Refine Your Listening: Hear Less, Coach Better

What if listening did not consist of hearing everything, but in choosing what truly matters?

In this article, I share an insight that deeply transformed my coaching practice. Between “listening too much” and “listening better,” there is a subtle inner shift that often goes unnoticed.

Discover how to refine your listening to capture what is essential and trigger real breakthroughs.

Key Takeaways

• Skilled listening for coaches is a practice of selective attention, noticing the moments that carry the most weight (a value, a belief, an emotion) rather than trying to retain everything a client says.
• Great coaches listen for a client’s underlying values, emotions, and beliefs, rather than getting pulled into every detail of their story to create space for real breakthroughs.
• ICF Core Competency 6: Listens Actively, asks coaches to notice what’s unspoken — emotions, patterns, energy — not just a client’s literal words.

Refining Your Listening: What Took Me Time to Understand

I remember very clearly this remark from my mentor when I was preparing for my MCC accreditation: “You still need to refine your listening.”

At that moment, I struggled to grasp this concept, and I did not know how to approach it concretely. How can one refine something as intangible as listening? Especially when the client talks a lot. I was already listening attentively. I was reflecting. I was following the thread.

It took me a few more years to understand that, in fact, refining one’s listening consists of deliberately letting a lot of information pass without trying to internalize it all! This is what I call the listening sieve. A large part of what the client says passes through the small fine mesh of the sieve without my trying to retain it. And at times, there is a bigger element that remains in the sieve. These are the nuggets that the coach must seize to lead directly to awareness and transformation. Like a gold prospector, there are few gold nuggets in the river — coaching is the same!

With time, experience, and supervision, I understood that listening is:

• Not only being attentive.
• Not capturing everything.
• Not trying to understand what the client says.
• Choosing what we listen to.
• Knowing how not to listen to everything.

When I work with peers in mentoring on this topic, we have fun highlighting the important passages of their session, especially when they tell me, “There were so many elements, it confused me!” We then discover that out of about twenty lines corresponding to the transcription of the client’s words, only 2 or 3 ideas are highlighted. All the rest are not really usable. It is often repetition, more detailed information about the situation, or about others. Only a few elements that truly concern the client (fear, emotions, values, beliefs, needs, behavior, etc.) can be useful to the coach in triggering awareness.

What “Refining Your Listening” Really Means

One of the major paradoxes of coaching is this: to hear deeply, one must not listen too closely.

Many coaches dive in with their client, immerse themselves in the story, follow every detail, and try to retain and understand everything. Ultimately, they get carried away by the current, and the more they know about the situation, the more preoccupied they become with the problem and the more they feel the urge to solve it instead of allowing the client to do so.

Refining one’s listening is, above all, letting oneself be carried by the flow of the client’s personality rather than by that of the situation. Thus, it is about taking a step back, stepping out of the flow, and changing one’s inner posture.

Practicing refined listening is like sitting in a referee’s chair, two meters above the ground. From up there, we do not see less. We see differently. We capture overall movements, repetitions in key words, invisible tensions.

This more aerial view also allows listening on three levels simultaneously:

• The client: what they say, show, and express.
• Ourselves: what it activates in us
• The relationship: what is happening in the space between us.

It is in this space that phenomena such as resonance or systemic reflections can appear, which constitute part of the famous gold nuggets to be returned to the client.

Active Listening According to ICF Core Competency 6

ICF Core Competency 6, Listens Actively, is not limited to hearing the client’s words, verbal or non-verbal. It invites the coach to:

• Be attentive to what is said and what is not said.
• Perceive emotions, values, and beliefs.
• Notice patterns of thinking and behaving.
• Listen to the client in their entirety: language, energy, posture, and relationship with the coach.

But above all, this competency is about listening to the client’s potential more than the problem. This posture aligns with what Otto Scharmer calls generative listening in his Theory U.

Generative listening consists of welcoming the future that is being created within the client. It invites the coach to no longer only listen to what is said, but to what is seeking to emerge.

Some Practical Tips and Exercises to Refine Your Listening

• Review transcripts of your sessions to:
  • Become aware of the amount of information you could have let pass through the sieve, and that gave you the impression of overload at the time.
  • Highlight the few nuggets that illuminated a path to explore to access the core of the client’s blocks or potential more directly, such as 1 word, 2 ideas repeated twice, a belief expressed subtly, etc.
  • Observe the link between your questions and the nuggets. Did you go anywhere other than the illuminated path? Did you build on the nuggets?
• Review your personal notes and observe: Everything that, in the end, we did not reuse during or even after the session. On the contrary, did you note the nuggets? Too many notes can disrupt our listening. It is up to each person to find the right balance between what is useful and what may be distracting.
• Consciously set aside what interferes with your listening. Before each session, take a moment to mentally say: “Here is what I put in the trash so as not to disrupt my listening” e.g., concern about timing, markers, desire to do too well, fear of missing something, personal preoccupations…)” and on the contrary, “here is what I seek to hear” (values, needs, fears, beliefs, desires, ways of thinking and acting).
• Do not react too quickly during the session. Something that shines catches the eye and sometimes makes us react too quickly, but it also cuts us off from real listening. Leave a few seconds before seizing it.
• Stay in contact with what is there.
• Be curious before thinking you understood.
• Stay connected to what the element heard or observed creates in you.
• Let it emerge rather than concluding too quickly.
• Take a step back. During the session, regularly ask yourself: “Am I in the client’s story or listening to what the client is making of it?” or “Am I in the referee’s chair or in the pool swimming with the client?” This shift is key.
• Give back the reins to your client. If you got lost in all the information given to you, give the reins back to your client by saying, for example: “We have been talking for xx minutes; what are the elements you already identify as truly essential to help you move forward?”

Questions for Reflection

• Am I trying to understand the story, or the client’s perception?
• At what moment do I shift into the desire to solve?
• What do I listen to the most: the problem or the potential?
• What do I feel during the session and what do I do with it?
• What is my ability to listen to the relationship itself?

In Conclusion

Refining your listening is not about listening more attentively, but about listening from another place. It means moving from:

• Listening only to the client’s content to listening for perception of the important details.
• Immersion in the story to elevation above it.
• Understanding the present moment to listening for what is emerging.

And this is often where coaching becomes truly transformative.

To Go Further

• Interview of Sandrine Saliba by Brighton West on ICF Core Competency 6
• Otto Scharmer’s work
• Theory U Overview
• Theory U: Generative listening