Listening: Using Emotionally Intelligent Self-Management

Self Management

Managing oneself during a coaching or listening session ensures the focus remains on the other person, the speaker or coachee.

Some ongoing self-awareness checks will be required to ensure effective self-management, watch for:

• Signs of your own distraction or reduced focus
• Thinking about your own response, or interrupting the speaker
• Mood or motivation shifts
• Assess your reactions and responses
• What your intuition might be telling you

Here are some self-management suggestions for the coach / listener to consider for an effective listening process:

Poise: preparation and readiness:

• Exhibit empathy, patience, energy, and poise as required
• Manage of your own state, body language etc
• Maintain a calm and confident demeanour
• Adopt a comfortable and open posture
• Create a comfortable and energizing space for the conversation
• Keep your options open
• You may choose to respond in other ways, as appropriate!
• Be strategic with your relationship

Focus and Motivation:

• Keep the focus on the other person
• Stay motivated to help and support their journey
• Minimise disruption, interruption and your interjections

Clarity of Purpose:

• Approach the session with a clear purpose – for the client’s benefit
• Maintain alignment with your purpose for the client
• Enable the speaker to own the insights and outcomes

Be a catalyst for the speaker:

• Be curious– ask questions
• Facilitate catharsis and resourcefulness for the speaker
• Resist being personally affected by the process

Adaptation:

• Be flexible and open, adapt to the speaker’s need
• Match the speaker’s pace and tone
• Mirror or align with their energy and mood

Create effective listening habits:

• Make listening a habit or style
• Maintain privacy and confidentiality
• Show empathy through acknowledgments and responses
• Recognize the benefits of being an effective listener

Gather Intelligence through Listening:

• Use all your available resources, including training, experience, learning
• Use your own emotions, and intuition to give you information
• Remain ‘curious’

Maintain Resilience:

• Retain the capacity to respond effectively and maintain control of the meeting
• Manage your energy, time and comfort, to retain engagement

Be Agile:

• Understand that listening is an interactive and dynamic process
• Be prepared to adapt to new opportunities and insights revealed in the coaching process
  
  

Considerations:

This may seem like a check list, but the point is that to be effective as a coach you should demonstrate the behaviours you seek to pass on to your coachee client. That starts with you as the coach being aware of and able to manage yourself for the benefit of your coachee client.

This is a demanding list and there will be additional items and individual emphasis. Working on some of these challenges – in preparation, before the session, will help to free capacity for the interaction with the coachee in the coaching session itself.

Join the conversation

How important do you think self-awareness and self-management are to you as a coach?