Coaching World Issue 19: Science of Coaching | Page 24

• What’s truly important to me now
and what is just a distraction?
Useful questions for the coach to
pose as a starting point to identify
triggers include:
• When are you at your most and
least energized and engaged
with your work?
• When do you feel most and least
purposeful in what you are doing?
• When do you feel trapped?
Liberated?

Observation and
Listening

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Coaching World

There are at least five levels or
perspectives of listening, but the
ones that have most relevance in
terms of mindfulness are listening to
understand how you make sense of
what the speaker is saying, listening
to how the speaker makes sense of
what they are saying, and listening
beyond the words or content to
encompass the wider context of
everything, from body language and
voice tone to unseen presences in
the conversation. Listening from
one’s own perspective is mindful
when it leads us to be aware of our
own internal thoughts and emotions.
What unbidden associations or
comparisons am I making? Am I
being truly nonjudgmental? Am
I letting what I think is important
overlay what’s important to the
person I am listening to?
Being mindful of someone else’s
perspective and their attempts to
make meaning helps build greater
awareness, increases empathy
and opens up greater potential
for genuine dialogue. Again, the
client can develop these skills by
allocating time to think and perhaps
introducing a change of environment
(e.g., by taking a walk). They can also
create simple rules to follow, such
as, “Whenever you offer your own

thoughts, ask the other person for
theirs.” Or they can develop their
curiosity (e.g., by asking, “What is the
unique knowledge or perspective
that this person has about the issue
at hand that I don’t have?”)
Observing the wider context
requires all the senses to be
switched on. Mindfulness training
is replete with exercises to develop
this capability. One that is relatively
simple for managers to adopt,
however, is the habit of “choosing
to notice”—deliberately opening
awareness to things that they would
otherwise tune out, exploring the
familiar as if it is new. Asking the
question, “What am I aware of that
I didn’t notice before?” can provoke
valuable insights into both internal
and external contexts.
Some useful questions coaches can
ask include:
• In meetings, when and how do
you create opportunities to step
back mentally and observe?
• What can you do to be still from
time to time?

Intuition and
Reasoning
There are two basic views of
intuition. One is that it comes from
reflection on past experience and
is primarily unconscious, instinctive
learning that allows us to recognize
and react to patterns we don’t have
time or explicit data to process. The
other is that intuition results from
moments of exceptional connection
with another person, where their
brain waves synchronize with ours
and they appear to be thinking the
same thoughts as we are.
There is probably quite a lot of
truth in both of these hypotheses.
Certainly, neuroscience has
confirmed that rational thinking and
decision-making require emotional

input so that we can assign valence to
different choices. Some of the ground
rules for helping someone develop
greater intuitive ability include:
• Help them reflect on how much
they already use intuition (e.g.,
by reviewing how they made
recent, complex decisions).
• Encourage them to test their
intuition, using questions such
as, “Am I sensing that … ?” or
statements like, “I’m feeling that
there is a lot more going on here
than you are acknowledging.”
• Reviewing with them examples
of when they have been
genuinely influenced by intuition
and when they are simply
projecting their own fears or
wishes on someone else.
The more comfortable people
become with accepting,
understanding, using and questioning
their intuition, the less likely they are
to come to hasty or rash decisions.
This is because intuition is no longer
something you react blindly to, but
something you build into the way that
you think consciously.

The Bottom Line
Of course, everything said here
applies equally to coaches
themselves. By developing our
own mindfulness, we become
more aware of ourselves and the
interaction with our clients. When we
model mindfulness, that’s also a way
to help the client learn how to be
more mindful themselves.
© David Clutterbuck 2016