2. Reflect upon what it means for you as a coach

3. Consider what each combination means for your clients

4. Take the notions of listening and positioning both individually and in combination into coaching sessions, one at a time ( eg one listening level in a session, one combination into another session) and notice the finer distinctions of these eg how did you know it was active listening you were doing at time x?

5. Add to the grid below, how you distinguish in within yourself as a coach, what kind of listening and what kind of Perception of Awareness you are running a t a particular time eg when you are listening intuitively, where does that awareness come from? Maybe it is behind your right ear, or the centre of your chest and so on.

There are not meant to be any “right or wrong” responses to this process, moreover, it is merely meant to heighten your awareness of your coaching practice.

	REFLEXIVE	ACTIVE	INTUITIVE
SELF
OTHER
OBJECTIVE

Recommendations:

1. Stillness and Mindfulness Practice

Consider developing, if you do not already have one, a daily practice involving stilling the mind.

For ideas on establishing a daily practice, see the article: “Stillness and the professional coach”

2. Use the combination grid above to review your coaching practice. Record a coaching session and afterwards record from your recollections of the session, as you play it back the relative use of the different listening levels and the PoA’s.

3. Review your Personal Signals,ie those internal awarenesses that help you recognise the different kinds of listening and PoA’s you are using

4. Having done step three, play about, within your stillness practice and within coaching sessions with choosing more consciously to adopt various combinations of listening and PoA.

5. Share with other coaches their perceptions of listening and PoA so that you can develop awareness through dialogue as well as stillness. You can do this through face to face conversations, email, telephone or blog

References

Galwey, Timothy – The Inner Game of Tennis

Thomas, Will and Smith, Alistair –Coaching Solutions

Tolle, Eckhart -Stillness Speaks