Deep and active listening as a coaching skill

Many of the people I have had a coaching partnership with so far are my acquaintances and friends whom I knew before. What does it mean to receive coaching from or coach someone you have known before?

The coach that I mean here is a "life coach" and is different from a sports coach or a health coach who directly transfers specific knowledge or teaches skills to their clients.

There is undoubtedly knowledge and skills necessary for life coaching, and we learn them through coach training. We do not pass on that knowledge and skills to our clients through coaching sessions. Rather, we use this knowledge and skills as a tool for coaching conversations. A genuine coaching conversation is not possible, in my view, without that knowledge and skills.

Deep and active listening skill is one of the critical coaching skills, of which I have deeply felt the importance recently. You may think that just a close friend or family can listen to you deeply and actively. However, in our busy lives, we rarely experience being listened to by someone, without any interruption or reactions from the listener who says, "I don't agree, because...".

One of my clients recently expressed, after their first coaching conversation, "it is so refreshing; I've realised I haven't really had the chance to speak about just me and my feelings at length like today. I am always busy with my kids." That was when I also realised, as their coach, the importance of deep and active listening as a coaching skill.

My coach training taught me that the appropriate ratio of talking times between the coach and client in a coaching conversation is about 2:8. I was surprised when I heard that during the training, thinking, "really? Then is the coach spending most of the time just listening?". But I can appreciate that wisdom now.

Listening deeply to the client without reacting to them with the coach's own ideas and opinions is a profoundly important skill. Why not react? It is because expressing the coach's opinions could mean that she judges what the client has just said, even indirectly. A coach does acknowledge what the client says, but it is different from reacting to it with opinions. What a coach does during that 20% of the coaching conversation time is primarily to ask the client "empowering" questions. It is another important coaching skill.

Now, let's return to the topic I wrote about at the beginning, on being coached by or coaching someone you know. As long as the conversation is conducted by a coach who makes the best use of these coaching skills mentioned above, would not it matter, I wonder, if the client is a friend, an acquaintance, or someone I didn't know at all before?

I have recently been reminded, vividly, of the concept of "a higher coach", which I also learned during the coach training. A higher coach is our instinctual voice in ourselves. If we listen to the voice, it will guide us with wisdom and empower us with unlimited potential. During coaching conversations with clients, I felt as if my higher coach was talking through my physical body and presence, making full use of coaching skills such as deep and active listening and empowering questions.

The role of a coach is to help the client access their own higher coach through the coach's own higher coach.

I have been explaining to my clients as well as to myself, "Yes, we have known each other before. But don't worry, I'll take off my hat as a friend and put the hat as a coach." It has been making more and more sense to me these days.