The I in Awarenesspar Robert McFadden, ACC
Perhaps you’ve encountered a client who, upon hearing the word awareness, pulls the kind of face more expected after swallowing a tin of earthworms. “Ah!” you may have concluded, “maybe my coaching-based appreciation for the concept of awareness is not quite the universal given I imagine!”
And you’d be right. For some, awareness rings with the distinctly hollow narcissism echoing through the “you go girl!/lemons into lemonade!/yes we can!” cheers of pom-pom culture. “How”, these sceptics inquire, “will staring into a mirror get my work done?” For others, awareness reverberates with the caustic yardsticks wielded by family, acquaintances, and teachers bent on evaluating personal worth, competency and effort: “What do you think you’re doing?” “Pay attention!” And then there are those for whom an appeal to awareness comes across as a rosy-cheeked naïveté imploring your placent Dr. Jekyll client to get down and dirty with that Mr. Hyde locked deep in the root cellar.
Awareness is an immensely loaded and variegated term. Even within coaching, its meanings shift. One moment it is a state of attentiveness to multiple sources of information. The next, it’s a condition of interpretive competency catalysing the achievement of agreed-upon results. Scanning through the nine behaviours related to the core competency of creating awareness, I might alternatively interpret awareness as:
- a quality or condition lying beyond immediate apprehension;
- an analogy to understanding and clarity;
- a manifestation of underlying concerns, perceptions, beliefs, and inconsistencies;
- a compendium of new thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, emotions, and moods;
- a carrier of broader perspectives and shifting viewpoints;
- a set of affective behavioural factors, on par with our physiognomy and background;
- a body of useful and meaningful insights;
- an appreciation of major strengths and important goals;
- a means to differentiate between types of issues and behaviours.
This list is but one set of examples as to how awareness might be understood in coaching. Your interpretation may yield completely different results. And a third, simpler version comes by opening the Oxford English Dictionary: “The quality or state of being aware; consciousness.” While the qualities of savvy and cognisance are included in the OED’s definition of aware, so does the word’s original sense: “Watchful, vigilant, cautious, on one's guard”: 10 points to that sceptical client’s gag reflex.
The connection between awareness and vigilance is extremely old news from the perspective of biology. Every living organism - from the simplest bacteria and paramecium through to fungi, invertebrates, and our primate cousins – maintain with us the ability to instantly recognize and respond to changes in our interior and exterior milieus. The difference is that we - along with a handful of other mammals – can consciously recognize and alter our responses to some of the stimuli we encounter. Awareness, biologist Bruce Lipton suggests, is an evolutionary strategy allowing the potential for past experience and anticipated futures to be brought to bear on current behaviours:
“The conscious mind can (…) think forward and backward in time, while the subconscious mind is always operating in the present moment. When the conscious mind is busy daydreaming, creating future plans or reviewing past life experiences, the subconscious mind is always on duty, effectively managing the behaviours required at the moment, without the need of conscious supervision.”
The Biology of Belief (2005), p. 169
The tremendous advantage provided by this facility to construct time-based life stories expands exponentially when we factor in our ability to consciously observe and intervene in subconscious behavioural responses as they are initiated. Lipton joins a host of psychologists – Eric Berne and Dan McAdams, being but two – in drawing attention to our process of integrating life experiences into self-narratives, and the influence these self-narratives exert in shaping the directions and dynamics of our lives, irrespective of our awareness.
So how does this brief foray into the OED and biology - with a twist of psychology - contribute to our understanding of awareness as coaches? The interpretations of awareness I made earlier from the nine behaviours seem to cover the salient points; albeit to varying degrees of abstraction and allusion. This is to the good, given that the core competencies provide us with a guiding framework, not a tome of immutable laws. Nonetheless, I can appreciate how my own aims and methodologies in creating awareness within a coaching relationship might benefit from a more nuanced understanding of awareness; an understanding that will grow and be enriched over time. And I look forward to the conversational follow-up next time my mention of the word awareness sends a client’s eyebrows rocketing to the ceiling; welcoming it as yet another step along the path towards putting the I in awareness.
