Why Context Coaching Matters for Lasting Change
Our CLG coaches practice context coaching, which is a different kind of coaching.
Context coaching begins by making a clear distinction between context and content. Most people who come for coaching want to talk about the content of their issue. They believe that if they can change the content, the issue will be resolved.
Content-focused clients want to talk about, for example:
- Their compensation package and how it is unfair and doesn’t recognize their contribution to the organization.
- Their boredom and lack of challenge in their role.
- Their 8-year-old’s struggles with reading.
- Their partner who isn’t interested in sex anymore.
They want to tell their coach all about the issue, problem, or opportunity. They believe that if their comp package was adjusted, they had a new job, could find the right tutor for their son, or could resolve their partner’s low libido everything would be OK.
Of course they do. This makes sense. Either directly or indirectly, they’re asking their coach to help them figure out what to do to deal with the content. Some coaches out there are subject matter experts who specialize in giving great content advice about negotiation, career management, parenting or sex.
At CLG, however, we’re clear that we’re not here to give clients great content advice. In fact, we avoid dealing with content at all. At the beginning of a coaching session, we ask clients what they’d like to explore—an issue, problem, concern, possibility or opportunity? For the first few minutes we invite them to share the content of their issue. For the rest of the session, though, we focus on exploring their context, not their content.
Why We Focus on Context Over Content
- Context prevents recycling issues.
If you don’t address and shift the underlying context of an issue, it will keep resurfacing. Most of us know this from experience. Most of us have discussed our problems with a friend, coach, therapist or spiritual advisor. When we finish the conversation we often feel better. We have been listened to by a trusted other. We might have also gotten some great advice. We sometimes leave with a plan.
But a month or year later, the same issue often returns. Just check: Isn’t your life filled with a number of recycling issues? Another way of saying this is that good ideas and suggestions poured into a consciousness stuck in threat and fear just run through the hole in the bottom of the bucket.
- Shifting context allows deep knowing to emerge.
When you address and shift your context around your issue, you create space for your intuition to surface. Instead of investing lots of energy figuring things out, you remove the blocks to your natural insight, which already holds the answers.
What Context Coaching Addresses
Context coaching focuses on deeper patterns instead of providing solutions for specific content.
Fear vs Trust
In a nutshell, your issue is usually an issue because you’re approaching it from fear and not from trust. Something about your desire for approval, control and security is being activated by your comp plan, your stalled career, your son’s reading issues, or your sub-par sex life. If you don’t address your core fears around your identity issues, trying to spice up your sex life by having a dedicated date night won’t create a lasting change. In context coaching we spend time unearthing our fears, facing them, and, most importantly, giving them some loving acceptance so they soften and stop running our lives.
Radical Responsibility vs. Changing Others
When people begin a context coaching session, they often, and quite naturally, believe the issue is about someone or something out there. However, context coaching guides them to realize they are the creator of their experience. At first, this can be shocking and scary, but once it is fully grasped, it becomes deeply empowering. You discover that no one or nothing over there needs to be different for you to be free. Changes may still happen, but you won’t rely on them for your sense of peace. Instead of focusing on changing others, context coaching focuses on the one person you can really change: YOU.
Curiosity vs. Being Right
Content coaching can get caught up in trying to determine who’s right and who’s wrong. In context coaching, we believe adjudicating rightness and wrongness is a waste of time. Very few people in your life will change and become what you want them to be because you convince them they’re wrong. And neither will you.
Context coaching prioritizes curiosity and wonder. We seek to see and understand things and people in a way that is beyond right and wrong. Curiosity opens us and others to new possibilities beyond what we can see while fighting over who spilled the milk.
Sufficiency vs. Scarcity
Many of our recycling issues are rooted in a belief in scarcity: “There isn’t enough.” There isn’t enough time, money, love, opportunity, support, or energy. Issues keep recycling because we try to cut up the pie in different ways rather than experiencing that the pie is actually bigger than we can imagine from a fear-based consciousness.
There is much more to context coaching, but this gives you a taste of the difference. To truly experience it, we encourage you to schedule a Chemistry call with a context coach and feel for yourself what it’s like.
Further Resources
- Explore coaching with CLG
- Get started with an Introduction to Conscious Leadership class
- Content vs Context video - Good leaders pay attention to the content of their business, conscious leaders also pay attention to context. They ask, "From where is the conversation occurring?"
- Are You Taking 100% Responsibility video
