Active Listening for Coaches
Active listening is the discipline of hearing what a person actually means - their words, their tone, and what they are not saying - rather than waiting for your turn to speak.
Three levels rise from hearing your own thoughts up to hearing what the other person leaves unsaid.
Reach for this when…
- You notice you are listening for the gap to insert your advice.
- A coachee talks a lot but the conversation never deepens.
- You want to raise the quality of your presence, not add another technique.
How to run it
- Learn the three levels: Level 1, hearing through your own filters; Level 2, focused fully on the speaker; Level 3, picking up tone, energy and what is left unsaid.
- Notice which level you default to under pressure. Most people drop to Level 1 the moment they want to fix.
- Practise staying at Level 2 or 3 - hold the silence, resist the reply.
- Use silence itself as listening. The pause is where the real thing often surfaces.
- Afterwards, ask what shifted when the listening deepened.
A worked example
Situation. Claire Tremblay, an internal coach at a logistics firm in Montreal, ran sessions that felt productive but never got below the surface.
Applied. She practised staying at Level 3, holding the silence three seconds longer instead of filling it, listening for what her client was not saying.
Result. Her client moved past the tidy version of the problem to the one underneath. Nothing was added but attention.
The catch
Listening this way is tiring and cannot be faked - people feel the difference between attention and performance. Held too long, silence tips into discomfort. And listening is not agreement; hearing someone fully does not mean conceding the point.
You cannot listen at Level 3 while rehearsing your reply. Choose one.
Origin: Co-Active Training Institute (Whitworth, Kimsey-House, Kimsey-House, Sandahl); building on Carl Rogers' foundational work on listening