Developing Awarenesspar Michel C. Lavoie, PCC
“The coach helps clients to discover for themselves the new thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, emotions, moods, etc. that strengthen their ability to take action and achieve what is important to them.” ICF Competency 8
As coaches, we all have competencies that we favour – and this is one of my preferred competencies. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly apparent to me that coaches must devote more time developing their own awareness if they want to be in a position to help their clients do so as well.
One of the best ways to learn something is to teach or to mentor another individual. I have had the pleasure of acting as a coach leader in a coaching institution as well as having mentored coaches for the past years from the coaching program at ConcordiaUniversity – and am still actively involved in doing so. I have also worked with experienced coaches seeking mentoring and supervision for their ICF certification. My principal contribution, apart from supporting the coach in becoming a better coach by offering reflective questions and feedback during this learning journey, has been to help develop a greater awareness of what is going on consciously and unconsciously during the coaching process.
Why create more awareness? Awareness is a power. It is an ability to observe how we create something and then seeing the consequences as they happen. It is a practice of slowing down thoughts long enough to experience them from a different point of view. With new perspectives, we begin to see what is prohibiting us from moving forward. When we break out of our routine thought, feeling and emotional patterns, we can use our conscious mind to objectively create new pathways forward as well as new choices. It has an amazingly liberating effect. Once the ‘cat is out of the bag’, this new awareness can be used to see that fresh choices are available and new decisions can be made. Action can be taken.
Guiding the client to this unique awareness goes beyond the mechanics and tools of coaching. Because the direct result of more awareness is choice, it enables us to control our lives with confidence. Indeed, awareness creates the choice to be more disciplined, attain better results, to have fewer negative feelings, to act on the things we want in our lives and to experience success.
The truth is that we are unable to act upon what happens outside of our awareness. A lot of things in our lives that we don’t like or want will continue to happen as long as they remain beyond our awareness. We will continue to respond or react in conditioned and unproductive ways. We will enable limiting beliefs, that we have held all our lives, to sabotage us again and again.
Some 3,000 years ago, Socrates the father of self-awareness, stated that “an unexamined life is not worth living”. For coaches to be totally ‘present’ with clients begins with being ‘present’ with themselves. Coaches must learn to observe how their own internal representation system is operating and what it is creating if they want to grow and improve as coaches. We can become more conscious of the unconscious. Many coaches practice techniques such as introspection, mindfulness, visualization, meditation or yoga in order to develop this power. The ability of the coach to observe what is happening in himself as it happens makes what he is creating internally into a choice. In this way we can empower ourselves and our clients to have a ‘say’ about how we want to feel, how we want to behave in given situations, what kind of people to be attracted to or to attract. We can have a ‘say’ in what meanings we want to assign to what happens to us, for instance our beliefs and thoughts about things. This is the opposite of living our lives in a reactive mode unconsciously, on auto-pilot.
I believe that the goal of life is to become more and more aware and to learn where to direct that awareness. It opens up a whole world of possibilities! We can choose to be reactive or proactive. The secret of life is to increase choices and there are few choices available until we create more awareness.
Suggested reading: The Mindful Coach by Douglas Silsbee
