Understanding that curiosity is one of the basic traits needed for survival has been a paradigm shift for me, my coaching practice, and my education because it addresses how I have intuitively applied curiosity in my coaching practice with my clients to enable their potential.

In Part one, I describe why curiosity is important in my practice, and in Part two, I will explain how curiosity unfolds and emerges though my work as a coach.

How we learn?

I was inspired by Dehaene's (2020) “How we learn: Why brains learn better than any machine…for now” in which he describes, evidences and explains that,

“Curiosity is a fundamental drive of the organism: a propulsive force that pushes us to act, just like hunger, thirst, the need for security, or the desire to reproduce. […] Curiosity is the determination that pushes animals out of their comfort zones in order to acquire knowledge. In an uncertain world, the value of information is high and must ultimately be paid in Darwin’s own currency: survival. ” (p. 187)

“Human’s appetite for knowledge passes through the dopamine circuit even when it involves a purely intellectual curiosity. […] The degree of curiosity that you report correlates tightly with the activity of the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area, two essential regions of the dopamine brain circuit. […] Memory and curiosity are linked - the more curious you are about something, the more likely you are to remember it. […] The degree of craving for knowledge controls the strength of memory. […] Learning possesses intrinsic value for the nervous system. What we call curiosity is nothing more that the exploitation of this value. […] And indeed, all things being equal, laughing during learning seems to increase curiosity and enhance subsequent memory.” (p. 188-89)

“Curiosity occurs whenever our brains detect a gap between what we already know and what we would like to know - a potential learning area. […] Curiosity guides us to what we think we can learn. Its opposite, boredom, turns us away from what we already know, or from areas that, according to our past experience, are unlikely to have anything left to teach us.  […] Our brain evaluates the speed of learning, and curiosity is turned off if our brain detects that we are not progressing fast enough. […] Metacognition plays a key role in curiosity. Indeed to be curious is to want to know, and that implies knowing what don’t already know. […] Knowing that they don’t know leads them to ask for more information. This is the early manifestation of epistemic curiosity: the irresistible desire to know.” [p. 191, 193]

These statements, whilst focusing on connecting neuroscience to learning, were a light bulb moment for me because it helped me to deepen my understanding of how I coached as well as offering a more concrete way to explain my intuitive observations and measurements of the shifts and changes in my client’s behavioural patterns i.e.

• their progress in the moment as they take ownership and responsibility for their own choices and decisions with the available information at the time of our coaching session,

• and the results in self directed tasks and actions i.e. the success to be measured as an outcome from coaching.

Why is this important?

Well, for some, this could be obvious… more so, as this could simply be considered to be synonymous with motivation. However, for me, motivation is an outcome that offers concrete confirmation that my clients have this intrinsic desire to initiate, guide, maintain or end certain behaviours or actions to achieve their goals. This is a very useful measure - an observable outcome as a result of the coaching that is owned by the client. Yet I’m curious to know what initiated this outcome during the coaching and how I add value.

As I reflected on my own practice with my clients, I’ve realised that I tend to begin my sessions with curiosity and I’ve noticed moments, let me call them ‘micro transition points’ which are subtle and nuanced shifts that point to the client’s curiosity becoming piqued and activated in various degrees as they determine what can be achieved, or not. My awareness of these ‘micro transition points’ activates both my subconscious and consciousness to observe progress, currently at a macro level, of when there are a change in thought, emotions, actions and/or behaviours that is a direct result of my interactions with my client as a coach.

When I consider my ways of engagement with my clients, I typically follow a pattern that starts with getting a sense of how my client is feeling when they enter the room or call, and simply asking how they have been since we last spoke. From there, the coaching session unfolds, and depending on where they are and what it is they want to discuss or avoid, I adjust my coaching to include one of the four styles distinct in my coaching approach,

1. To partner my clients with complementary skill sets, resources and offerings as they share their situations,

2. To support my clients in articulating the challenge they need to face, and

3. To enable my clients to consider ways to better deal with the situation so that they can more confidently make the right decision when it’s time to take action in real-time.

4. To keep my clients accountable for the goals they have set for themselves.

The proportion of time I need to spend in a coaching session in each of these different styles parts will depend on, as I stated at the start, how my client chooses to start and then engage in our session. Each style, depending on the situation, can connect to a client’s curiosity: more often than not, a combination of styles is needed to gently tease their curiosity until my clients know how they want to make the best use of it. In most cases, whatever state my client turns up to our session in, I need to maintain and sensitively adjust the spatial tension of the coaching space to be psychologically safe and inviting enough for my clients to want to invest their time to both share their challenge and to pique their desire/curiosity to want to explore their possibilities of meeting the challenge at whichever level - thinking, doing, being, or becoming - that is currently holding them back from taking their first step forward.

What this means in practice is that I need to work and pass through a series of steps, ‘hoops’ or states, whether set consciously or unconsciously by my clients until they are ready to engage with the coaching from their neutral state. This is important because often times when I am coaching my clients, their various emotions, thoughts and feeling can influence their ability to thoroughly consider what is in their best interest, particularly if they are emotionally vested in a narrow perspective: this is a common example of not being in a neutral state for both a client and a coach.

In Part 2, I’ll go into more detail about how curiosity manifests itself in my work as a coach and the approach I’ve used to write up these experiences for curious coaching practitioners to consider as part of their own continuing professional and personal development.  

Read other blog-articles by Yvonne Thackray via tgc The Bloggers

Acknowledgements: To Andrew and JT for their time and discussions as I explored my ideas.

References: Dehaene, S. (2020). How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine…for Now. Viking.