Burger Bites: Intuition

The Burger Bites Series Is Designed To Bring You A Taste Of Coaching.

The word intuition has some connotations that place it in a box to be easily dismissed. For example, intuition is sometimes considered to be a paranormal experience like a psychic ability available to only especially sensitive people. It’s disregarded as nagging worries and concerns without logical foundation in the phrase “woman’s intuition.” But coaching has a creative and surprisingly realistic view of intuition that reclaims it as a powerful tool available to all of us.

Intuition is such a demystified concept in coaching that it’s almost a practical thing. As part of understanding and then communicating what we understand, each of us calls up memories and images associated with what we are experiencing or hearing. Automatically, outside of our conscious awareness most of the time, part of our logical thinking brain is tossing aside memories and images that show up but don’t quickly make sense.

This executive function is like a personal assistant to our busy-CEO minds. It filters out the insignificant and provides us with only the most relevant information. For example, a co-worker talks about breakfast and immediately a cluster of images and memories appear. They include our favorite breakfast items, special breakfast ideas, a typical farm breakfast from childhood at grandma’s, the lighter fruit and bread breakfast from our international travels, and so on. But because he also says, “while I was getting the kids ready for school,” farm breakfasts and international breakfasts and special breakfast memories are tossed out, leaving cereal and milk, pop tarts, and maybe oatmeal as the best-fit images.

It’s completely possible the breakfast was something special and elaborate, like an egg based casserole, or something international that the man enjoys fixing for his children. This filtering process isn’t perfect. It’s just efficient. The more likely answers become our automatic assumptions. To a degree, we are all lazy thinkers processing information in predictable ruts, filling in what we expect a person will say or what our experiences should be based on past formulas.

Intuition in coaching is essentially about the coach softening up that filter a little bit to let the chatter of other images and ideas come in. It’s not mystical or supernatural. In fact, it’s pretty scientific, when you consider that our bodies are sending a huge volume of sensory information to our brains at all times and our minds are ignoring a lot of it. A coach actively chooses to pay attention to more of the input and more of the associated images that show up.

Imagine the co-worker is now a coaching client, and he’s explaining to his coach that he was frustrated that his schedule change would keep him from being able to make breakfast for his children once a week as he currently does. The filter says “man making breakfast” and “breakfast for kids on a school morning” and throws away everything but the easy-to-prepare answers. But the coach, open to her intution, gets an image of a memorable but simple breakfast she enjoyed while traveling in Europe.

She doesn’t realize it at the time, but the client’s emotional investment in this regular ritual is associated with her fondness for the simplicity and tradition of her ritual of having fresh local cheese, fresh fruit, and some freshly baked bread with coffee and steamed milk. Trained to honor her intuition, she tells the client about her memory and the image. Since intuition has no special power associated with it in coaching, the coach has taught the client she will share her intuitive images at times to see if they resonate. If they do, they move the client’s understanding and self-awareness forward. If not, they are tossed aside, in an active version of the preconscious filter.

She says, “I have an image that is connected to a memory from my travels in Europe. For a few days I had a ritual of eating a very special but simple breakfast that was the local custom.” She goes on to describe the image to her client. He says, “I had an experience kind of like that. I would visit my great aunt while we spent summers with my grandparents. She would fix homemade hot chocolate, not the powder kind, by heating milk and melting a piece of chocolate bar in each cup. Then she would serve us lightly sweetened breads, kind of like a croissant but smaller and glazed with sugar. That’s what I fix for my kids, except I buy croissants and just warm them up and sprinkle sugar on them. And I make sure they have fruit, too, because my wife is always counting the servings of fruits and vegetables.”

The coach’s image, though not a prescient message from the supernatural, connects with the client’s experience because the emotional importance she associates with the memory of a breakfast ritual resonates with the emotional importance of his breakfast ritual. From there he is able to see that the breakfast time is his way of sharing the tradition his great aunt taught him, which he experiences as a special sort of family love and connection. Once he thinks about it, he is able to identify other ways to share family traditions with his children while his weekly breakfast with them is interrupted.

The client not only finds a solution to the immediate problem, but he also becomes aware of the importance of his routine so that he can make it a more mindful activity. He can plan ways to honor the value of tradition, and he can experience the enjoyment and the meaning of sharing traditions with his children more fully because he is aware of how important family traditions are to him.

There are times when a coach’s intuitive image resonates so strongly with a client that it feels like a metaphysical or spiritual experience. There are times when the image the coach sees is uniquely and personally meaningful to the client, but the coach cannot figure out where in his or her own experience that image originated. It seems like it came from a place where the client is well known, not from the coach.

Jungian psychology addresses this sort of connection as synchronicity, where the collective unconscious component of each person’s mind can communicate with another person’s collective unconscious through shared images and symbols. Religious people may interpret this as a message from a spiritual being, such as an angel or an all-knowing god. Metaphysically focused people might see it as communication on the level of energy vibrations or quantum particles, where everything is essentially the same and of one essence.

Coaching doesn’t bother with the source of intuition. It merely acknowledges that intuition exists, that one person can become aware of an image that doesn’t have an immediate logical connection to what another person is saying, but that still might be meaningful to that person. Coaching teaches the coach to be open to sharing the images and to let the client decide if they are useful or not. This amplifies communication and accelerates understanding between coach and client.