In a Coaching Conversation, Activate all Senses

When you consider a coaching conversation, what senses do you anticipate using more than others?

Perhaps hearing and seeing?

Yet all five senses provide insights that enable you to elevate the quality of your interactions.

Hearing

How often do you really pay complete attention to what is being said? To the words being used, the pace of speech, the pauses left, the sentences where the speaker trails off.

There is so much opportunity to be curious about the meaning of what is being said – and the importance of what isn’t being said.

Before the advent of Zoom, I used to enjoy coaching over the phone. It allowed me to listen to everything that was happening. Sighs, the hint of frustration or excitement in the speaker’s voice, the gaps.

There is a wealth of information in how a person expresses themselves – and how they don’t express themselves.

Seeing

What do you notice when observing someone? Their facial expressions, their energy levels, their gestures?

Typically, the senses of hearing and seeing are strongest in people, but which of these two senses is strongest for you? And how does this impact your ability to blend the visual clues with what you are hearing?

I enjoy listening and can be at times distracted by visual observations – precisely because I am a visual person. Can you prep yourself in advance to shield yourself from over-focusing on one sense, at the expense of other sensory data?

Touch

I was discussing a rally biking scene with a colleague recently. ?I noticed who was most likely to win. They were immediately drawn to the dust in the air, the heat of the sun and the lack of a breeze. They wondered at the riders’ ability to breathe in those conditions.

It was an eye opener to me that a scene could evoke such powerful perceptions, reactions and sensations in a person.

Imagine how such insights can support you in more effectively coaching ?someone.

How you can tune into their most powerful sense and use words, similes or metaphors that help them elicit meaningful data from their awareness of how they are physically experiencing a situation.

Smell

When people share, over time, you begin to detect inconsistencies in what they say is important to them and what they do, or how they’ve perceived something in the past and how they perceive it now.

Perhaps you notice something smells off.

It’s not literally a smell. It’s a sense. How can you use that awareness to support the person’s self-leadership?

Smell is a unique and highly impactful sense because our olfactory system is directly connected to the limbic brain – where we process memories and emotions.

If the colleague you’re having a coaching conversation with refers to the sense of smell, given it is directly linked to emotions and memories, you may want to explore further.

By exploring what the smell symbolizes for this, or how it relates to current patterns, and whether these patterns are serving you well, and how you might want to change these patterns, you can help them gain deeper self-awareness and insight into how best they can handle the situation and which constructive steps forward they can take.

Taste

Sometimes people find it hard to describe how they think or feel about themselves, others or a situation. You may be able to help them gain insight by tuning into the lesser explored senses, such as taste.

‘If you were to compare this to a taste or flavour, what would that be?’

You might then explore what that flavour represents to them and how that is connected to what they are experiencing.

Be alert for your colleague or coachee using a taste metaphor: ‘This is a bitter pill to swallow’ or ‘I’d like to taste success with this project’, or ‘That client interaction has left a bad taste in my mouth’.

Metaphors offer rich ground for exploration.

• What does success taste like for you?
• What factors combine to create that taste of success?
• What options exist for you to create that taste of success?’

We tend to rely heavily on our sight and hearing senses, but our others senses are also sending signals. Can we give them some space, tune into the meaning and realize the opportunities in the signals?

Andrea Stone is an Executive Coach and Educator, working with leaders and their teams in global tech-driven organizations to create greater self-defined success, based on a foundation of emotionally intelligent leadership.

? Andrea Stone, Stone Leadership