Aboodi shabi
In the third in this series of columns to provoke your thinking about coaching practice, Aboodi Shabi examines a well-held tenet of coaching: active listening
I was coaching a woman recently who was telling me how she had stopped caring and had become very cynical about life. She said she wanted to give up her work as a coach. The more she talked about her past, and about how she had “learned not to care”, the sadder I felt, even though she remained impassive and her tone hadn’t changed. Eventually, I told her that listening to her made me want to sob my eyes out. At that, she softened slightly, and began to talk about the pain she had been feeling that she didn’t dare to admit. It was a strong and intense moment between us, and the coaching began to shift.
Afterwards, I reflected on what had happened. I found myself thinking about whose sadness I was feeling. Hers? My own? My attention had definitely moved from being on her to being on me and the reactions I was having. Had I remained “neutral”, I am not sure we would have enabled this shift in our coaching.
This was just one of many experiences I have had to support my curiosity around the concept of active listening. The International Coach Federation defines active listening, one of its core coaching competencies, as the ability to focus completely on what the client is saying and is not saying.
This definition carries the expectation that all of our attention should be on the client and what they are saying. Fair enough, but if all my attention is on my client, what might I miss?
One of the questions I like to explore when I am working with coaches is: “How does the client happen to you?” A coach is not just an observer. We need to be intimately involved in the coaching conversation, immersed in the connection. If we are, then the client will have an impact on us – by what they are saying, and not saying, and by how they are being.
While it is true that our attention needs to be on the client, we also need to be aware of what thoughts, feelings and sensations are happening to us. All of those reactions might serve the coaching, by presencing things that are not explicit in the client’s speech.
If I arrive at a coaching session feeling happy and open, and then I notice that I am starting to feel sad, tense or angry, or that my back is starting to ache, I want to be at least curious about what might be happening with the client that could be causing this. I might be wrong, but it behoves me to listen and to share my curiosity with my client.
We have to bring ourselves into the coaching relationship – our history, experiences, emotionality – otherwise there is no relationship. As Newfield Network founder and president Julio Olalla says, a good (coaching) conversation means changing together.
That raises a new territory for exploration: how do we, as coaches, calibrate and balance our attention between the other and ourselves?
How might we be holding ourselves back from truly connecting with our clients by not immersing ourselves in the connection?
I am reminded of the quote from Jung:
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 3