What it means to look
Subject, object, art. Image by Mauro Lima on Unsplash.
We learn from the art, not the artist
When I did my first coach training five years ago, we spent most of our time practicing short coaching sessions, peer-to-peer.
In these conversations, we took turns pretending to be coaches, with no real idea of what that looked like, from either chair. Master Coach Claire Pedrick has generously referred to this as a “shared not knowing”. I call it bad practice (or perhaps even mal-practice?).
No matter what you call it, I missed out on the crucial learnings you get from watching a professional demonstrate their craft.
This learning gap is surprisingly common
Thankfully, I have seen many professional coaching sessions since. I gain something new and valuable each time.
In a recent group mentor coaching session with Claire, we had an opportunity to watch her coach one of us.
We were invited to focus our attention on the person being coached (the “thinker”) and NOT on Claire. This is both counterintuitive and somewhat challenging.
In a learning environment, you would expect to focus on the “teacher” and what they are doing and saying. But that’s not where the learning is.
The real teachings are found by watching the thinker and the impact that the coaching is having on them. Yet my tendency is to want to focus on the coach doing the coaching.
What questions did they ask?
How did they phrase them?
What does their setup look like and should I be changing mine to match?
What is their body language like?
We’re trying to learn from masters, right?
None of that matters as much as being able to notice the impact we’re making. The skill of sensing. And then responding.
What I noticed when I shifted my focus
First, I switched to speaker view in Zoom and pinned the thinker’s face, so that I wouldn’t be as tempted to watch Claire.
It was a short session, a perfect amount of time to practice refocusing my attention; a mini-meditation on listening.
At one point, Claire invited the thinker to stand up as they discussed things. This made sense in their context.
Instead of the face, I was listening to a whole body. One that was slowly drifting off camera. Now just hands. The thinking was only observable to me through the ends of two limbs. Or was it?
That changed, too. Now only a sliver of the body was in the frame, just moving a bit in contrast to the opposing wall.
I shifted my attention to the space and how the thinker was positioned in it. My focus narrowed also to the voice. I could hear them smiling as the session drew to a close.
When looking and listening are the same
What I had just witnessed was a 10-minute masterclass in noticing. This was worth more than the dozens of hours I spent circling in shared not-knowing with my peers. And yet, here I was again with peers. But this time, the simple invitation to look made all the difference.
I’m left with this thought on what it really means to ‘look’. It is a verb that is multi-modal — looking involves not only seeing, but also noticing and sensing.
To truly look is to do so with the eyes, but also the ears (to hear a smile). It also includes those hidden senses, such as proprioception (how we are situated in space) and interoception (what goes on inside us as we experience things).
Claire’s thinker taught me that if we can think with our whole body, we can look, notice, and learn with it, too. That kind of presence is the practice.
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