Masterful Coaching as a Creative Practice

As a coach, taking on the coaching role requires us to shift our everyday mindset. Each activity and role we assume daily comes with its own unique mental, psychological, and physical state. What is the optimal state for a coach? Furthermore, what state should a coach aim to cultivate to facilitate masterful coaching?

State

There are a few questions that can help here:

1. In what state are you most present at multiple levels - to a person’s story, explicit and implicit meaning, to their emotions, thinking, values, worldview, etc., and to your subtle intuitions?

2. What is the state when you are most attentive to everything essential and everything that might be related to that indirectly?

3. When are you most relaxed and surrendered to the magic of the moment, what happens, and what is about to occur in almost invisible ways?

4. When are you most creative and trustful to step into what is at the threshold of existence and non-existence?

Partnership

The partnership involves complete transparency and clarity. It is about intentionally establishing the relationship and understanding the type of collaboration required to maximize the value of the conversation between the coach and client. Partnership encompasses not only the collaborative relationship but also the work itself. Effective coaching involves avoiding assumptions and explicitly exploring the client's desires, needs, envisioned outcomes, and the process. A solid contract is the cornerstone of this process, not only the beginning of the coaching work but also an integral part of the entire session. Good coaching entails purposefully inviting the client to continuously decide what is essential and what they want to explore. This is one of the most significant benefits of coaching. The client doesn't just gain ideas and insights but also develops a more profound and more valuable thinking style.

Process

It is emerging and creative. There is a structure that creates the context and holding space in which freedom and creativity emerge. Coaching revolves around the phenomenon of collective intelligence and creativity. The coach's and client's intelligence will mutually inspire each other, leading to the creation of something unexpected. However, the creative process is emergent and cannot be planned, foreseen, or controlled. Insights come into empty spaces, showing up when least expected.

The most important ingredients are good, precise, and profound communication, deep curiosity, and a willingness not to know and let things unfold while still maintaining some control. It's about staying attentive and engaged with the client, allowing the conversation to flow while also guiding it, noticing key details, and encouraging the client to recognize and make connections between different ideas and levels of understanding, both thinking and reflecting on the thinking to make sense of what emerges.

Learning and Development

To learn effectively, we need to engage in a different type of thinking - one that integrates, clarifies, and draws conclusions. During deep thinking, the client may not yet be aware of all the valuable insights, so the coach needs to intentionally encourage the client to step up to a higher level of thinking and reflect on what they have learned. This kind of reflection introduces new perspectives into the conversation. Therefore, frequently allowing the mind to wander and then reflecting on it creates a potent combination of both divergent and convergent thinking.?

Coaching for me involves the specific research and integration of first-, second- and third-person action inquiry with narrative, phenomenological, and grounded theory methodologies. What do these methodologies have in common? We are not trying to prove hypotheses. Instead, we use curiosity, a willingness to discover, and high-quality critical, systemic, and philosophical thinking to explore the client's world. Our goal is to come to valuable insights and conclusions for application. In this sense, masterful coaching is not only artistic but also deeply “scientific,” and its value lies in the unique and timely discoveries and their applications.

Neither art nor science can capture everything in one work, but they are continuous.

"The artful act, the master emerges, when …you pass beyond competence to presence. To do anything artistically, you have to acquire technique, but you create through your technique and not with it."

(Stephen Nachmanovitch)