A Coaching Power Tool By Benny Callaghan, Leadership and Life Coach, AUSTRALIA
What Is the Difference Between Confusion vs. Clarity
We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.—Talmud
Coaching creates clarity. It is a powerful process for thinking through problems and finding clear pathways to success.
Clients often come to sessions with unclear ideas about how to achieve their goals. Often, people have given a lot of thought and attention to the problems they are facing or the goals they are pursuing. But in the process of exploring multiple ideas and options, thinking can get confused, and hard to know where to start.
The Universal Experience of Confusion
The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.― Shannon L. Alder
Confusion. noun.
a situation in which people are uncertain about what to do or are unable to understand something clearly.
—Britannica Dictionary[i]
I have experienced confusion in many areas of my life—what career path to take, whether to leave a job, my sexuality, or whether to move cities. Confusion can have many qualities, including trying to balance divergent ideas, weighing up multiple options, or making choices where the heart says one thing and the head says another.
Confusion is a state where one’s perspective gets muddled and can come about when one type of thinking (head, heart, or body) competes with or gets ‘preferenced’ over another.
A classic way people try to resolve confusion is to create a ‘pros and cons list. By listing and weighing varying inputs, the intention is to determine which option is the best one. While these approaches may have value in some situations, they often prefer rational thinking to the exclusion of considering how one feels or knows instinctively.
For example, one could rationally convince themselves to stay in a job if a pros list favors certain benefits. While I don’t want to be dismissive of a pros-and-cons list, I do suggest there are other ways to find clarity.
Noticing When You’re Experiencing Confusion
From experience, it’s not unusual for a client to come to coaching seeking clarity around an issue and to have already done a lot of thinking to try to solve the challenge. But not all thinking is necessarily productive and it’s possible for the client to have done so much thinking and research that they’ve worked themselves into a more confused position.
You might hear a client say, “I’m confused” or “I’m lost.” There are other signs like speaking endlessly on a topic without getting to the point, giving conflicting information, a consistent inability to arrive at a decision, or generally feeling stuck.
It’s important to notice confusion with compassion. The etymology of confusion is the Middle English word confus, meaning “frustrated, ruined.” Confusion can come with feelings of frustration and disappointment.
According to Berios, when he studied the history of confusion, it was often associated with “chaotic thinking and cognitive failure.”[ii] This may sound extreme, but it points to a situation where one’s thinking is no longer working productively.
What Creates Confusion?
We are constantly inundated with inputs from outside of us—family, friends, media, social media, social norms, and cultural expectations. The number of inputs can destabilize our thinking and distract us from listening inwardly to what is most important to us.
For those with a strong mind orientation, there can be a tendency to want to think one’s way out of a problem. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but overthinking can lead to disconnecting from body awareness and a sense of how one feels about a situation. Later, in looking at confusion’s alternative, we’ll find the pathway is aided when it considers not just thinking, but also how one feels about a situation.
Confusion can also come about from trying to hold a lot of information you can’t yet make sense of. This can come about through the information not aligning with your mental model’ of the situation, requiring a new way of looking at it.
Confusion vs. Clarity: Clarity as the Flipside to Confusion
Clarity precedes success.—Robin Sharma[iii]
Clarity is the moment we see without opening our eyes.-Stephanie Banks, A Soulful Awakening[iv]
Several clients have named clarity as the desired alternative to confusion.
Clarity seems to be a universally understood idea, easily translatable across languages and cultures. This may be aided by its bodily connection to the senses of sight and hearing, like when people talk about seeing a situation clearly or hearing clearly. These senses offer an ability to ground oneself and reduce reliance on the analytical mind.
The etymology of clarity also has a poetic quality. Coming from the 13th Century claret, it means “brightness, radiance, glory, splendor.”[v] Who doesn’t want these qualities?
Clarity can offer many benefits for a client:
- New insights or perspectives into their situation or goal;
- Awareness of how one thinks or seeks solutions to challenges;
- A deeper connection to one’s body awareness, feelings, values, and other ways of thinking and being.
The Path From Confusion to Clarity
When confusion feels set in, the path to a new perspective may not be as simple as ‘flipping it’. While you may identify wanting clarity, you may also doubt how to get there. After all, if it was as simple as ‘flipping it,’ they would have done it already.
Instead, when flipping to clarity isn’t easy, I’ve discovered several tools that can help the client navigate toward this new ‘flipped’ perspective:
- Flipping through feeling
- Keep it simple
- Getting a helicopter view
- Using metaphor
- Decluttering
- Feeling a sense of clarity
- Inviting a client to act on clarity
Flipping Through Feeling
Earlier it was identified that confusion can come about through a process of overthinking. Even if the path to clarity is found via new ways of thinking (e.g., metaphor, new perspectives), it’s also important to consider how one feels about the situation.
This helps bring the orientation from outside of oneself (referencing ideas or inputs from others) to identifying with the sensation of where clarity resides. While this might be difficult for some clients to access initially, inviting reflections like this can help ground one’s understanding of where and how they can access their internal wisdom.
Questions might include:
- How would you like to feel?
- What does clarity feel like? (If they identified clarity as the desired feeling.)
- What name would you give to this feeling? (If clarity doesn’t land as the right word.)
- How does it feel now that you have this perspective?
- Where in your body does clarity live?
- How might you access that clarity in the future?
Getting a Helicopter View
On many occasions, I have noticed a heightened state of clarity comes when on an airplane. Somehow being at 30,000 feet, I get to have a higher perspective on my life. Creating distance helps me detach from feelings I often feel ‘stuck’ in. I’ve also discovered, however, that I don’t need to get on a physical plane to get a higher perspective.
One client described her confusion as feeling like being ‘lost in the forest.’ I invited her to zoom out and look at the forest from a helicopter view. I asked what insights that new viewpoint offered her. At first, it was difficult, but in remaining silent and giving her time to process, she came to a different perspective.
This analogy of seeing the forest (the bigger picture) and the trees (the minutia) is helpful for those who work readily with metaphor. Outside of a client using the specific metaphor of a forest, on several occasions I have had good results when asking,
What new insights do you perceive when you zoom out and look at this situation from a higher perspective?
Using Metaphor
The starting place is often to notice and acknowledge a metaphor one is repeatedly using. A question may then be,
How is that metaphor shaping the way you think about the situation?
This question is typically difficult to answer quickly but offers a powerful moment of pause to recognize the way one is thinking about a situation. For example, if you see the situation as a ‘mountain,’ it conjures up a way of thinking about it as being one that requires tenacity, challenge, and determination. This is an altogether different way of looking at a situation when compared with that of a ‘river,’ which may invite reflecting on a situation as ‘going with the flow.’
One client is fluent in using metaphors, often introducing several nature-based metaphors in a session. Rather than invite the client to think of a specific metaphor, which would be leading, I opt to ask:
What metaphors can you think of that could help you see this situation in a more empowered or clear way?
One time, in response to this question, the client identified an intertidal zone at a beach and the specific creatures that live in rock pools. It was part of a natural ecosystem she was highly familiar with, while I was very unfamiliar. The coach doesn’t need to be an expert in the subject matter to ask insightful questions. Simply invite the client to think more deeply about the metaphor they have chosen. I asked follow-up questions like,
- How does this metaphor help you think about this situation differently?
- What wisdom could you take from this after the session?
The highly visual nature of metaphor adds power to a reframed perspective. This visual reference can easily be carried with the client after the session.
Decluttering
One of my peer coaches, ICA graduate Maya Rooz[vi], is a decluttering expert. She shared with me a powerful insight about clarity and decluttering. Maya recognized that not all inputs and ideas are equal. Decluttering her thinking and removing those areas of consideration that were distracting helps her home on what is most important.
Connect With Values
If the confusion is coming from juggling multiple ideas and inputs from outside sources, it can present a great opportunity to help the client connect with their values.
- When you look at this situation or goal from the place of your values, what comes to mind?
- How might these values offer a different way of seeing the situation?
Inviting the client to act on clarity
Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.—ThomasSzasz[vii]
Coaching places a strong emphasis on turning insight into action. If one is prone to thinking and will likely go into more reflection after the coaching session, identifying tangible actions can be helpful.
This tool doesn’t only invite new perspectives on what the client is exploring. It also provides an opportunity to unpack how the client thinks. Possible questions to ask the client to reflect on their thinking could include:
- What have you discovered about how to shift from states of confusion to clarity?
- How might you apply these tools to future situations?
References
[i]https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/confusion
[ii]G E Berrios, “Delirium and confusion in the 19th century: a conceptual history,”
[iii]Robin Sharma (2006). “The Greatness Guide: One of the World's Most Successful Coaches Shares His Secrets for Personal and Business Mastery”, p.88, Jaico Publishing House
[iv]Banks, Stephanie (2014). A Soulful Awakening. Balboa Press.
[v]https://www.etymonline.com/word/clarity
[vi]Maya Rooz, www.mayarooz.com
[vii]https://www.upstate.edu/whatsup/2014/0807-clear-thinking-requires-courage-said-the-late-dr-szasz.php