An important ingredient in successful coaching is self-awareness. In fact it could be argued that it is the most important step towards successful coaching and that, without it, any positive impact of the coaching will be negligible and short-lived. I would go so far as to suggest that self-awareness is core to our behaviour, a control centre that monitors and regulates our interactions and our effectiveness in all walks of life, not least in managing and leading others.
In coaching, when you ask people how they feel, the vast majority of people will have a reasonably clear and articulate response. They may be happy, sad, frustrated, annoyed, excited and so on.
But the real challenge emerges when you ask people to describe how they make others feel. While some may be switched on to this, far fewer people are able to clearly express how they make others feel.
A recent paper in the European Journal of Personality builds on research into what’s known as ‘affective presence’. This is the extent to which we elicit emotions in others. Several different studies suggest that this is a trait that we all share – much like assertiveness or sociability – and that it varies between us.
To understand affective presence, the researchers measured the way that people consistently left others feeling over the course of several interactions. These feelings were then rated and the scores were correlated with other trait characteristics.
What did they find? Most importantly, the strength of our affective presence has a marked positive (or negative) impact on the degree to which: we connect with others; we leave others feeling positive; and the extent to which we enthuse and motivate others. Interestingly individuals with higher levels of affective presence also have higher levels of emotional regulation (they manage their reactions in pressured situations) and have higher emotional expressiveness (they share how they are feeling). They also have significantly higher levels of agreeableness.
So what? Well, if affective presence is a trait then it will be measurable. If it’s measurable, then it may provide useful feedback and insights that will be helpful in coaching and development to raise self-awareness. And in the process, it may be one of the keys to developing greater self-awareness over a long period of time and, with it, greater leadership effectiveness.
