Awareness Is Not Ours

PRIME SPACE

Host Elias Skultori explores the fundamental distinction between coaches 'creating' awareness and 'evoking' it. He argues that when coaches

Key takeaways

• Coaches cannot manufacture awareness; they can only facilitate the conditions for it to surface.
• Providing solutions or intuitive leaps as a coach establishes a subtle hierarchy of 'the wise' versus 'the needing'.
• The coaching competency has shifted from 'creating awareness' to 'evoking awareness' to reflect this partnership.
• True empowerment occurs when clients practice the capacity to think, question assumptions, and make meaning themselves.
• Effective coaching environments are built on ethics, trust, safety, presence, and deep listening.

Main topics

• Evoking vs. Creating Awareness
• The Coach-Client Power Dynamic
• Building Conditions for Insight

Notable quotes

We don't create awareness. We can't create awareness.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a call to action for coaches to move away from b

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Welcome to Prime Space, Advanced Conversations in Coaching, with your host, Elias Skultori. Coaches, we're almost at episode 100 of Prime Space, and I just realized something. I've never done an episode specifically about awareness, evokes awareness. Speaker 1 (0:35) Almost 100 episodes and somehow awareness has never had its own episode. What happened? So let's talk about it, right? Awareness is such a central part of coaching. However, where does awareness come from? Whose responsibility is it? How do we coaches evoke awareness? Speaker 1 (1:14) So for those of you old timers, I'm sure you remember when this core competency was called creating awareness. Back then, I was never comfortable with that title because I've always said as coaches, we don't create awareness. We can't create awareness. We can't open our client's mind and stick awareness in there. There is no way to do it. Speaker 1 (1:45) The only thing we can do is create the space and partner with the client to create the proper conditions for awareness to surface. That's why I'm much more comfortable with how the competency is called today evokes awareness than what was before. That is what we are called for. And that is so much more appropriate. Speaker 1 (2:16) And even here, it is important to realize this doesn't mean there is something special, a magical technique a coach has for producing awareness. There is no magic. There is no magic question, no holy grail skill hidden somewhere in the coach's repertoire that will evoke this awareness. Awareness emerges from... the quality of the coaching environment we create together with the client. If we want our clients to generate insight, if we want the coaching process to provide this value of awareness to the client, it starts from the moment we say hi. Speaker 1 (3:08) I like to say that awareness starts with ethics. It starts with how we embody a coaching mindset and put the client genuinely at the center of the process. It starts with a clear session agreement, a clear intentionality for the conversation. Speaker 1 (3:31) It is how we cultivate trust and safety, the quality of our