Without an ability to actively listen, even the best coaching question will be of limited effect. Active listening encourges the coachee to think deeply and give expansive answers. For the coach, active listening provides insights into the coachee's frame of mind and suggests more useful follow up questions.

Listening happens at 3 levels:

Active

Conversational

Superficial

The bottom level, Superficial, is what we do when we're hearing but not listening. We might have a conversation at a party trying to take an interest in what another guest is saying but really having our attention elsewhere, perhaps on some other conversation we suspect would be far more interesting.

The problem is that we are only hearing what the other guest is saying, not listening, so we often get confused, lose track of the conversation or end up having to ask them to repeat what they just said.

This would be extremely damaging in a coaching conversation. People instinctively know if we're only listening to them superficially. The fact that our mind is elsewhere will be revealed in our body language. This will destroy any trust in the coaching relationship and make it unlikely that the coaching will result in any useful outcome.

The second level, conversational, is the type of listening that we do throughout the day. In conversational listening, we listen while our partners talk and vice versa. However the danger here is that while the other person is talking, we are concentrating on making our next point, rather than truly focusing on what the other person is saying.

This is not an easy thing to do when we start out as coaches. When you're not used to this approach, it can be hard to keep the questions flowing. It's usually better to wait until the person has finished speaking and then decide upon the next question.

We should also avoid the habit of finsihing other people's sentences for them. Invariably we do not pick the words they would have chosen for themselves and all we've ended up doing is disrupting the flow of their thinking and making them feel hurried.

So we need to work hard to reach the top level, Active Listening. Put simply active listening is about clearing our minds of all other distractions and really tuning in to what the other person is saying with as much focus as we can muster. This is easier said than done and takes a lot of time and practise to develop but is well worth the effort.

On a practical level it means we should try not to coach when we're in a hurry or preoccupied with something else. Neither should we run a coaching session in a noisy environment or one that is likely to get to hot or too cold. In such circumstances it is imposssible to actively listen.