Inside the Mind of a Coach. Part 2
In Part 1, I shared my three core principles for coaching. In Part 2, I describe my sensing, sense-making and acting system - a reason and intuition-informed compass that guides my practice.
In Part 1 of this three-part article series, I shared three principles that have been foundational to my coaching. They’ve provided a scaffold within which every conversation can unfold. In this part, I’ll take on the trickier task of making visible my mental, emotional and intuitive process during an actual coaching conversation. You can find the third and final part here.
I call it a “whole-body sensing, sense-making and action system” because it feels like it involves every part of me, not just my brain, and it feels like an alternation between picking up relevant cues, interpreting them and then choosing my next action as a coach.
The human brain receives around 11 million bits of information/second - gathered by our senses from our surroundings. Out of that massive ocean, the brain only consciously processes about 50 bits of information per second. This means that normally there is A LOT of information left out and a lot of possibly useful information missed. This is a painful reality for coaches as they start their journey and they embark on the difficult ‘learning to stay present’; ‘learning to bracket off the thoughts/judgements in your head’; ‘learning to be curious and follow the client’.
How do you ‘stay present’ exactly? How do you tell apart thoughts that are polluting your attention (such as ‘What will the client think about you"?) and thoughts that are useful and relevant to the conversation (such as “The client has just said the word ‘try’ 5 times in a row - what might that mean?”)? I believe a lot of the work in the first years of coaching goes into maximising our already narrow window of conscious attention. If I can devote most of my 50 conscious bits of available awareness to the client, our conversation and the internal cues that help me orient in that conversation - then I have a better chance of coaching them effectively.
So as a pre-requisite to any coaching conversation, I strive to put my brain in a state of “I am fully here for the next hour”. A few minutes of mindfulness usually do the trick. So does visualising my client and stating clearly in my head the intention for how I want to show up as a coach in the session. Finishing any urgent work beforehand, creating a silent comfortable space, and putting all notifications on silent helps a lot too. I do anything I can to create mental space for this human who is about to trust me with their challenges. On the rare occasions where I have felt sick, or so concerned with something that was taking over all of my attention to the point where none of my usual strategies worked, I’ve preferred to be honest about it and postpone the session. As one client said a long time ago - “rather than giving someone the ‘leftovers’ of you, better give nothing”. I’m curious what are your strategies for clearing the decks? Do share them in the comments!
Once that work of making inner (and outer) space is done and I am truly attuned to the conversation, my sensing - sense-making - acting system kicks in.
What I’m about to describe here is a very personal experience, born out of the unique way my brain works. So I invite you, as you read through this, to consider how your own brain learns and processes information. What unique mental ‘quirks’ do you have, which, similar to mine, might end up helping you in coaching?
Sensing
I am a very visual learner. I can easily conjure up images in my head and those images usually have an emotional tinge to it. So my visual and somatic perceptive systems are very strongly connected. This is why metaphors of all kinds come very easily to me - they are, to me, the best way to turn what often feels like abstract or boring information into a visual, compelling, memorable story.
I also feel emotions (and not just emotions) very intensely and I’ve trained myself to recognise the cues in my body and be able to put words to them easily.
Interestingly, curiosity is one key emotion that I found plays a central role in my coaching. It feels like a forward movement in my body, an intuitive pull towards that which is truly relevant. I let curiosity inform what I choose to do next, every step of the way and strive to stay attuned to this emotion throughout every coaching session. I somehow feel my curiosity is a powerful channel into the inherent wisdom of the coaching process itself. I do believe there is inherent wisdom present in the space between me and my client (when both of us are present and animated by positive intent), which I trust and seek to stay attuned to, through this fascinating emotion called ‘curiosity’.
Auditory processing, on the other hand, is not my strength. I don’t easily remember things I’ve heard unless I connect them into a visual in my head, or a feeling in my body or write them down, which engages my somatic capacities) or, better yet, write and draw some visual connections between different bits of information.
I found that knowing how you best process information is crucial to good coaching. For example, to keep the red thread of a session (from ‘contracting’ to ‘next actions’) you need to remember what the client said and follow the thread of the conversation - to notice contradictions and paradoxes, to bring to the surface beliefs that seem to hide under challenges the client is describing. To do all of that, you need to remember what they said every step of the way!
Someone like me, whose auditory processing is not strong, needs to get a bit creative with remembering. Note-taking in the session doesn’t work for me, because it prevents me from staying fully present and attuned to my client (I know it works a treat for other coaches, which is why you need to test things out till you find an approach that truly works for you and your mental system).
So what I do instead is that I turn the auditory input into images in my mind. I use the metaphor of a tapestry that I imagine I and the client are weaving together. The tapestry always starts with the first thread (I call it ‘the red tread’) and that is the one I focus on finding at the beginning of the conversation. Having clarity on the intention for the coaching (I like the word ‘intention’ better than ‘goal’), then helps me keep track of whether my questions stay in service of that intention throughout, or we’re veering off course.
I often notice how coaches skim over the beginning of a coaching session, conflating the topic the client brings to the session with the goal/intention for the session. To me, the topic is just the entry point. The real red thread is the intention, and that usually takes a bit of time to clarify.
So as the client talks, I picture both of us looking for that thread - the REAL thing we want to accomplish. The thread might have a colour (red is my favourite) or a particular texture. It’s always something I recognise. Once we have that first thread, and the conversation unfolds, I imagine myself holding on to that original thread and then weaving, with the client, new threads around it, creating a tapestry that has consistency and harmony to it.
This metaphor of the tapestry becomes a powerful tool for my sense-making.
Sense-making
If the client starts changing the topic away from the red thread, I almost instantly see my tapestry unravelling, as they seem to start weaving another one. I then know it’s time to check if our original intention has stayed in place, or perhaps it’s time to ‘re-contract’ the session.
If the client says contradictory things, it feels to me like they are holding two loose threads, which both seem important - so I often mirror the contradiction back to them to explore how those threads can find their proper place in our tapestry. This is where practices like polarity mapping, or Immunity to Change might find their way into coaching - they are powerful ways to weave together the paradoxical (but equally important) threads.
If a certain theme keeps popping up - for example, the client keeps repeating a certain word that seems to be holding important meaning for them - I ‘pull out’ that thread and investigate its importance, as it may well prove to be a central element of the tapestry.
I am always looking to weave a coherent tapestry, that feels ‘sturdy’, with no significant ‘holes’ in it and that helps the client put together an understanding of the topic they brought to the coaching, gain new insights and, very importantly, find a path forward that is new and makes sense for them.
Beyond this visual of the tapestry, which plays a big role in my coaching and engages my rational brain in very creative ways, I also stay on the lookout for other cues, which I pick up somatically.
I make it a point to keep a little beam of attention focused inwards when I’m coaching.
I notice subtle shifts in my body. A feeling of constriction, my heart picking up pace, an ‘unease’ or a vague sense that something is ‘off’ - all of these are, to me, cues to slow down the conversation and investigate. These feelings are often in close connection with shifts in the client. Their shoulders slumping, their voice rising, their rhythm of speech picking up and slowing down.
Quite often these small cues turn into a question, which might be as simple as “I am noticing a change in your tone. What is happening to you right now, as you talk about losing control?”. As I say that, I invite the client too in this shared field of awareness, where often they pick up on insights that were bubbling just underneath the surface, unexamined.
I believe that ‘stepping away from the conversation’ and ‘noticing the process’ is a hugely important aspect of sense-making in coaching. HOW we talk is just as important (and often even more revelatory) than WHAT we talk about.
This is why I often invite my clients to pause and notice HOW we are going about the conversation - their feelings, their unconscious movements, and their sense of progress/stagnation in the dialogue. The insights they gain from such moments of witnessing the process versus getting lost in the content often unlock new perspectives and possibilities in a way that merely ‘talking about it’ seldom does.
This becomes the moment when sense-making meets action.
Action
Action in coaching describes several things. It’s the moment-to-moment action of the coach - how I use the cues I’m picking up via my own quirky ‘sensing’ system. It’s also the client’s action - how do they turn the insights they are gaining into meaningful actions that can move them towards what matters to them?
Action for me as a coach, in the moment, implies trusting the cues I’m picking up and letting them turn into my next question, mirroring, or silence. I don’t think about what my next action should be but merely act in the way that feels appropriate in the moment. This helps create a flow that may look seamless and natural from the outside but is in fact honed over many hours of practice.
‘How do you know what question to ask next?’
I don’t, I let the question emerge from my sensing into where we are and my intention to hold on to that first thread I picked at the beginning, which gives us direction and purpose for our tapestry. Of course, that most appropriate question does come from somewhere. It cannot emerge if you don’t already have a background of knowledge to inform your inquiry.
Here, in the ‘action’ phase, is where all the technical coaching know-how accumulated over years of practice - the theories, the models, a solid understanding of human development - come together to inform how what you have sensed can turn into an action that is appropriate for your client, their context and their intention for the session. You might say this is where your ‘horizontal development’ as a coach meets your ‘vertical development’.
A dear coaching mentor of mine used to say:
“Learn all you can, then let go of everything you KNOW and just BE!”
It took me years to understand and embody that.
I’m a huge believer in investing time, effort and resources to get thoroughly trained in your chosen profession. I think filling up your cup of knowledge about your field is crucial, as all that content then informs your intuition and in-the-moment choices. I will write more about continuous learning in Part 3 of this article, where I’ll share some of the practices that have supported my growth as a coach over the years. I will only add here that once you have done your homework and you’ve built a solid foundation of knowledge, the challenge seems to be to keep your full attention on your client, following the threads, sensing into the conversation and trusting that the right words or the right moment of silence will simply pour out of you, without any conscious effort on your part to retrieve any particular ‘right question’ or ‘right statement’ in the moment.
This brings me back to ‘threads’ and the tapestry of meaning I have been describing. This same visual helps inform my actions in several ways.
I picture every move my client or I make in the conversation as a ‘thread’. Every one of the client’s statements (and often their nonverbal cues) are threads. Every one of my questions, reframings, invitations, pauses - are also threads. I always seek to ‘keep the threads tight’ and weave the relevant ones in the tapestry, while relinquishing the ones that belong to a different tapestry (conversation).
In practice, this means that I keep my questions short and mostly open-ended. Beginner coaches often ask multiple questions - that’s like throwing your client several threads - which one should they pick up? I’ve also often seen (and done it myself) coaches explain their question, making it much longer than it should be - that’s like throwing your client a very long and tangled thread that they can’t really unravel and weave easily back into the tapestry you’re co-creating.
It also often happens that the client throws you threads that are hard to weave. They might talk too much - the thread gets long and convoluted and you might need to gently stop them, and summarise (make the tread shorter and easier to manage). They might jump from one topic to another, throwing you multiple threads - that’s when you might want to again gently stop them, sum up the threads you’ve heard and invite them to choose which thread to focus on (always keeping in mind that you hold a ‘red thread’ - which is your client’s intention for the session - so the thread they choose to follow next should be the one that weaves in best with the core red thread). Or it might be that the threads they are exploring are somehow connected, so you can actually weave them into a coherent whole, finding the underlying theme/pattern.
The client might also be on the opposite end of the spectrum - speaking very little - giving you very short and unsubstantial threads to work with. That’s when you might need to ‘pull the tread’ a bit more - asking follow-up questions, inviting them to share more or give more detail. Or they might give you threads that don’t seem to easily fit into the tapestry - speaking in too abstract terms (then you need to ask for examples to make it more concrete) or speaking in too many details (then you might need to ask a ‘chunking-up’ question - ‘what does this all mean to you?’ - to find the core thread connecting all their details).
I could go on and on describing how ‘threading’ informs most of my choices and actions in coaching, but I hope you’re already getting a sense of what this whole realm of ‘action’ looks and feels like for me.
This is the first time I have ever attempted to turn inside out and make visible for others what is a very colourful inner universe. I believe each coach has their own version of this universe.
Some coaches I know have ‘aphantasia’ - they cannot form pictures in their heads. The mechanisms that inform their coaching are completely different (but just as effective) as mine. Some coaches I’ve worked with are neurodivergent - they might have incredibly ingenious mechanisms to work with distraction or to support their time-keeping during a session and also they often are creative in their coaching in ways that amaze me - as you can see in this podcast I recorded with my friend, Dr. Tracy Winter.
I hope my offering of this glimpse into my coaching universe inspires you to consciously reflect on and map out your own. How do you sense, sense-make and act during coaching? What have you learnt from your practice that the rest of us could learn in turn?
This is the end of Part 2 of the series “Inside the Mind of a Coach”. Next week I’ll invite you to Part 3, where I share some of the personal (and professional) practices that have helped me evolve and hone my coaching over the years, but, most importantly, that have helped me grow as a human being alongside with growing as a coach.
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