What Is Evoking Awareness Technique During Coaching Sessions?
One of the most important skills for an ICF coach is the ability to evoke awareness in the client.
Evoking awareness is a skill that every coach should have, and awareness can be evoked by facilitating a conversation between the client and himself while using powerful techniques such as powerful questioning, silence at times, or even metaphors that the clients have used to dance at the moment with them and shed light on their perspective.
The coach must clarify the client’s agenda at the beginning of the coaching session while asking powerful and curious questions to understand what challenges are being faced by the client.
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The coach must begin by understanding where the client’s awareness is in order to effectively partner up with the client to reach the maximum level of evoking awareness.
Most importantly, the coach must be ignorant in the sense that he must enter the coaching session in a complete state of unknowing about the topic even when he is an expert on such a topic.
How Could A Coach Create Awareness During Coaching Sessions?
When hitting the “Reality” in the “GROW Model,” coaches are meant to explore the client’s past experiences in achieving and dealing with their goals. As a result, clients get to reflect on their past experiences and trials when they tried achieving their goals in the past.
They would also reflect on the challenges, pros and cons of every action they took to get closer to their goal.
Therefore, this would create awareness for the client on what worked and what did not work for them.
Also, if a certain action worked, what can they do to ingrain it to get closer to their goal after gaining further awareness?
Therefore, the client would consider what has been most effective and successful from the client’s experience and what has not been when trying to achieve the goal again.
Without breaking the rapport between the coach and the client, coaches must challenge the clients to bring the best out of them. Challenging the client during a coaching session must not be done by personally challenging the client, however, challenging a limiting belief, value, or even an idea that is presented by their way of thinking. When trying to evoke the client’s awareness, the questions must be powerful and challenging.
Those questions would put the client in an inner state of flow which will be demonstrated by their body language and their silence when reminiscing about the question.
The coach should always encourage the client to share more about their experiences in the present along with their hopes and dreams in the future as coaching is a developmental approach, not a corrective approach.
Clients must be encouraged through the art of powerful questioning to explore things beyond their current perspective of life. Such techniques will help the client identify factors that influence the present and future which will evoke awareness about their current situation and their future situation. As the coach has the pilot perspective, he must pay attention to what motivates the client the most and helps him create awareness to indulge more in it. He must have an eye for what enhances the client’s progress and concentrate on it to build up more confidence with the client in himself.