When I had received coaching in the past, I was very impressed and encouraged when my coach was able to not just recall what I had said in previous sessions but could even repeat back to me the exact phrasing that I used to state my goals and realizations. Ever since then I knew that this was something I wanted to be able to do as a coach. That desire had manifested itself into furious note-taking.
Taking notes is also something that I do to stay focused and present, but in a peer coaching exercise sometime later, I realized that my consistent typing and looking away can be distracting and can even in a way prevent a real connection from developing. Even though it helps me focus on what I am hearing, it is definitely causing me to miss important visual cues, body language, microexpressions, and even nuanced tonal or language shifts that I would have otherwise been able to pick up on in order to tug on the right threads and move the conversation along more meaningfully.
I am learning that it might be hard to employ any levels of listening beyond Scharmer's first level of habitual listening and simply downloading information while taking notes the way I am used to. If I am to listen with an open mind, open heart, and open will, I need to find a different way. In speaking with other coaches and asking about what they do I realized that one way would be to take my notes asynchronously. If my clients are comfortable with recording our sessions, I could listen after the fact and take my notes. If they prefer that I not record, then I can have a pen and paper to record brief notes sparingly during the session and then build on those immediately after the session. It is going to be important for me to build in time after and between sessions to download all my mental notes.
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