Chapter 2: Using Intuition, Curiosity and Flow in Coaching

So long as you are coaching effectively, your clients will be doing most of the hard work on their own as they answer your questions about what they want and how they are going to get it. As their coach, you will rely heavily on your sense of intuition to provide insightful questions that will keep them thinking outside of the box. That’s not to say that standard coaching forms and personality assessments aren’t important: they’re key. However, a good coach knows when to go with his or her gut and strike while the iron is hot by asking well timed questions.

By this point in your development as a professional coach, you probably have a solid grasp of just how central questioning is to process of coaching. As a result, the most effective coaches use a combination of intuition and curiosity to lead them towards asking the right questions at the perfect moment. This is only possible when you are sincerely interested in your client’s motivations, values and aspirations and using your personal curiosity to continue asking probing questions until both you and your client have reached the end of a particular line of reasoning.

When a coaching session is inspired by a sense of both intuition and curiosity, both a coach and his or her client can experience a mental state that psychologists call ‘flow.’ Also referred to as being in the moment or in the zone, flow is a state in which people are completely immersed in a particular activity to the point that they are fully involved and energized. People often remark that they become unaware of irrelevant concerns like the passage of time or other topics when they experience flow, and many people find that they are at their most productive and creative during flow.

In coaching, coaches and clients may notice that they entered a state of flow after experience an ‘a-ha’ moment in which they have discovered a new perspective or realization regarding a particular topic. This highly-focused mental state is the ideal opportunity for energizing clients to continue making their way forward long after a particular coaching session is complete.