Listening to Ourselves and Each Other

In this month’s online session, Simon Seligman will introduce a tool taken not from the coaching world in fact, but from Hand in Hand Parenting; the Listening Partnership (LP).

From Simon: It is a very simple tool and similar to many we may have encountered as we learned how to listen deeply to clients in our training, and it may be similar to listening exercises you use today. This particular model has been a bedrock for my coaching practice and in my life, parenting and relationships more generally, and I will introduce it before we then work in pairs (via breakout rooms) to experience a Listening Partnership for real.

An LP is a simple structure in which to listen and be heard without interruption or response. You each listen, in silence, to the other for an agreed amount of time, each way. You won’t need any prior knowledge; just yourselves.

Once we have done this, and we may do more than one LP each way to strengthen the container for what follows, I would like to continue into the second part of the evening and use further LPs to explore the territory of our failures, of the obstacles and vulnerabilities in coaching. I deliberately use a term - failure - that is often banished from our industry; we don’t ‘fail', we learn, we develop, we re-frame, we reflect, we grow, we take a risk, we show up the best we can be, and so on, but never fail. My experience is that sometimes as professionals we can feel (I certainly do) that we have failed, or we are making mistakes and getting things wrong, whatever our level of expertise, and sometimes these are alive in us as gut feelings rather than logical thoughts, feeding off insecurities or inventing new ones.

If we are in supervision as coaches, then we have a powerful held space in which to explore these bumps in the road, honestly, so that we can process the discomfort, learn from whatever experience we had and grow in our practice. But whether we are in supervision or not, whether we’re investing consistently in our CPD or not, for this evening I would like to offer the container of the LP for us to explore some of these topics, being heard without judgement and without the listener stepping forward to solve or make better, as we reflect on some of these charged terms. As we hear ourselves, and have the honour to witness others, we create the space to be ever more honest in our coaching practice.

FOR MORE ABOUT HAND IN HAND: https://www.handinhandparenting.org

Simon Seligman