My daughter said to me this evening ‘Thank you for being lovely and listening to me earlier’ and I thought about how my coaching training must be paying off. I’ve always thought that I was a good listener, but in the last few months I’ve been consciously trying to hear every word without thinking of my response; to truly hear the message without trying to offer the solution.
Why is listening without offering a solution so important?
If we offer our solution to someone else’s problem and they go with it, that might not be the conclusion they were going to get to. We have no guarantee that our idea would be better. We could have stopped their thinking part way through the best idea they would ever have.
Being listened to
The flip side of listening to others is having someone listen to you in order to come up with solutions yourself. In my session with my coach today, we eventually got to my new goal of ‘To be able to sit with my feet up in the future’. In my mind there are many steps and barriers that I need to get through to make this happen. He then asked what timeframe I imagined this goal happening.
I think we were both shocked when my immediate response was 1-2 years. What was I thinking? Can’t I just put my feet up right now? What’s stopping me? The answer I came up with was that I’m not seeing it as time to fully relax.
When my coach listened to me more and asked me lots of effective questions, it became obvious to me that because I allow the interruptions to happen, and react to them, I’m always on edge so don’t feel like I’m relaxing.
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