The use of intuition

Over the last few articles I have been looking at essential coaching skills and showing how these skills, when used in client-centred learning, raise awareness and build responsibility in the individual learner.

• Rapport: This is all about the relationship between you and your customer. The relationship must be equal and the customer must trust that you will be non-judgemental. Being non-judgemental is critical in empowering the customer to be themselves. The customer must believe that they can express how they think and feel about things knowing that you will not be dismissive or defensive in your response.
  
   
  
  This equal relationship enables the customer to learn how the way they think and feel about things influences the choices they make. The learning environment is such that they feel comfortable exploring and experimenting with different strategies to manage their emotional state and help them make decisions that are safe for them.
  
   
  
  Rapport is created, not through banter or even establishing common ground, rather it is created through non-verbal communication techniques, such as the use of eye contact, nodding, smiling and matching body language, tone of voice or use of words.
  
   
  
  
• Listening: There are a number of levels of listening, most of which are ineffective when aiming to create a client-centred relationship. Active listening is about focusing entirely on the customer’s agenda and almost seeing yourself as a blank sheet. As the coach, you have no idea where the conversation is going to go and simply facilitate the process.
  
   
  
  There are a number of techniques you can use to do this, such as repeating back parts of what has been said, paraphrasing and summarising. These techniques enable the customer to check that what they have said is what they meant. Listening is very important when developing the customer’s ability to set their own goals and determine for themselves how they learn.
  
   
  
  
• Questioning: Effective questions target thoughts and feelings. They are open questions and may start with words like, what, where, why or how; or explain, or tell me. Coaching or client-centred questions are very different from the use of questions in an instructor-led relationship. Coaching questions do not check knowledge and understanding. They focus on the underpinning things that motivate behaviour. They help the customer recognise how individual they are and how the decisions they make are affected by their state of mind.
  
   
  
  
• Feedback: There are many forms of feedback and in client-centred learning the most powerful form of feedback is one that develops effective self-evaluation skills in drivers. Feedback is all about the customer identifying a set of skills, against which they can measure their performance. They need to be aware of their strengths, weaknesses and development needs and they need to understand how their emotions impact on their behaviour and their ability to rationalise. Their measure of ‘good’ and ‘safe’ will be very different from yours because they think and feel things differently from you. ‘Drive like me and you will always be okay’ is not helpful to an individual when all their life experiences, conditioning, peer groups and influences have developed them into human beings, who do not resemble you in one tiny little way. They can ‘drive like you’ up to their test and pass but post-test they will always ‘drive like them’. Effective feedback is about developing their ability to make choices by evaluating the potential consequences of those choices and deciding whether this is what they want or need to do.
  
  

Just pause for a moment and consider two different emotional states: happiness and sadness. Reflect on how you feel when you are happy; where that feeling of happiness sits; how it affects the way you carry yourself; how you feel when you smile or laugh; how you relate to other people. Now consider the same points when you reflect on how you feel when you are sad. Now imagine you are sitting waiting to emerge at a busy junction in a sad state and then in a happy state. Does your emotional state affect your judgement of a safe gap? The answer is ‘Yes’ but the extent to which it affects your ability to make a decision depends on you and will vary from individual to individual. In order to make a safe decision to go I have to consider my emotional state and understand how it influences my thought processes and my behaviour. I will drive differently depending on how I feel and I will develop strategies to help my decision-making process based on my recognition of my emotional state. Sadness slows down my ability to make decisions. I am more hesitant. Happiness may encourage me to take more risks and I may emerge into gaps that are too small.

It is the use of essential coaching skills that empowers our trainee drivers to recognise how their thoughts, feelings and behaviour are inextricably linked.

There is one more essential coaching skill I want to discuss and that is the use of Intuition.

• As driving instructors we are able to use our intuition in many ways. We recognise when our customers are feeling nervous as their shoulders tense and the grip on the steering wheel tightens or they sit forwards in their seat when the demands of the task suddenly increase. The physical tension will make them tire more quickly and affect their ability to focus on the hazards and risks outside of the car. We know instinctively when they are thinking about changing gear before they have even done so or when they have mis-interpreted our instructions and are about to signal left when they should be going right.
  
   
  
  It is important that we use our intuition to develop coping strategies in our customers. They need to understand how their behaviour is a reflection of their thoughts and feelings. If something becomes too difficult for them to manage and we notice this in their behaviour then we need to identify this to them so that they can work out for themselves the link between the way they are thinking and feeling and the way they are behaving.
  
   
  
  For example, one of my customers struggles with busy junctions and roundabouts. Often she will end up stalling. I noticed that on the approach to these junctions she would take her left hand off the steering wheel and place it on the handbrake. When we pulled up to discuss this I used my intuition - I knew that her hand going down to the handbrake was because she was feeling nervous about the busy junction and wanted to make sure she could stop the car. The problem with this is that she was ‘thinking stop’ whereas she really needed to be ‘thinking go’ and getting the car ready to go by slipping into first gear and holding it on the bite.
  
   
  
  I could have told her all this and she would have practised it and got it. However, she wouldn’t have had the chance to reflect on her nervous state and appreciate how this emotion was governing her behaviour. So, instead, I scaled her on how nervous she felt approaching these junctions and she said she rose from a 4 to a 9. I then asked her where she was on the scale when her hand went down to the handbrake. We had to go and practise this for a couple of junctions for her to identify that when she got to a 9 her hand went to the handbrake. Only once she had realised that her behaviour was a direct result of her feelings was she able to rationalise her fear. She realised that her fear was producing risky behaviour – the opposite of her intention. By encouraging her to keep her hand on the wheel until she needed to change gear and getting her to ‘think go’ she was able to bring her nervousness back down to 4 and keep it there. In this case, her behaviour now governed her emotions.
  
   
  
  Intuition, therefore, is about recognising a mis-match between behaviour, thoughts and feelings. Someone might start yawning when you are giving them a briefing. Your intuition tells you that they are no longer paying attention and processing what you are saying to them – they have stopped learning and you need to change your methods.
  
  

To become good coaches and remain client-centred at all times we need to develop our ability to use these five essential coaching skills. We can only do this through constant practice, reflection and evaluation and it is a long process that will not happen overnight. When you come across someone, who you think cannot be coached, ask yourself whether you have been using these essential coaching skills effectively enough.