Coach as Active Learner

Young Girl in Front of a Window by Suzanne Valadon

As exceptional coaches and facilitators, we are always doing more than merely listening to our clients. We are actively learning with them. We are facilitating their understanding of themselves and their lived process. As exceptional coaches and facilitators, we must make active learning a regular and ongoing part of our own inner work and our work with clients.

What distinguishes learning as active is the process of externalizing it. In order for learning to "take," so to speak, it must be concretized or crystallized in some way. It must be activated. In the simplest terms, it must be spoken or written or drawn or somehow taken out of the mind and put into the world.

Active learning is expressive.

Its reflexive.

Its integrative.

When we are actively learning with clients we are integrating new knowledge about ourselves as coaches while also being right there in real time with the client as he or she starts to integrate new ideas, understandings, and insights. This is a fragile and powerful time in the coaching conversation and it must be tending carefully.

As coaches, exceptional coaches, and facilitators...we must ask the client to stay with the insight, stay with the feeling, stay with the curiosity and perhaps even the numinosity of that moment. We must ask our clients to slow down, hold on, and stay with it.

Clients must learn to approach and stay with the insight through their thinking function, their feeling function, their intuitive function, their sensing function...and importantly, through their somatic function. This is what creates the beginning of integration. Experiencing the insight or learning from many angles and multiplying the neural channels that have experience with it. This creates learning pathways.

It takes the new knowledge or insight from a passing and passive thought or realization to an internalized and multi-modal experience. As coaches we must 1) carefully attune to when clients are having those first inklings of new knowledge and 2) slowly tend to the moment with them, asking them to slow down and experience the thought from the vantage points of thinking, feeling, intuition, sensing, and somatic.

As we do this with clients, we are gaining neural pathways ourselves as coaches. We are learning with the client. There is active learning happening in the session. This is the foundation for the shift in consciousness that happens next.

On life, Life by Charlotte Bronte

LIFE, believe, is not a dream So dark as sages say; Oft a little morning rain Foretells a pleasant day. Sometimes there are clouds of gloom, But these are transient all; If the shower will make the roses bloom, O why lament its fall ?

Rapidly, merrily, Life's sunny hours flit by, Gratefully, cheerily, Enjoy them as they fly !

What though Death at times steps in And calls our Best away ? What though sorrow seems to win, O'er hope, a heavy sway ? Yet hope again elastic springs, Unconquered, though she fell; Still buoyant are her golden wings, Still strong to bear us well. Manfully, fearlessly, The day of trial bear, For gloriously, victoriously, Can courage quell despair !