Coach as Instrument: Where Do I Focus as a Coach?

This Week's Attunement

You once told me
You wanted to find
Yourself in the world -
And I told you to
First apply within,
To discover the world
within you.

You once told me
You wanted to save
The world from all its wars -
And I told you to
First save yourself
From the world,
And all the wars
You put yourself
Through.

APPLY WITHIN by Suzy Kassem

What do you know about where you focus as a coach?

You likely have a pretty good idea. You've been trained on what to pay attention to. You've practiced.

What do you know about where you're not focused?

It's a crazy question, right? If we aren't focused on something, we don't see it. So how do we know what we're missing when we are focusing?

Where We Learn to Focus

As humans, we learn where to focus from our earliest relationships and throughout our lives. As coaches, we learn where to focus in our coach training programs. Some of that we learn consciously and cognitively, and some we learn somatically and implicitly. And the two reinforce each other.

In our earliest relationships, we learn where to place our focus (more inward, toward ourselves, or more outward, towards others) to get our needs met and stay safe. This happens neurologically and implicitly at a time for which we have no memory. Sometimes this focus toward self or other is slight, and sometimes it's significant. And because it's implicit, we tend not to be aware of it. (In fact, we'll tend to believe that what we are focused on is all there is!)

We learn where to focus from our coach training as well. In my experience, a disproportionate focus of coach training is on the client's words, language, and narrative. That is, of course, important. And that narrow focus misses not only the nonverbal information from the client but also the rich supply of energy and information from within us and in the energetic field between the client and us.

Creative, Resourceful, and Whole

A well-known phrase from Co-Active Coaching that's been around the industry for ages is about people (our clients) naturally being "creative, resourceful, and whole." What I've learned after coaching for close to 20 years is that while all of us humans have the capacity for creativity, resourcefulness, and wholeness, we routinely lose our access to it all because the stress of our lives narrows our focus and disconnects us from our creative, resourceful and whole self.

I believe the ultimate aim of any form of coaching is to support our clients in accessing their creativity, resourcefulness, and wholeness. And for us to help our clients do that, we must first do that for ourselves.

Part of our opening our aperture and accessing our own wholeness as coaches is in opening our awareness to ourselves. By noticing where we focus, we can reflect on what might be escaping our focus, lie outside of our awareness and consider the meaning that has for us as coaches and humans.

I hope you'll join Dr. David Drake and me on a journey of noticing and self-awareness in our next series of Finding Ourselves and Our Way Forward.
We'll explore the essential question, "What do I focus on as a coach?" across four sessions starting April 11.

Learn more here and register to join us here.

Until next week,

Alison Whitmire