Learning to Witness
There’s a book that’s been sitting within arm’s reach for weeks now. Its chapters are short and independent enough that I keep picking it up and rereading a random one: Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being.
The other day I opened it and landed on the chapter called “Awareness.” Rubin’s definition of awareness struck me enough that I pulled a piece of it into the image above.
Years ago, while training in the Gestalt Coaching Program, Dorothy Siminovitch introduced two ideas that, looking back, turned out to be foundational to my entire career: the “Awareness Agent” and “Awareness Intelligence.” Whether I’m coaching an individual or a team, the work almost always comes back to the same goal, creating awareness.
Rubin draws a distinction in the book that I keep returning to. In most of our daily life, we set the agenda. We set a goal, build a strategy, make a plan. We’re the ones running the program.
Awareness works from an entirely different place. As Rubin puts it, “The world is the doer and we are the witness.” The world turns. People speak. Our bodies send signals. Feelings and thoughts arrive, pass through, and leave. Before anything else, we’re learning to witness them.
Two different modes
What we’re really talking about are two operating modes. One sets goals, plans, acts, produces outcomes. The other simply stays present, observes, makes contact. Both are necessary. The problem is that most of us spend almost all our time in the first mode and rarely switch on the second.
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One of the most common blocks I see as a coach starts exactly here. Someone is trying to solve a problem, can’t quite get there, and responds by producing more strategy, more planning. What’s often missing isn’t a better plan. It’s the pause to actually see what’s there first.
In the Gestalt approach, awareness means making real contact with something before trying to change it. Before analyzing it, interpreting it, explaining it, or fixing it. Simply noticing what is, as it is.
That’s easy to say and hard to do, because we’re wired to be doers. We see something and immediately start thinking about what to do with it. We feel something and immediately look for a way to explain it away or get rid of it. Witnessing means suspending that reflex, even briefly.
The quiet moment in coaching
Something similar happens in coaching. The most valuable moment is rarely the moment I ask a clever question. It’s usually the moment a client notices something they had never noticed before. And more often than not, that moment doesn’t come from something I said. It comes from a silence I held, just being present.
The same holds true in team settings. In sessions run with methods like LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, people build something with their hands and touch an awareness they couldn’t have reached through words alone. In that room, I’m not the doer, I’m the witness. My job is to notice what the hands, the faces, the silences are already saying, and to make room for the group to arrive at its own awareness.
This is exactly where good coaching, good leadership, and good facilitation overlap. Not analyzing faster. Not offering advice sooner, ever. Seeing clearly first.
It applies to leadership too
This isn’t limited to a coaching room. The same distinction shows up when you’re running a team, or a meeting. A leader who stays permanently in doer mode tries to solve every problem instantly, fill every silence, resolve every bit of uncertainty right away. But sometimes what a team needs isn’t a solution from the leader. It’s the leader actually stopping to listen. That’s the first level of listening, in fact: setting your own agenda aside long enough to hear the other person without assumptions.
Change rarely starts with new information. It starts with new awareness. And that awareness usually arrives the moment we stop doing, and remember to witness.
