A Coaching Model Created by Gabriela Sanz
(Leadership Coach, FRANCE)
The definition of Leadership by Oxford dictionary is quite simple:
the action of leading a group of people or an organization.
But for our work and coaching experience, we will consider a broader definition.
Searching for what would match exactly what I have in mind, I found this great definition from Tony Robins:
… leadership takes many forms. Most obviously, it can look like one person leading a group of people on a path to a particular goal. But leadership is also how you, as an individual, choose to lead your life. It’s a term that can be used to describe how you manage your family, your relationships, and your job – because, even if you don’t think you’re in a formal “position of power,” in reality, you are. You’re responsible for shaping your life however you choose to. We all are. What could be more powerful than that?
So Leadership is, in fact, a position or a role you take in life that can affect everything and everybody around you, it brings the possibility to impact your whole living experience.
I agree with Tony Robbin’s definition that if we take this responsibility, it brings much power, and it’s up to us individually, to deeply work on that.
As we continue to explore a broader meaning of leadership, Tony Robbins also said that:
Leadership is not something you’re born with or without – it’s a creative muscle you can strengthen and develop over time. Developing incredible leadership skills takes practice and commitment.
Whit that said, everybody can learn to develop leadership, you just have to train hard to get better at it.
As coaches, we are trained to partner and help our clients achieve their goals. One of the most powerful learnings I had during this period at ICA is that nobody moves forward waiting for others to act. We have to focus on what is on our hands, what we can do. Or in the coaching session, help the clients see what they actually can have an impact on or do regarding their objectives and goals. Help bring somehow this clarity to them.
To improve leadership skills, to have a real impact in their life, our client has to commit to change if needed, commit to working on self, reflect a lot, and take decisions if necessary. It’s very courageous.
During the process, one of the first things to understand and address is how things work for the client, how the client’s mind works, make him/her aware of that, clear things out, and create some space.
We are going to challenge the client to have a deep look inside of him/her and define what he/she always believed, what still makes sense for him/her on his/her journey, and what doesn’t and needs to be changed. He /she needs to be aware of what thoughts, perspectives, and or behaviors are useless now. What is not helping him/ her to achieve the goals or even stopping him/her from reaching it?
This is a fantastic exercise for all of us. When thinking about what you want in life, your future, and all the possibilities you have, try to find serenity and lightness to choose wisely what is going to serve you, really help you and work on what is not serving you and should be reshaped or should just go away. Question yourself, what should I do to achieve that? What should I change? Or transform? What I don’t want in my life anymore? How can I let it go? – This is developing a more conscious leadership towards your life.
There are 2 sentences I think can help me illustrate what I am trying to explain. Roy T. Bennett mentioned in his book The light in the heart:
Let go of something old that no longer serves you in order to make room for something new.
This is an interesting and very true perspective: create space, clear things out so you can fit new things, new ideas, new everything.
Another concept I found very interesting comes from Max DePreewere he says:
In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be, by remaining what we are.
Here we see the idea of mutation, change, and evolution. We just cannot be the same as we evolve, as we grow, as we heal.
If we don’t work on ourselves constantly, likely, we won’t have the progress we want. So, let’s start with our memories, past beliefs, and perspectives that were built a long time ago, with another experience and point of view. All of us have earned some ready conclusions we didn’t have much judgment about during life, some even in our childhood, and we have just accepted it as it is. This material is somehow “unconscious knowledge” and forms much of our thinking and even who we are today.
All of this information might become assumptions and connections that our brain did sometime in the past, and now they can work as quick mental shortcuts known in psychology as heuristics.
If we look at the definition of Heuristic
A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. These rule-of-thumb strategies shorten decision-making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about their next course of action. Heuristics are helpful in many situations, but they can also lead to cognitive biases. (Heuristics and Cognitive Biases by Kendra Cherry for VeryWellMind)
It means that our brain to save energy, save time, and get us to a point or decision without having too much to think about is assessing them. It might be compared to an autopilot. It is very efficient in saving energy and getting us from A to B in a regular standard situation but in an exceptional case, considering that it will follow what was imputed, with no analysis or questioning, there might be other important new data to consider to solve this new situation. And this is the major problem.
A study conducted by psychologists at Duke University show that a “lazy brain” can lead to bad decisions and that the only way to avoid these errors is to become more aware of how they work, when and how they can happen (Source: This common mental shortcuts can lead to bad decision making by Carolyn Gregoire At the Huffpost).
These shortcuts are mostly unconscious, they are not always the best for us and they can happen with our behaviors, with our beliefs and perspectives. Some of these heuristics, when brought to consciousness, will remain unchanged and will continue to save us energy mostly in a positive way, but others might need to evolve and transform during life. And if we don’t stop and look at them, be aware of them, reflect to see if they are still valuable, we won’t be able to actively remove or reframe if necessary to align them with our new goals. From these heuristics we take actions, decisions, evoke feelings; they impact our daily lives and our quality of life so it’s better to look at them and see if this impact is still positive.
It is very important to enhance that the change can only happen if we have identified the pattern we are constantly showing if we can explore what is beneath it and most of all if we consciously want to make this shift. Only after having this figured out we can make a transformation and shape what is not serving us anymore. This process requires a lot of self-awareness and clarity to try to reframe and with that can impact our present and future life. It’s like a restart.
Being able to do this requires self-work, training, it is not always easy, changes need time, but we can be the leader of this. And this can be very rewarding.
The CLEAR Coaching model can help identify, analyze and if necessary, transform, overcome and let go of what doesn’t serve the client anymore, enhancing positive attitudes and supporting goal achievement for a lighter and brighter leadership towards your life. The Clear method allows the client to try to restart from a different angle because it enables the client to calibrate the way of seeing things, to better fit the future goals. It helps make clear what matters today, to achieve the goal.
The coaching process as it is is already perfect to initiate change and to bring self-awareness and clarification to the client. The CLEAR model is only going to challenge him/her a little bit more, to make him/her move from the “I have no power/I am a victim/ I am trapped/ I am stuck” to the “I can do something” mode, where we can see the rise of responsibility, personal power, and conscious leadership.
The concept of the CLEAR model is very simple, and the questions written here are only to illustrate the main idea, there is no cookie-cutter. The questions and the order of them will for sure change and fully adapt to the client agenda.
It is important to understand that real changes take time and effort. But the learnings are forever, and the progress will happen throughout all the sessions.
- Establish confidentiality and trust space
- Connect and partner with the client
- Explain what is coaching
- Understand client moments and intentions: What made you come to a coaching session? What is going on?
- Clarify the goal for the coaching journey: What do you expect from our work together?
Listen, learn, bring light
Start exploring the client’s current situation and goal. Help bring awareness to the client.
- What would you like to focus on today? What makes this important to you?
- What would you like to have at the end of this session? And how will you know you have achieved it?
Identify and assess potential unconscious obstacles: Underlying beliefs/ Past traumas/ useless perspectives
- What is stopping you from achieving what you want? What are your thoughts on this?
- What is the impact of these thoughts or this mindset on the achievement of your goal?
If there is a probable underlying belief, memory, or a perspective that isn’t helping the client, challenge him:
What do you think is behind this? How is this memory/ behavior/ perspective serving you nowadays? How is this impacting the achievement of what you want? What have you learned from it? What are the learnings here? What importance do you want this to have in your life today or in the future? How this possibility makes you feel?
Rethink, let go of useless/ reinforce good
Reflect on possible new paths, challenge new connections, new horizons, reframe perspectives
- What would be the perfect scenario for this? How do you want it to be?
- What is opening up for you? How does this possibly make you feel?
- What other resources could you asses to help you with that?
- What could you do to increase your chances of succeeding?
Aim and adjust
Visualize the goal, define strategy and planning
- How far are you from achieving what you want from this session?
- How do you see yourself in this?
- What do you believe is in your hands now in this scenario? What could you provoke or start to achieve what you want? How could you help this happen? What do you need to address?
- Are there any obstacles that could get in your way? What are these possible obstacles (if any) and how could you overcome them?
Explore shifts/ changes and the power of change coming from the client’s actions and thoughts.
Recap and Restart
Do a Recap of the path and client learnings of the session.
Measure where we are vs. where we intended to be at the beginning of the session.
You mentioned you wanted XXXX at the beginning of our session, how do you feel about it now?
- Compromise: So, just to be precise, after we finish this session, what will you do exactly and when?
- Accountability: What can help you stay accountable for this? What could help you maintain yourself on track here?
- Learnings: What is the main take away from today’s session? How can you apply these learnings in your life from now on?
Ask for permission to end the session.
The CLEAR model is very simple but it has the potential to transform the attitude of the coachee by challenging him to think deeper and be more conscious about his thoughts, choices, decisions, and actions.He/she understands that he/she has to constantly work on himself/ herself to have more self-awareness, align to his/her own goals, and be the one taking the lead. Not only moving forward but also by choosing what he/she will take with him/her during the journey, It’s like a constant awakening, being mindful and conscious. This is the only way to get closer to being the person he/she wants to be or having the life he/she has chosen.
We cannot control external factors of course, but we can try to manage internally how we are feeling and how we are going to deal with it. We cannot control others, but we can decide how we are going to deal with them and how they will impact us. These decisions and choices impact our reality and daily lives. Being conscious of them makes a huge change. We have the chance to respond instead of just react.
The CLEAR model challenges the client to be conscious of his thoughts and actions, to act as a leader, and that enable astounding restarts.
“This common mental shortcuts can lead to bad decision making” by Carolyn Gregoire -Posted at the HuffPost