Nancy Kline’s approach – coaching in a thinking environment

Sometimes the good intention of the coach can get in the way of the client making progress in their thinking and this is behind Nancy Kline’s question – who is the expert anyway? So to generate the coachee’s best thinking the coach works to create the thinking environment for the coachee in the coaching time.
The Components of the Thinking Environment

These are the behaviours and ingredients of the thinking environment that Nancy Kline has brought together as a framework to generate best thinking:

Attention – listening with respect, interest and without interruption
Equality – treating each other as thinking peers, giving equal turns and attention
Ease – offering freedom from internal rush or urgency
Appreciation – offering genuine acknowledgement of a person’s qualities, practicing 5:1 ratio of appreciation to criticism
Encouragement – giving courage to go to the cutting edge of ideas by moving beyond internal competition
Feelings – allowing sufficient emotional release to restore thinking
Information – supplying the fact and dismantling denial
Diversity – welcoming divergent thinking and diverse group identities
Incisive questions – removing assumptions that limit our ability to think for ourselves clearly and creatively
Place – creating a physical environment that says to people ‘you matter’.
Practical Time to Think Partnership Sessions

The Thinking partnership session provides a process for discoveries, a route through issues using what’s real and specific and doable for the individual working with a coach who is the thinking partner. It works – Give it a go!
Kline, N (2015) More time to Think: the power of independent thinking. Cassell