How can we be fully present for our clients when so many coaching models focus on the past – or the future, asks Vivien Whitaker, visiting research fellow, Coaching & Mentoring Research Unit, Sheffield Business School
Being truly present is crucial for effective coaching. Yet many coaching models tend to take us into the past, while goal orientation may draw us precipitately into the future. How can we stay focused in the moment, giving our full attention to our client?
Weick & Sutcliffe have noticed that many people operate mindlessly:
“A tendency towards mindlessness is characterized by a style of mental functioning in which people follow recipes, impose old categories to classify what they see, act with some rigidity, operate on automatic pilot, and mislabel unfamiliar new contexts as familiar old ones. A mindless mental style works to conceal problems that are worsening.” (1)
Suzuki (2) encourages us to develop the opposite – a “don’t know” mind – one that is open to everything, ready for anything. He comments: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
John Groom (3) recognises the need to develop a “beginner’s mind”.
“Most of my coaching time is spent tripping over myself. I can hardly wait to explore the coachee’s issues before I am rushing in to get them ready to set goals, to analyse their lifestyle imbalance, do a cognitive checklist or evaluate their own self-care strategies. I am learning to slow down… Being
fully present to a coachee is no easy task. It requires a high degree of self-awareness, lifestyle balance,
self-care and effective supervision. The rewards are great.”
Present moment awareness
Our challenge as coaches is to recognise and work with what Simon Small (4 ) calls “the tug to the next moment”.
“The problem is that deep inside us, so deep that we are not usually aware of it, our minds experience an ever-present ‘tug to the next moment’. It is so subtle, yet powerfully cuts us off from the beauty of life. The tug can be pleasurable anticipation or dread, but either way it takes our awareness into the illusion of the next moment. We cease to be alive.”
Think about your coaching practice/working life and about when, where and how you engage with and fully enjoy the present moment.
Then identify the activities that encourage you to live in the next moment. Consider when the tug took the form of dread and your mind became preoccupied with fear of what the future might bring. Now remember when the tug became anticipation, and explore the impact it had on your present moment awareness.
Our challenge is not only to be fully present ourselves, but to enable our clients not to be drawn by the tug so the issues in the room can be fully explored.
Recent research by Coaching & Mentoring Research Unit (CMRU) members has shown that students and less experienced coaches find models help structure their coaching.
John Jeffrey (5) offers a framework for gaining penetrative understanding with a client. He outlines five elements:
- Interest – aspiration, eagerness, desire to be involved
- Resolve – absence of doubt, commitment to act on that interest
- Mindfulness – the act of holding one’s attention always in mind; being aware of the bigger context
- Concentration –absence of ambivalence, one-pointed attention
- Wisdom – penetrative insight, seeing deeply into a situation.
Each stage of these models arises from and builds on the former. Jeffrey suggests we use them to check our experience of the present moment.
References
1 K E Weick and K M Sutcliffe, Managing the Unexpected, Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 2001
2 S Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Wetherhill: Boston, 1999
3 D Megginson & D Clutterbuck, Further Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring, Butterworth-Heinemann: Oxford, 2009
4 S Small, From the Bottom of the Pond, O Book, Winchester, UK, 2007
5 D Megginson & V Whitaker, Continuing Professional Development, CIPD: London, 2008
Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 5