Listening skills in life coaching practice

Life Coaching

Listening is an integral component to the life coaching process. Coaching is a psychologically and emotionally intimate professional relationship that depends on a strong two-way flow of information. Similar to both counseling and mentoring, coaching involves empowering the client by tuning into client needs, goals, backgrounds, and communication styles. The information flow should ideally remain as unimpeded as possible.

Life coaches need to remain continually aware of their listening skills at any given moment in the coaching process. As Dunbar (2009) points out, many life coaches take for granted that they are already good at listening and forget the pitfalls of poor or passive listening. Listening skills fluctuate and can never take them for granted, especially by a professional life coach (Dunbar 2009). The importance of listening is common sense, but can also be highlighted in empirical research. In fact, evidence-based practice yields valuable tools for life coaches. Some of those tools are proprietary such as the Listening Guide, which is developed specifically for life coaches. The Listening Guide "is a qualitative, relational, voice-centered methodology, which may be used to seriously reflect on the ways in which we listen to our clients, learn from them, and form relationships with them," (Woodcock 2010).

However, the development of effective listening skills that facilitate the coaching process does not depend on proprietary methods. Research does point to several key components of good listening within the coaching context. Listening is only part science; as Bentley (2008) points out, "listening is an art," (p. 51). Because listening is an art, no two coaches will practice listening in exactly the same way. There are certain core skills and resources that all coaches may draw from to improve their ability to listen and apply listening skills to the coaching process. These essential skills include recognizing the difference between listening and hearing; understanding the different levels of listening; and avoiding the worst listening habits.

Listening and hearing are related but distinct processes. Hearing is the basic perception of auditory signals. Listening is the addition of higher-level cognitive functioning to the hearing process. To listen is to naturally include, if not impose, personal experiences, belief systems, biases, judgments, and emotions on heard material. Moreover, Carter-Scott & Stewart (2007) clarify the difference between hearing and listening in terms of attentiveness. "Hearing is passive," whereas "listening can be either passive or active," (Carter-Scott & Stewart 2007). Passive listening and hearing are both inevitable but unproductive parts of the coaching process. No coach is a saint or superhuman, and therefore eventually slips into patterns of passive listening or mere hearing. Coaches who aspire to excellence and who are dedicated to reaching the pinnacle of their profession must learn to leave behind bad habits of passive listening to embrace active listening.

The importance of active listening to the coaching process should be self-evident. Active listening is "extremely important in coaching" because "if you don't know how to actively listen, you will surely miss some critical pieces of information that will affect your ability to respond and support another," (Carter-Scott & Stewart 2007, p. 47). Bentley (2008) frames the concept and practice of active listening in terms of attending to the other. Active listening is an integral part of the process called attending: that is to attend to the client without paying any attention to the inner static or clutter of the untrained mind (Bentley 2008).

By definition, active listening requires effort and training. Listening actively means first being familiar with the various levels of listening and then knowing which level is appropriate at any given time. Banis (2010) lists five levels of listening including listening for the turn to speak; listening for the opportunity to share personal examples or anecdotes to maintain the flow of conversation; listening for when to offer advice; listening to know when to ask for more information; and listening between the lines by using intuition.

Listening levels may also begin with mere hearing. Although "listening is not the same as hearing," it is true that "hearing and listening are different aspects of a similar function," (Carter-Scott & Stewart 2007, p. 47). From the point of turning into raw words and phrases, the listener progresses to the next level of listening: paying attention. Keeping the mind and emotions focused requires practice and is remarkably similar to the process of meditation. In fact, Bentley (2008) claims that, "listening is a form of meditation," in which "the more you practice…the more proficient you become," (p. 51). To pay attention as a part of the listening process, the coach needs the ability and "the freedom to detach…from the constant internal demands of the ego, and focus its powerful beam of awareness on the outside world," (Bentley 2008, p. 51). When with a client, the client is the center of the universe. Phones are off, external distractions are eliminated or kept to a minimum, and the coach endeavors to shut off all internal distractions as well. Thinking about lunch is not conducive to attending to a client.

A further stage of listening involves focusing the mind actively on what the client is saying. The client is not delivering only words but a whole system of values, beliefs, and emotions that empower those words. It is the coach's job to decipher what the client is saying via active listening. This may involve taking notes or butting in at key moments to ask clarifying questions. Otherwise, the coach might mishear a crucial piece of information. Especially when the client's first language is not the same as that of the life coach, clarifying words, phrases, and cultural idioms is a necessary component of the listening process. Foreign accents are not the only possible impediment to good listening; the life coach must also be sensitive to the client's culture and background. The coach needs to pay attention to symbols or situations that are meaningful to the client but not to the coach or vice-versa. Active listening therefore involves appropriate and intelligent processing of the client's information.

Carter-Scott & Stewart (2007) outline the five levels of communication. These five levels include cliched communication, fact-based communication, communication of judgment, communication of feeling, and peak communication. The life coach strives for the final of these five: peak communication. In peak communication, the rapport between life coach and client is unstoppable. This is the stage at which the client and the coach are on the same wavelength, regardless of the superficial differences between the two individuals. Bentley (2008) describes the peak communication experience in terms of Jungian psychology and the Meyers-Briggs personality components of thinking, feeling, perception, and intuition. In what Bentley (2008) calls unitive coaching, the life coach uses a holistic and 'integrative rather than reductive" approach to listening (p. 12). The whole human mind is engaged to the point at which archetypes and symbols can be invoked and used in the coaching process.

Active and effective listening depends on the life coach's recognition of the worst listening habits and how to avoid them. Impediments to listening are the death knell of the coaching process. Just as the life coach must be tuned in and aware of distractions, it is also important to be aware of other pitfalls in the art of listening. Besides the obvious distractions such as environmental cues like phone calls or hunger, the life coach may also be distracted by what the client is saying.

Rehearsing lines or responses while the client is speaking is one of the most common impediments to active listening. It is impossible to listen and plan what to say next at the same time. However, it is difficult to resist planning a response. For this reason, the life coach would do well to absorb as much information as possible by using pen and paper to jot down key points or to repeat back to the client key phrases for clarification. This way, a thorough and thoughtful response can be formulated without breaking the spell of good listening.

Blocking or being closed off to what the client has to say is common when the life coach is uncomfortable with the client's speech. If the client is talking about a subject of which the life coach knows nothing about, for example, the coach might tune out instead of probing deeper, admitting ignorance, and asking key questions. The life coach does not need to be an expert in every field from engineering to fashion design. Instead, the life coach needs to maximize the life potential of engineers and fashion designers who happen also to be clients. The life coach must be honest and upfront with clients, and be willing to learn about subjects that they do not know about to enhance the coaching experience.

Likewise, the life coach should always ben interested in what the client has to say. It is unnecessary to feign interest when every issue has a potential kernel of curiosity embedded within it. For instance, if a client is a tax lawyer and the details of the profession prove incessantly boring to the life coach, the coach can either tune out and therefore not listen; or better yet, can ask about what the day-to-day job of the lax lawyer entails, why he or she became interested in the profession, and what future ambitions in the field might be.

Preconceived notions or biases are signs of poor listening. The life coach cannot project personal values onto the client's words and expect to be listening well. A good listener also does not jump to conclusions or finish the client's sentences. Instead, the life coach erases all preconceived notions and listens with a fresh mind. The life coach also does not interject judgment or opinion, especially when none was solicited. Judgment is one of the greatest obstacles to good communication. As Carter-Scott & Stewart (2007) put it, "judgments are the cancer of interpersonal relationships," (p. 61). The life coach seeks to connect with the client while suspending all judgment. A life coach learns about the client in a state of attentiveness and presence of mind. By emptying the mind and releasing the need to be right or superior, the life coach listens with an open heart. Asking open-ended questions to establish flow with clients, rather than using yes/no questions that close off the client to further talk, promotes good listening and establishes a positive communication flow.