Coaching is like spreadsheets.

At an advanced level, relative references are more efficient.

Coaching is the process of making people think.

It is important to recognise that once you have successfully triggered somebody's thinking it will, unless you do something to stop it, keep going.

This means that you are coaching them, not just on what you are hearing them say, but at a deeper level on what is going on in their mind.

And because you can't hear that, you do not really know exactly where they are with their thinking on whatever it is you are coaching them on.

I realise this may sound a little strange at first, but it's just like the adjustments you need to make as you move up through levels of leadership in first accepting, then embracing and finally fully leveraging; ambiguity.

You need to get comfortable with the fact that you are playing with something you cannot actually see or hear. This leads you to totally "in the moment" coaching.

So although, in previous articles, I have shown you how to help the person you are coaching articulate clarity on the NOW, clarity on the FUTURE and clarity on what they need from the conversation; all three of these elements could be shifting, changing and developing as the conversation moves forward because you have triggered their thinking; and their subconscious is working on all that stuff.

If you were to repeat the words they used to describe the future; and the thinking on what the future looks like has moved, at the speed of thought, in the subconscious; your question is targeted at the wrong thing, because the target has moved.

The solution to this is to use relative references. If you're familiar with using spreadsheets you will understand this term. You can either use an absolute cell reference in the spreadsheet, which refers to the specific data in a specific cell or you can use a relative reference which allows for change.

So after they have described the future, and precisely what is in the future shifts as their thinking continues, you can talk to the subconscious and refer to whatever data is currently in the cell called Future.

The way you do this is, when they have finished describing the future, to ask "so tell me, in order to achieve THAT, what precisely do you need from this conversation?" The word THAT is the relative reference to whatever data currently sits in the cell called Future.

Recognise that when you coach at this level you should be deliberately talking to their subconscious all the time.

You do not need to keep recapping and playing back what they said.

For example; if the conversation shifted and then you needed to come back and asked them something relating to the future they described; you do not need to give a long winded re-statement of the future.

You can just say to them "Now go back and think about the future as you described it, tell me…" And ask them whatever it was you wanted to.

I suggest listening to some coaching session recordings and either individually, or as group work, analyse the difference when someone is coaching using absolute as opposed to relative references. Notice how much less the coach has to say in the conversation and how much faster the conversation moves when relative references are used.

This article is an extract from TheCoachingApp.

A Profitable Leadership? product. www.thecoachingapp.com