Consciousness in Coaching

In your leadership, it’s important to become highly self-aware – understanding and acknowledging how you “show up,” how your demeanor or behavior impacts others, and being able to adapt your approach to the situation. Then you’re better able to achieve the full promise of leadership – coaching others. In this episode, Bill and Ralph discuss consciousness and suggest practices that will help you sharpen your self-awareness.

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*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors

Bill Berthel:

Welcome to the Get Emergent podcast where we discuss leadership team and organizational topics and best practices. We like to provide ideas, concepts, and pragmatic experiments to help you develop your potential in your work and leadership. I’m Bill Berthel.

Ralph Simone:

And I’m Ralph Simone.

Bill Berthel:

So Ralph, we’re going to be talking about, we’re going to have a series of four or so podcasts that really support this concept of leader as coach, the coaching modality in leadership. Love it. And today we want to talk about consciousness and coaching.

Ralph Simone:

I mean, that’s kind of a fancy word that I think it’s bantered about by people like ourselves, other coaching professionals. What do we mean when we talk about consciousness? And then specifically in coaching,

Bill Berthel:

I can get really distracted in this space with consciousness theory. There are two prevailing theories being discussed philosophically because so far science, Ralph is far, far behind in answering where consciousness comes from. This becomes an interesting philosophical debate, whether consciousness is a fundamental dynamic of the universe. This gets heavy, or if consciousness is an emergent property derived from physical stuff happening, atoms, chemicals, energy, having an experience. And I think this matters. This isn’t just philosophy because as leaders we need to know how to connect to our source of consciousness, so it matters where this comes from for ourselves, whichever might be true fundamentalism, materialism of emergent properties. By the way, I like the emergent properties idea. Of course, that’s our brand, right? What’s most important is that we connect to our consciousness that we become highly self-aware, very aware of.

Ralph Simone:

So that was coming up for me. If we could use the word awareness for the purpose of this conversation almost interchangeably, because we want to be aware of ourselves.

Bill Berthel:

I think so, yes.

Ralph Simone:

The things that motivate us, the things that make us impatient, the things that trigger us.

Bill Berthel:

I think so, yes.

Ralph Simone:

But it goes beyond just our own.

Bill Berthel:

It does, especially in this context of leadership and coaching. We do need to be in touch with our own self-awareness, and I think it starts there, but we also need to be socially aware of the people or the person we’re leading or coaching. We need to be able to dial into what are their feelings, their thoughts, their senses, their thought processes, what’s going on with them. Now we cannot have their experience. I’m not suggesting that, but we need to be able to dial in and relate to an awareness of their being.

Ralph Simone:

Bill, I’m curious about what we would say about the leader, and you and I have both interacted with the leader that says, I am a driven guy who is impatient and I’m totally aware of that. Would we describe that as someone demonstrating high levels of consciousness?<