WHAT IS AWARENESS BASED COACHING (ABC)?
awareness based coaching. verb. - Strategic trust-based partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that focuses on cultivating and deepening personal awareness as the primary foundation for enhancing the quality and skillfulness of the client's relationship with Self and and others - resulting in significantly enhanced personal and professional effectiveness.
In addition to standard executive coaching tools, at Level 5 we also use a tool that we developed - called Awareness Based Coaching (ABC) - to help clients deepen self-awareness in relation to internal and external stimulii.
WHY? Brain science over the last 10 years has demonstrated that most thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur automatically. In other words, they are habit-based. The same science also demonstrates that habits, in turn, are triggered by feelings and preconditioned thought patterns.
What does this finding mean about our ability to maintain consistently high-levels of effectiveness, or our ability to be at the “top of our game?”
Awareness and intention can shift habits and reactive patterns to responsive patterns. Through personal observation and practice we can learn to see our Selves and the impact we have on others more clearly.
We always start where we are. Using the Level 5 ABC model, this first step is supported through regular practice and observation - simply “asking” what we see happening within ourselves.
"Leadership itself hinges on effectively capturing and directing the collective attention. Leading attention requires focusing on your own attention . . . then attracting and directing attention from others, and getting and keeping the attention of employees and peers, customers or clients.
A leader's field of attention - that is, the particular issues and goals that she focuses on - guides the attention of those who follow her, whether or not the leader explicitly articultes it."
Daniel Goleman
"Open awareness refers to our ability to observe conditions as they are, without feeling the need to change them. While this may sound passive to our action oriented ears, the ability to rest comfortably in the present moment, regardless of its imperfections, is the foundation of all true happiness.
Open awareness leads to acceptance. Acceptance leads to the end of conflict. The cessation of conflict leads to clarity of purpose and vision, which leads in turn to skilfull action.
Sharon Salzberg