By Liz Hall

The more you push for an “aha moment”, the less likely it is you´ll get one but you can create conditions to make it more likely to happen, said Christian van Nieuwerburgh.

To encourage new thinking in clients, we need to encourage them to “unfocus”, be creative, experience challenge and believe, said Dr van Nieuwerburgh, senior lecturer at the University of East London´s School of Psychology in the United Kingdom.

Research on the brain shows that just before an aha moment the brain goes into an alpha (relaxed) state, then suddenly there is a “gamma spike”, where a constellation of neurons bind together for the first time to create a new neural network pathway. This is the creation of a new idea. So it helps to allow the brain to “be idle” such as going for a walk, said Dr van Nieuwerburgh.

Aha moments tend to involve “connection, increased clarity, positive sensation, excitement and confidence”, said Dr van Nieuwerburgh, drawing from his own experiences and from supervising others. He was speaking at the seventh annual Instructional Coaching conference at Kansas University.

He said it is not enough to have unconditional regard and empathic understanding; we have to demonstrate this. “Sometimes the coachee will say things to challenge that and check…if there was one word that is important to me, it´s relationship.”

Discomfort is an essential part of the coaching process too, he said. “It´s not about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable- part of coaching is about discomfort.”

Being comfortable with silence also helps create the right conditions. “If the coachee answers the question right away, it´s the old thinking, they haven’t had to think about it.”
´
“It´s necessary to do the relationship, discomfort, uncertainty and silence but you also have to encourage new thinking. Don´t accept just one or two options. If you ask about options, the coachee will give you the ones they’ve already thought about and coaching isn´t about old thinking so you need to keep asking, “what else could you do?”

“Coaching is a conversation about learning, self-awareness and change. If the thinking or behaviour hasn´t changed, it´s not coaching.”

Session participants were asked to define an “aha moment”. Here are some of their definitions:
An aha moment is….
“ an empowering shift in thinking.”
“a clearing of the fog”
“a paradigm shift”
“a moment of possibility existing and attainable for the first time”
“liberation”
“the moment of connection between the un-known and the known”

• Hear Daniel Goleman on the aha moment http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZmTY8d9Jy4
• Recent research on the aha moment and the brain http://brainworldmagazine.com/the-aha-moment/