Coaching Principle 3: Coaching Creates Awareness

This is the third blog in the series about coaching principles. You can find first two blogs here.

Each profession has its jargon. And you’ll find coaches talk a lot about awareness. So what’s awareness and why is it that important?

Dictionary definition of awareness is ‘knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists.’

In the context of coaching, awareness can be used in different ways. It can mean being aware of feelings when you are making a hard decision. It can mean having a new frame of reference or a distinction. For instance, being aware of political influences inside of an organization.

Of course, clients do not come to coaches to increase awareness. People don’t need awareness. But change is not possible unless you are aware of what you need to change. So in most cases, it’s necessary as a stepping stone to achieve the end goal.

For example, awareness is crucial for building new habits. There are triggers or cues that lead to habitual patterns. Without being aware of them when they come into play it is going to be impossible to break the habitual pattern.

There are different ways people can attain awareness. It can come as a cathartic insight or it can slowly build up leading to a shift in perception. It can come during the coaching session when a client sees the situation from the new perspective or it may be gained by observing different aspects of what’s going on between the sessions.

As an illustration, in Sidney Lumet’s masterpiece 12 Angry Men, we see how Juror 3, brilliantly portrayed by Lee J. Cobb, is pushed to realization by the end of the movie. The movie is set in the jury room and the jurors are deliberating on the case in which a young man is accused of killing his father. Juror 3 is the most adamant about the young’s man guilt but as he goes on and on in his final rant he realizes that this conviction is caused by his poor relationship with his own son. In this dramatic scene, becoming aware of that, he admits sobbingly: ‘Not guilty’.

In this fragment, you can also see how other jurors pause. And by doing that, they allow Juror 3 to express his thoughts more deeply and become more aware of them. Pausing in such a way creates a space where a person is encouraged to think more deeply.

Pausing is the one of the tools which coaches use to help foster awareness. Other tools are asking questions, offering observations, or suggesting a home task that would help build that awareness.

I had a client, let’s call him John, who was remotely leading a support team. He came to me after he started noticing that he became too pushy and abrasive in his communication. He wanted to be more in control over what and how he was saying. And he wanted to be able control his temper during disagreements.

We worked with him for several months. In order to find out how to achieve the change John wanted, he started with focused observations in the conflict situations. When exactly did he become emotional? What kind of thoughts contributed to that process?

As he observed himself, John became more aware of the repeating pattern. First of all, he cared a lot about the results. Sometimes he felt that decision suggested by other people might have bad consequence. And it was necessary for him not to allow such decision to be implemented. The only strategy John had to ‘persuade’ people to implement the solution he considered ‘right’ was for him to become angry and pushy. In terms of behavior, he found out that he doesn’t listen very well. He did almost all the talking in situations where there was a difference of opinions.

Being aware of all that, it was easy for John to come up with actions to remediate the bad behavior. He came up with a few ideas such as don’t talk for more than 5 minutes at a time and ask other people for their opinions when there is a disagreement. So having awareness helped him, firstly, to craft the strategies which were more productive in critical moments and, secondly, be sensitive to know where he needs to apply these new strategies.

Awareness is a critical component of change. Change begins when clients slow down to become aware of what they want to change. And coaching helps to create an environment where it’s possible to slow down and start noticing those details.