Conference roundup – British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy Coaching Division inaugural conference, London, 17 June
By Jane Campion
It’s not easy selling silence to coaching buyers amid pressures for ever-greater and faster performance, and when the coach, not the outcome is measured, said Nancy Kline.
However, giving ourselves and our clients the chance to see how brilliantly we can think because of our rich and radiant silence is worth the effort.
Attention is an act of creation – in the presence of our listening and silence, clients can generate everything they need from the session, she said.
“We are assessed as coaches by what we say and not by what our client says. How do we connect the dots, when we know that if a client works right though a complex business issue she had struggled with for six months, it would be great, but if the coach coaches with the generative power of silence, she would fail because she did not speak for 28 minutes?”
Fear may be why we rarely “listen to ignite”.
“I wonder if we are afraid. I wonder if we consider client silence as the end of what they have to say. Do we see silence as the crumbling of our expertise?,” said Kline.
She spoke of trust and how guaranteed attention calms the amygdala, opens the brain’s central limbic system and holds it open by keeping the mind calm.
“It’s not as if we haven’t done this as coaches, but we have done it haphazardly, and closed it again by coming in too soon.
“It seems that the magic, generative nature of silence is a genuine chemical event our clients experience as trust,” Kline said.
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 5