I wrote a short piece for an ex-student about coaching recently. Here’s an extract –
A coach is an expert in personal development and the process of achievement. The client is an expert in their own life, their story, their challenge, or their goal. Or to put that another way the client is an expert in ‘what’, and the coach is an expert in ‘how’. Improving performance in life is about maximising your own potential whilst minimising any interference. Whether that interference is from your own conscious or unconscious mind, or any external factors. A coach helps a client to do this. The core skills possessed by a coach are, listening, questioning, and reframing. Reframing is the ability to look at situations or ideas from a different perspective. It requires flexibility of thinking. Coaches are curious about their clients. This curiosity guides them to ask searching questions, and it is often by considering these questions that clients will create the insights that they have failed to grasp by themselves.
As you can see there are many important skills that a coach needs, not least of which is curiosity. As a coach curiosity helps to drive your questioning. Because your curiosity creates questions in your mind, which you want to find the answers to. When I coach, I want to know –
- What is the situation that the client is in right now.
- How did the client get into this situation.
- What have they been doing about it so far.
- How will they know when they have overcome their current situation.
By seeking the answers to these questions, I create a mental representation in my mind of what is going on with the client. Having done so I can then guide the client to see what they have heretofore not noticed about their situation. By doing this they can find their own way to move forward. Curiosity is not the only driver of questioning, but it is a very important one.
Those of you who have had children will know just how curious they are. When I was young, I felt like I had started reading a novel part way through, and that everyone else seemed to know exactly what was happening in the novel, but I didn’t. Now I realise that most people were just pretending to know what was going on or thought they did, when in reality they had no clue. But it was this sense of wanting to know what was going on on this planet that drove my desire to learn more.
Curiosity is essential in learning. Whenever I buy a book my buying process is largely driven by my curiosity about what I might learn by reading it. Although in the interests of full disclosure I have bought books on subjects I like simply because the book felt nice and had that beautiful new book smell. To get children excited about learning spark their curiosity about what new things they may discover through the learning process. In Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) we assume that the unconscious mind is pre-set to seek more and more. Part of this is the idea that our minds like to seek out patterns and like things to be complete. In NLP we are assuming that our unconscious minds want to discover new information. Like many human skills this will vary from individual to individual. And may sometimes get a little shut down, maybe because of a negative past learning experience. But it is there in us, and activating it is a sure way to learn.
And what about the well-known proverb, ‘Curiosity killed the cat’. Apparently, this dates to the beginning of the 17th century, and featured in a Shakespeare play as “Care killed the cat”. Though the meaning was the same. Here ‘care’ meant worry or sorrow. So, the phrase means, too much investigation isn’t good for you. Sounds to me like someone with something to hide thought that one up. In the age of the internet and smart phones keeping secrets will become harder and harder to do. And our curiosity will keep driving what was heretofore hidden to the surface.
“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.” James Stephens
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