Coach As Instrument: Do We Really Need to Know?

This Week's Attunement 

"Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." 
— Miles Kington

What do we need to know as a coach?  

Your answer to that question may depend on the type of coaching you do or how you define coaching. And to me, there’s no “wrong” answer.  

It’s ok for us to coach for different purposes and to define coaching differently. And regardless of the type of coaching we do or, how we define it, there’s value in considering the question.

Most of us coaches think we need to know a lot more than we actually do. Or said in a different way, we think we need to know differently than we actually do.

What does that mean?

Let’s start with a different question altogether. How do we know?

This question of “how do we know” was researched by John Heron and Peter Reason.  Together they created a theory called extended epistemology (it sounds more complicated than it is) to call attention to and legitimate the ways in which we humans come “to know” beyond our thinking minds.

They came up with four ways of knowing:

1. Propositional knowing — This is what most of us think of when it comes to “knowing” something.  Propositional knowing is the intellectual knowing of ideas and theories.   It is knowing “about” something or someone. 
2. Practical knowing — This is knowing how to do something. Its product is a skill, knack, or competence—interpersonal, manual, political, technical, transpersonal, and more—supported by a community of practice. 

3. Experiential knowing — This is knowing by being present with and having a direct experience of people, places, and things. It is knowing through the immediacy of perceiving, empathy, and resonance. Its product is the quality of the relationship in which it participates, including the quality of being of those in the relationship. 

4. Presentational knowing — This kind of knowing emerges from the encounters with experiential knowing by intuiting significant form and process in that which is met. Its product reveals this significance through the expressive imagery of movement, dance, music, art, poetry, and story. (in other words, any form of artistic expression).

Much of our coach training focuses on Propositional and Practical knowing — knowing ABOUT something and applying that knowledge in practice. (And that is important, for sure.)  And we can tend to focus on those means of knowing in our coaching.

We tend to think that we need to know ABOUT what our clients bring to coaching. That we need to understand what they are talking about, the facts of the situation, the context, who’s involved, and how so that we can then DO something with it. Or figure something out about it.

Consider that perhaps we don’t need any of that.

In my first coach training with Fran Fisher, we did an exercise in which there were three coach/client conversations going on in the room at the same time. And when a bell would ring, the coach would leave the coaching conversation they were in, move to one of the other clients in the room and forward the coaching from there without backtracking. They could do that and could do it effectively because they didn’t need to know anything the client had said.  

The most important knowing for us as coaches is the experiential knowing that comes from our being present in the moment with our clients. 

Our presentational knowing then shows up in how we work in the field of energy between the client and ourselves. 

So, what do we need to know as coaches? And how do we know that?

We need to have experiential knowledge of the present moment experience of the client, the field, ourselves, and the client’s story. It’s this experiential knowing that allows us to detect what’s wanting to emerge for the client and use our presentational knowing to midwife the moment with our clients. 

Of course, this “says easy and does hard.”  And WHAT a worthwhile pursuit. To be fully present with our client’s experience, our own experience, the field, and what’s wanting to emerge. I believe that this is what the Universe wants us as coaches to do. To experience it.  

As instruments of something greater than ourselves, our work is not to know ABOUT. Our work is to know WITH the world.