Listening: Using Emotionally Intelligent Social-Awareness

In this series I am using emotional intelligence to explore how to further enhance the coach’s listening skills.

In this article I explore social-awareness, one of the key elements of emotional intelligence and the essence of the interaction between the coachee and the coach. It further extends the idea of listening beyond just hearing words.

Listening and Social-Awareness

Hearing is not the only ‘sense’ that the coach has available for use when listening. Effective listening is more than just ‘hearing’ what is said.

Effective listening might for example require you as the coach/listener to:

• give the coachee/speaker indications that you are paying attention – by making ‘listening noises’
• indicate that you want to know more by a nod of your head
• offer a facial expression confirming that you are seeking to fully understand what the speaker is trying to communicate
  
  

Defining Social-Awareness

In emotional intelligence, social-awareness is the ability to be aware of, observe, sense, identify and understand the behaviours and feeling of others – to be aware of others.

Social-awareness skills significantly enhanced the effectiveness of the coach’s broader listening capability and build upon the EI foundations of self-awareness and self-management.

Two-way, multi-channel communication

Social-awareness requires the coach to be aware of communication flows, from multiple sources and across several channels.

Consider some of the communication 'channels' that could be used by the coachee:

• Words, language and expression
• Silence, loudness and tone of voice
• Facial expressions, body language and movement
• Energy, presence and proximity
• Emotion, attitude and mood
• Dress, personal presentation

To manage their availability to the coachee, the coach’s foundational skills of self-awareness and self-management should support their social-awareness.

As a coach, I am aware of and manage myself whilst maximising my focus on the coachee. There are many times when I sense being ‘in flow’ during a coaching session. At such moments I am fully engaged, focused upon the coachee, I am unaware of almost anything else happening around me, except the conversation and exchange with the coachee.

Intuition

This is potentially a sensitive area but I suggest that intuition is a profound and invaluable assistant to the coach / listener. 

Like emotional intelligence, intuition is multifaceted, it is perhaps:

• partly wisdom and life experience
• partly sensitivity, awareness and observation
• partly a set of thoughts, collated subconsciously from all our senses and knowledge
• partly an emotion, a movement, initiative or drive toward activity

Intuition might be called a sixth sense, an instinct or a feeling. There are countless examples throughout diverse professional career stories of skilled, experienced and ‘wise’ practitioners ‘knowing’ something before the factual, scientific evidence is available.

We rely upon science, logic and evidence in our decision making. Listening to our intuition gives us information from our senses, experience and instincts and it works more quickly than our conscious thoughts. It might be due to our senses, being tuned to threats to our survival, creating ‘emotional’ responses before our intellect and cognition are aware.

The Value of Intuition in Social-Awareness

The value of intuition is that it can cut into our conscious behaviour and thinking, telling us that something requires further attention. But we must be aware of it and it is easy to ignore.

In the context of executive coaching and deploying our emotionally intelligent social awareness, ‘listening’ to our intuition is a potentially significant enhancement of our coaching capability.

I have learned to use and selectively rely upon my intuition, indeed I may choose to deliberately share my intuitive responses in the coaching conversation. I have personal, powerful and confidence-building examples where my intuition has given me the crucial insight in complex coaching conversations.

An ‘Artificial Intelligence’ metaphor for Intuition

Intuition isn’t ‘fool-proof’, it can make mistakes, but it is nevertheless a worthwhile resource.

Perhaps a comparison with Artificial intelligence (AI) provides us with the metaphor of the moment to explore intuition. At the time of writing, AI is evolving rapidly. Like intuition, AI is monitoring and collating vast amounts of intelligence and communication in the background. It then saves time by providing summarised actionable information at pace. As with AI, intuition can be highly effective and informative but further judgement may be required!

In the coaching situation where social awareness and focused concentration are required, our intuition is a source to be listened to, the volume of information, the emotions, complexity and consequences create a potentially overwhelming flow. Intuition might be the useful ‘AI-like’ tool able to identify the essential social-awareness insight at pace.

Summary

We see that emotionally intelligent social-awareness recognises that there is a two-way flow of information between the coach and coachee. This substantial flow involves all our senses, is complex and subtle. Skilled and conscious use of mature intuition by the coach can further enhanced interpretation of the information flows for the coachee’s benefit.

Join the conversation

• How would you describe 'intuition'?
• Do you trust your intuition?
• Do you use intuition, how much do you rely upon it?