Can you listen to what the client does not say?

Can you really listen to what the client is not saying? I did a quick Google search on “listening to what is not said” and it produced an enormous amount of blog posts by communication consultants, coaches and other people in the human development sphere. The International Coaching Federation also seems to think that it is important for a coach to listen to what the client is not saying. In the updated Core competencies we read:

Listens actively: focusing on what the client is and is not saying to fully understand what is being communicated in the context of the client systems and to support client self-expression.

I have a couple of axes to grind with these statements:

First, I really don't think that we listen in order to understand. Steve de Shazer used to say: “It is impossible to understand, there are only more or less useful misunderstandings.” (Source: my memory of him in workshops). What he was hinting at was the fact that we never really can fully understand what another human being is saying. The whole concept of communication as information transfer is not very helpful in coaching, especially, if it is about understanding the client correctly. It is much more about creating an exploratory space in which coaching client and coach can co-create a preferred reality for the client.

Secondly, “listening to what is not said” opens the gates for the coaches taking their interpretations and perceptions of the situation of the client as more significant and “true” than the client’s perceptions and interpretations. How can the coach know what is not being said without assumptions on what should have been said. Those assumptions may not be correct. An example that comes to mind is a client who is speaking in terms of what they should be doing, and ought to be doing. A coach who is “listening to what is not being said” might assume that the client needs to talk more interms of what they would like to be doing rather in terms of what they should be doing. The coach might say something like: “You're speaking in terms of should. What is it that you want to do?” The coach thereby invites the client to explore what the client wants to do. However, this question comes from an assumption of the coach. Undeniably, the client might be served by thinking about what the client wants to do. However, this impulse of the coach rests on the coach’s assumptions and doesn't come from a spirit of partnering and letting the client decide on whether this is a valuable topic to explore.

So, what sense can we make of this core competency and its definition? The coaches who wrote this definition probably had something useful in mind. What I usually do when I try to translate the texts of associations like the International Coaching Federation and the European Council for Coaching and Mentoring is to imagine myself in the situation that they are describing. I retranslate the abstraction into the situation in which it might occur.

Let's imagine a coach listening to a client the client may be talking a lot about what the client does not want or about what the client is missing from their life. If the coach only listened to what the client was saying without noticing what the client is not saying, the coaching conversation would consist of a giant bitchfest. This is probably not helpful for the client and not very enjoyable for the coach. In this case I can make sense of “listening to what is not said”. In narrative practice this is called “listening to the absent but implicit”. The coach might say something like:?“You seem to be really clear on what you do not want. What does this say about what you do want?” or more partnering: “Would you like to explore what you want instead?” I remember seeing a video of Michael White where he says something like: “Thank you for explaining the situation to me so clearly! Would you like to explain some more, or might I ask you some questions around what you would prefer?”

I prefer the language of “absent but implicit” to the language of “what the client is not saying”. The text of what the client is saying implies something for the coach. That doesn't mean that there is any truth to what is implied. It just means that from the coach's perspective they may be an implication which the coach might check with the client. I don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water and simply say the language of the core competency makes no sense. I think it does make sense when we are taking it with a grain of salt. If you conceptualize communication as co-creation, it becomes much clearer that both people matter to the conversation: their experiences, their backgrounds, the memories of all the conversations that they previously had influence the conversation. This is also why there can never be “an understanding”. Of course, everything will always be slightly different for both people – and this difference can be used creatively. These “misunderstandings” may help in the co-creation of preferred realities for the client.

If you would like to have philosophical discussions like these, practice your active listening or simply hang out with a bunch of cool like-minded coaches please join us for our free meet up and exchange.