Applying metacognition with some possible implications for our coaching practice and a practical development tool for continuous development to better serve our clients (Part 2) by Andrew Parrock
My ultimate aim as a coach is to help my clients develop so that they become able to,
Address their issues by themselves,
Reflect on what they do by understanding themselves better.
Or, to put it another way, getting them to think about how they think. This does beg the question, ‘can they already do this for themselves?’ Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But even if ‘yes’, they are not aware that they can, it takes a little teasing out. If no, well, we are in for an interesting journey.
But given my ultimate aim, I am working towards improving their metacognition. It is my belief that if I know and understand the science behind how our human brain works (neuroscience), the scientific study of the mind and behaviour (psychology), and the history of socialization and culturalization, then I can become a more effective coach, because I will be working ‘with the grain’ of my client’s thinking, and perception, not against it.
This blog is about what I have learned and understood (which may well be imperfect!). In Part 1 I discussed the science of metacognition, and in the second part I connect metacognition with my thinking about possible implications for coaching and develop an applied approach to support us as we develop our practice through our own continuous development in part 2.
Some implications for coaching.
Doing two things at once with the same tool
Coaching requires the coach to multitask. When I am in the midst of a coaching session, I am listening deeply to my client, with my whole attention, seeing their body language, hearing their words and the tone they use, and feeling the emotion they bring to the meeting. With all that information I must then CHOOSE what to do with that information (which gives an indication of their thoughts and emotions). Should I ask another question or not? If yes, which question should I ask? Which would help my client the most? This could be described as bringing our perception of uncertainty to our conscious minds (building block 1), using that ability which is, for the most part, unconscious.
As I have deepened and improved my coaching skills, I have noticed that, at times, a line of questioning and listening just occurs to me without conscious thought as it utilizes my “educated insights and intuition”. It appears to happen by itself. At other times I have to stop and make it clear to my client that I am weighing up a number of options. I have said, “That’s very interesting. It raises several questions in my mind. Do you mind if I take a few moments to consider which might be the best for us to pursue?” Invariably they have agreed to that. This might be described as conscious use of my ability to monitor my actions; building block 2.
When I read that our thinking about other people uses some of the same neural pathways as our thinking about ourselves, the idea that coaches multi-task as they coach their clients came immediately to my mind.
What is going on in my brain while all of this is happening?
I believe that we can start to develop an idea, using the science behind metacognition for what is going on inside the brain of a coach, in this case my brain and possibly other likeminded coaches. I suggest the following hypothesis:
A. The coach is empathising with their client, feeling their feelings, getting a hint as to their emotional state, yet remaining apart from that.
B. The coach is also listening to their own thoughts: the ideas generated by this listening, noting their own emotions to ensure they can maintain that professional distance: keeping not too far away, not too close, just enough to maintain rapport and objectivity.
If A and B require the coach to use some of the same neural pathways then this would be difficult to do; it would be like trying to hammer in a nail and screw in a screw with one hand tied behind our back. We might THINK (and jump to judgement) then LISTEN, because the thinking about our client’s words has become habitual, and because we know we do not judge, our ‘error related negativity’ kicks in and we (silently) say “Doh!!!’ to ourself.
What could be done is to consciously separate the two processes in time; suspend our immediate thoughts to first LISTEN, and then THINK what to do. I think that this hypothesis may explain my experience of coaching. I make this suggestion with great trepidation as I am not a neuroscientist; I am trying to apply the knowledge gained from reading about metacognition to my personal experience of coaching and explain what is happening as I work towards my ultimate aim in coaching which is to help my clients develop their own metacognition/self-awareness.
The science is new to me, and it may be that applying it in the context of coaching is a new way of approaching how we think about our coaching. It could also show us another way to learn how to be a coach.
Application to learning how to coach:
Many people (me included) at the start of their coaching career are nervous about ‘doing it right’. We have,
A model in mind (e.g. GROW),
we know we must build empathy,
listen,
not judge,
ask open questions and,
above all, be present for our client.
All that ‘stuff’ is going on as a parallel process [13] in our head, it’s like trying to listen to a piano sonata in the middle of a rock concert. It’s a wonder we ever get to do any coaching at all especially as we have a limited attention until we train ourselves to become practiced in what we choose to pay attention to!
How might this new understanding of how our minds work be harnessed at different stages of our coaching practice?
Novice Practice
I suggest this approach can be used whenever we are in the learner’s mindset, when we are ‘consciously incompetent’; the second stage of the ‘four stages of competence’ model of learning [14] (see diagram).
The idea that their fluency comes with practice, and that they are allowed to practice, as long as they share what they are doing with their client (and with their permission) may well remove that initial nervousness. They can then feel freer to learn gradually, to build their expertise knowing that this is a normal and natural progression, one dictated by our very nature. A tactical approach to achieve this would be,
a) Introduce our learner coaches to the idea that that listening and empathising cannot, at first, be done at the same time as listening to their own reaction to their client’s words. Give them that awareness with some bite-size knowledge so that they know their thoughts will intrude into their listening. This is very much like mindful meditation; notice the thought, and bring your attention back to the words of your client.
b) Tell them that taking a small time-out to allow them to quickly reflect on their client’s words and come up with a short plan is perfectly acceptable behaviour as long as they explain what they are doing (maybe not yet why they are doing it!). That plan could simply be the decision to ask another question, or to summarise to check their understanding.
Deliberative Practice
While I was reading Fleming’s ‘Know Thyself’, a Yvonne Thackray [15] gave me a paper about ‘Deliberate Practice’ [16]. This described the acquisition of expert skills in the fields of chess, typing and music, and the implications of that for becoming an expert emergency medicine doctor. I think that the conclusions in this paper can be extended to the field of coaching.
What struck me were the parallel ideas in these two very different pieces. I will draw out the parallel ideas and apply these to how coaches might approach their own development as a coach, to add to the proposal above.
The paper alludes to the familiar 4-step ‘stages of competence’ learning cycle referred to above, and then examines in greater detail how people progress to being ‘experts’ in their chosen fields of chess and music. It rejects the idea that ‘time served’ leads to high levels of performance. Instead, it proposes that a process called ‘Deliberate Practice’ is needed. Without it, people’s skills will plateau in the ‘unconscious competence’ or ‘automatic’ level and will not improve with time, leading to ‘arrested development’.
This is acceptable for everyday skills such as shoelace tying and car driving and more advanced skills such as typing. But not for people aspiring to master something difficult. The first parallel is the idea of conscious awareness of a skill. This might be building block 2 in action; the ability to monitor our actions.
Deliberate Practice involves four conditions. Individuals were:
given a task with a well-defined goal,
motivated to improve,
provided with feedback, and
provided with ample opportunities for repetition.
These individuals, seeking mastery, “purposefully counteract tendencies towards automaticity by actively setting new goals and higher performance standards, which require them to increase speed, accuracy and control over their actions.” A key feature of their success is their development of the ability to report their thought process and critical aspects of the situations they face, if these are challenging enough. Based on medical training for emergency medicine, it is found that the best training situations focus on activities of short duration with opportunities for immediate feedback, reflection and correction. This is the second parallel, which might be building block 1 in action; keeping track of our uncertainty, in this case the uncertainty about the efficacy of one’s practice of a certain skill.
I suggest that these parallels are very strong indeed, so strong that ‘deliberative practice’ as undertaken in other fields of professional expertise, may well be an already existing practical application of the ideas about self-awareness the Fleming is proposing. In which case, the next section suggests an approach that amalgamates these into a practical development tool for all coaches, following the excellent example set by the emergency medicine doctors.
‘Coaching on the Border’; application of Deliberative Practice and Second-order Rylean self-awareness to coaching
Reflecting on the why “Doing Two Things at Once with the Same Tool” and then the how “Deliberate Practice”, and in conversation with some of my coaching colleagues, they suggested this phrase, ‘Coaching on the Border’, when I was musing whether the Johari Window might hold some insight here, if applied to a coach’s internal reflections in order to receive the necessary feedback to help then to continue developing their coaching practice i.e. the “what”.
The Johari Window:
The ‘Johari Window’ is “… a technique designed to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. It was created by psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) in 1955 and is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise. Luft and Ingham named their model "Johari" using a combination of their first names” [17]. I first came across this when became a manager and took a course on emotional intelligence, where it was presented as a way of thinking about yourself and using feedback to better understand oneself. It asks two questions to construct a 2x2 grid of the behaviours we have that are, firstly, ‘know to self ‘or ‘not known to self’ and secondly, ‘known to others’ or ‘not known to others. The answers about each behaviour then fall into one for four areas:
Arena: known to self and others
Façade: known to self but unknown by others
Unknown: to both self and others
Blind spot: known to others but not to self.
The Blind Spot is the area that feedback can reduce, by making us bring the behaviours we are unaware of into the light of our awareness, and moving them into the ‘arena’. The idea is that the more we know about ourself, the better we can interact with others to create beneficial outcomes. It works. I tried it with my team in a ‘goldfish bowl exercise’ and learned that there was one thing I did as their manager that really annoyed them. It was something I could fix immediately by reprioritising my tasks, and that behaviour change made a difference to my relationship with my team, for the better.
A possible ‘internal Johari Window’ for coaches to use.
The Johari window is a tool to initiate seeking of feedback from other people, to build the self-awareness of a person, and usually used by someone other than the person them self. As coaches we are encouraged to self-reflect as a deliberate means of improving our practice [18]. Self-reflection, and reflection with a supervisor or peers in an Action Learning Set, give us the opportunity to examine what we have done in our coaching sessions and discuss the effectiveness, or not, of our actions. Indeed, this article itself is an example of self-reflection, shared with ‘the good coach’, to improve and deepen my understanding of the wider context of coaching and my own practice!
What I am proposing here is a way of structuring that self-reflection to make it more effective. I have modified the Johari Window by substituting the question ‘can I do X, or not?’, where X is a coaching skill such as listening without judgement, or awareness of my own thoughts leading me to choose a course of action that I believe will benefit my client.
The resulting “Internal Johari Window of a coach” looks like this
It has a lot of similarity to the 4-stages of competence’ model, with
area A being ‘unconscious incompetence’,
area B is conscious incompetence,
area C is conscious competence, and
area D is unconscious competence.
The difference lies in the difference between conscious/aware and unconscious/unaware. The difference is subtle but important.
When we perform a task our awareness (which is our self-awareness) of what we are doing depends on two things: our ability and our attention.
If a task is difficult (we are ‘consciously competent’), we naturally pay attention to what we are doing because if we don’t, we will make mistakes.
But if we know what we are doing well (we are ‘unconsciously competent’) we can carry out the task without paying attention. Indeed, we often don’t even remember doing it! Ever driven home along a well-known route and been surprised when you arrived at your front door? The myriad tasks of driving home were done automatically and without conscious awareness. It turns out that our self-awareness is “often absent or offline” [19].
If things are going as they should there is no need for our higher cognitive functions and the ‘higher-level prediction error’ processes to be activated. I shall quote Fleming verbatim here, from the same page; “Self-awareness operates on a need-to-know basis. This has the odd consequence that the absence of self-awareness is often more common than we think.” And thus, I extrapolate here, when we are doing a task that we have had a lot of practice doing, more often than not we are not aware of doing it, we are not conscious of doing it. But we can become conscious of it but only if we make the effort to think about it. We can switch our conscious awareness of our action on and off, as long as we are very competent at it. And with this subtle distinction in mind, I propose the above modified ‘Johari window’.
The four quadrants become areas of conscious awareness or conscious unawareness of any particular skill or ability.
When a coach falls into either A or D, unaware quadrants, then this is when they need to be resourceful and gather the right feedback and learning (active reflection with a supervisor, peer) to either build the skill from a low level, or bring that automatic high-level skill back to our conscious awareness.
When a coach operates in either quadrant B or C, it’s about deliberative (self) practice, reaching automaticity but then pulling back from it to become conscious of the skill, and thus allow self-reflection on the details to allow further development.
Depending on what stage a coach is as they develop their practice, different supportive resource may be required along their journey as they develop their metacognition of their practice.
Applying ‘Coaching on the border’ to better serve our clients
The development and learning of a coach might well follow a cycle starting at A (never coached before) to B (just starting to coach) to C (has developed some fluency with coaching) to D (has lots of practice but has not read this article yet…).
I suggest that we should be aiming to ‘coach on the border’ between our unconscious choices and our conscious choices of what to do for our client particularly when we are aware of our limitations and cautious of what it is we don’t know we don’t know.
The unconscious, intuitive, approach is FAST, because we have learned to do it and it has moved into the unconscious realm.
The conscious, reasoned approach is SLOWER and more effortful because we have to think about it [20], we have to make the effort to turn our self-awareness on rather than leave our actions to the automatic well-practiced pathways.
Coaching ‘on the border’ allows us to use both our uncertainty tracking ability, and then our action-monitoring ability in a conscious way on the areas we choose to practice so it becomes almost automatic. Think of it as allowing time to stretch a little so that we are more fully in the moment to use these two innate abilities consciously. In this way we never allow our practice to become fully automatic, but always deliberative, as a conscious way of improving it because we can,
React quicky to maintain the flow of the conversation, but not so quick that we cannot be aware of our own thoughts as the coach,
Be directed towards our client’s needs, and thus be able to consciously choose the optimal path for our next question or observation, to best help our client gain their own insights and ‘aha!’ moments.
How might we do this?
Here is a suggestion:
Define a task with a well-defined goal; say, to notice when we are acting unconsciously
Be motivated to improve; ermm, if you are reading this then I think you will already have that motivation!
Be provided with feedback, both from our client, from ourselves by reflection and from respected peers or supervisors. We might ask our client how it went for them, with the aim for us to better understand what we are doing so that we can improve it and reflect on how we felt about it in conjunction with their response.
Provide ourselves with ample opportunities for repetition: practice, practice, practice.
For example, we might be getting feedback that our approach is helpful for the client, who is moving towards their goal. Yet we might also have a concern that the behavioural changes needed to reach it are not becoming habitual for them to maintain their progress. So, we might then start the next session with questions looking for what they have changed, as an explanation as to why they think the sessions are useful.
What this approach might provide is a permanent framework for a coach to continue their own development. Think of it as a spiral, moving ever upwards, always improving, using self-reflection and getting external feedback, triggered for each fresh cycle by the internal question, ‘am I doing what is easy or am I doing what right thing, which may be difficult, for my client?’ The easy thing is coaching with unconscious competence. The hard thing is developing and/or refining a new or existing skill, which is in the area of conscious competence. We never accept coaching in our comfort zone, but use our own curiosity about our own practice to drive our development. [see diagram]
Conclusion
Given that my ultimate aim is working towards improving our clients’ metacognition, which may be similar to other peers, in turn we also need to develop our own. Our aim could be to become more aware of how we coach, so that we can improve how we coach. This is not a new idea, but maybe we can approach that aim better informed using sound science that draws upon many disciplines that might shine a light on how we might go about achieving it.
Andrew Parrock (MSc, CMgr, MCMI) has, since graduating in 1980, been a teacher, a tax specialist and a manager. He spent 10 years as a volunteer mentor with undergraduate students at UCL and, later, Brunel University as part of the National Mentoring Consortium. He discovered coaching late in his career and has now become an accredited coach at Practitioner Level with the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).
References and notes
13. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-parallel-processing-in-psychology-5195332
14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
15. Founder and organiser of ‘the good coach’ platform- thanks Yvonne!
16. ‘Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of expert Performance: A general Overview’ by K Anders Ericsson, PhD. Academic Emergency Medicine 2008; 15: 988-994 (ISSN 1069-6563, PII ISSN 1069-6563583)
17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window
18. For example, the EMCC demands some reflective practice as part of its accreditation programme.
19. Fleming, op cit, Chapter 5 ‘Avoiding self-awareness failure’, page 105
20. Daniel Kahneman, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’
