What can we learn from how others see the world? This new column peers through different lenses, exploring how ideas and perspectives might be woven into coaching and mentoring LINDSAY WITTENBERG
Just as children learn by observation, coaches can maximise their learning too – through focus and without judging
It’s lunchtime and I’m watching my nine-month old grandson. A tiny crumb of food falls from the spoon onto the tray of his high chair. He dabs at it, intent on the contact between finger and crumb. He pushes it, and contemplates with intense concentration what’s now on the end of his finger. There seems to be nothing else in his awareness but the finger and the crumb.
Half an hour later, he’s standing at a low coffee table. He reaches for a placemat, pulls it towards himself, and then a little further so that it overhangs the edge of the table. He tips it slowly over the edge, lets it go and watches it fall to the floor. He leans down, picks it up and puts it back on the coffee table. He pulls it towards himself, lets it overhang by the same amount, tips it to exactly the same angle and watches it fall. Again he picks it up, puts it back, pulls it towards the edge of the table… After the mat has fallen for the fifth time, he crawls off, in search of the next experience.
He’s learning by observing with undiluted attention. I realise that at least as significant as what he’s learning is that he’s learning about how he’s learning – what he needs to do and how he needs to be in order to learn. It looks like a pretty effective process. And I’m learning too: about purity of focus and the absence of judgment.
He’s shown me what it’s like to be totally present and intensely aware, to be uncompromisingly curious, to give total attention to what is, not to what ‘should’ be. He’s shown me what ‘maximising learning’ means. There’s no judgment about whether he’s getting it right or wrong, whether the mat ‘should’ or ‘should not’ fall, whether he himself is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
In coaching sessions over the following weeks I focus on my own presence and curiosity. Clients’ feedback reflects both inner peace and resolve as they talk about new levels of awareness and solutions that they experience as energising to challenges that have felt immobilising.
One client, who has come to the first session with very clear transactional objectives for his coaching programme, realises with relief that what is fundamentally troubling him is the search for his calling. Had he addressed his original objectives, he says, he would have missed the essential question that informs his other issues.
Another client joyfully creates her own process for managing conflict in her team by focusing on her awareness and her options, rather than on a prescribed model for conflict management – and reports later that the effect on her team of applying this has been powerful.
This little baby has enriched my coaching, and in turn my clients have been enriched. My coaching relationships seem more connected, and my clients seem to be discovering more meaningful, creative and incisive routes to resolving their challenges.
See also ‘Child’s Play’ by Ian Day, Coaching at Work, vol 4, issue 6 www.coaching-at-work.com/2010/01/14/child’s-play/
Lindsay Wittenberg runs an executive coaching consultancy.
lw@lindsaywittenberg.co.uk
www.lindsaywittenberg.com
Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 4
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