ALIFE™: A Listening Model for Coaching

Abstract

AGROUP OF COACHES, SITTING AROUND a conference table, sharing their best practices. Batting ideas around. Getting juice from the life in the discussion. One of them, Neil Stroul, offered up a framework that he had developed to organize the stories he was hearing from leaders, and he said that this framework helped him calibrate how he listened. We talked about what a leader has to do, what and how a leader thinks, and how a leader ought to learn. One of the other coaches, Karen Gravenstine, mused aloud that these organizing principles could be reordered to create an acronym “ALIFE.” We’ve used it that way ever since.