Coaching Skills Training: The ARROW Questioning Sequence: How to determine the Reality

The most important thing we must recognize as we coach people through the Reality stage is that it is all a matter of perception.

We are all constantly interpreting our environment based on our own experiences. As a result we construct our own unique model of the world which then serves to guide us through life without having to deal with every interaction we have as if it were a new experience.

Our model of the world gives us patterns so that we can recognize familiar objects or events. So that having seen a tree in England we can recognize the same thing if we encounter one in Switzerland. However, not everything will be interpreted the same way by different people. Find a piece of paper and draw a curved line. Is the shape is concave or convex? Of course there is no right answer; it's all a matter of perspective. For some the shape is concave, for others it is convex.

What has all this to do with coaching? The important perspective in coaching is that of the person being coached - it is their version of reality that counts. I have a story that illustrates this point: John was a sales person who was seeking some coaching on how he might better answer customer objections during the sales conversation. He approached Mary for some coaching on this and having discussed his aims they began to explore the reality of John's situation. John was very concerned about this aspect of his sales technique and rated himself as one of the poorest in the team in this regard. Mary disagreed. She insisted that John was one of her best performers as far as handling objections was concerned and suggested that John should think of another performance area on which to be coached. John thanked Mary for the encouragement but explained once more that this was his number one issue effecting his performance overall. He instinctively knew that if he could get over these feelings his performance would really soar. Mary became so irritated with John for failing to see what she saw as the reality of the situation that she ended the coaching session and suggested that John might like to return when he had something sensible to discuss. She had failed to help John raise his awareness, she had reclaimed the responsibility for John's learning and she had shattered the relationship of trust. You'll not be suprised when I tell you that this was the last time John sought her coaching. So we can see the need to be alive to the likelihood of different perspectives and perceptions.

Draw a picture of a square. Draw a line down the centre and a line across the middle so that it is divided into quarters. Similarly divide each of those squares into quarters. How many squares can you now see? The correct answer is 30:

1 whole square

16 individual squares

9 squares of 4 units

4 squares of 9 units

Look again until you can see all 30. This gives us another important lesson when we're thinking about reality. Namely that the true picture of reality often only emerges after we've looked several times and that it is worthwhile spending some time in a coaching session on the Reality stage.

We should welcome the fact that the people we coach may see things differently to us. It creates a sense of diversity and can throw up all sorts of new ways of taking a situation forward that would never have been uncovered if we all thought in the same way. Coaching is a powerful tool for improving performance in any area. In an organizational setting we should never use it only as a means of addressing poor performance. Sometimes even the best performing team members are still operating below the level of their potential and they too deserve to benefit from coaching and see how much better they might become.

However, coaching is also a valuable tool for problem solving and dealing with difficult issues and it would be true to say that the majority of coaching that goes on at work is used for these reasons.

As such, it is possible that when we are coaching someone through the Reality stage that things may get quite downbeat as they come to realize how big a task or challenge they face. It may be necessary to encourage them to think through all the things that are going well in a situation - there will always be some! - to help them get a balanced picture.

This is not the same as imposing our view it is simply encouraging the other person to recognize that an accurate view of reality includes acknowledging what's going well. More importantly, it sets a positive tone for discussing solutions later in the coaching session.