Claire writes: “There was a conversation on Twitter this week about whether to take notes in coaching conversations.  This is a controversial topic. I ask myself what are notes for? Lots of disciplines take notes – the therapist, the doctor, the financial advisor. And coaching isn’t any of those.  Personally I don’t take notes – unless it’s one word on a tiny post-it note that goes into the bin at the end of the conversation. Writing and reading notes also means that you move your attention from watching the thinker think. Watching video recordings of conversations you can see how much gets missed when the coach is looking away… the thinker moves forward and the coach didn’t notice. (In a series of conversations I do make brief notes of the big agreement at the beginning of the work)

Today I was watching a recording with a coach. When we started talking, she said that she was interested that they didn’t really get to explore feelings in the session. She wanted us to look at what that was about.  Ten minutes into watching the recording, and the coach had actually asked about feelings more than 5 times after the thinker said they wanted to understand them better. It’s interesting that the coach’s self-reported reflection to me was that they hadn’t gone there at all.  Each time the coach asked about feelings, the thinker slipped into thinking about head stuff..  

Two wonderings emerged in our conversation

• People remember facts so when they are talking about what they will do, who they will talk to etc, perhaps you can turn down the volume as you don’t need to remember that. When you turn down the volume on information, you can turn it up and notice more feelings, what’s repeated, what’s missing etc
• If you’re losing track of the main thing that someone wanted to explore, you could try picking up something to represent that so that you remember to explore it.  In this example, picking up and holding anything to represent the main thing (here it was feelings) would have encouraged and reminded the coach to address the question more directly… because, after all, that’s what the thinker asked for.”

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