The Heart of Coaching (and Leadership) Mastery: Evoking Awareness

One of the most powerful questions in coaching and leadership is…

“What are you now aware of?”

It’s a version of questions such as, “what have you learned?” or, “what’s shifting?”.

We have over 60,000 thoughts a day, and are only aware of 1% of them. That’s a whole lot happening in our subconscious, and without intention! Yet, herein lies the power and purpose of coaching - to bring what’s unconscious to our conscious thinking. It’s where transformation, change, and growth begins.

Here’s what I’ve personally been aware of recently…

The ICF has just come out with an updated Core Competency model on September 8th, 2025, six years after a major competency overhaul. These changes may seem like minor edits, but they are signals of where the coaching profession is heading and what will matter most as we continue to grow as practitioners. The message is clear: coaching is becoming more relational, more self-aware, and more rigorous in its expectations of presence, professionalism, and partnership.

Being the coach-nerd I am, I hosted a webinar translating the updates. If you’d like to dive deep into understanding the new changes, have a listen HERE. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did facilitating!

Within this updated framework, and as a thread in the last iterations, Evoking Awareness still stands out as both a foundation and a frontier of mastery. 

For MCC-level coaching, this competency is the bread and butter of the work. It’s what differentiates our industry from others like therapy, mentoring, consulting, and so on. Awareness is where active listening, rigorous curiosity, and powerful presence converge to help clients see themselves differently, not just solve a problem. 

When coaches act as thinking partners to their clients - and not just conveyors of an answer - we can explore layers way beyond the presenting issue. Because, folks, the presenting problem is NEVER the problem (well, never say never, but you know what I mean) - it’s a symptom of it. Otherwise, if the presenting problem were IT, the client would’ve resolved it long before they brought it to coaching!

Coaches that evoke depth of exploration and insight understand that transformation doesn’t come from answers, it comes from awareness. Awareness leads to responsibility, which invites choice and change. And awareness only emerges when we coach the person, not the problem.

When coaching executives and team leaders, oftentimes I see this as the crux of many breakdowns: instead of teaching other people what to do, we need to teach them how to THINK. And how do we do this? Through evoking their awareness as a thinking partner, instead of a problem solver.

Awareness is a rich, layered topic. From birth, our ability to develop rests on our capacity to become conscious of ourselves, of others, and of the environments we move through. But in coaching, evoking awareness masterfully can seem like the toughest skill to transform from a formula into an art-form. Why? Because it requires us unhook ourselves from our human design: the need to fix, to know, to seek the threat and resolve the problem, to prove our value. 

Masterfully Evoking Awareness calls for 4 key components:

1. Partnered exploration - inviting the other person’s creative thought process, leveraging their learning and language

2. Precise, powerful questions - a depth, a simplicity that cuts through complexity, asking questions you don’t have answers to

3. Who and What - holding both the goal-growth and the holistic human-growth simultaneously

4. Rigorous curiosity - surrendering, not knowing, reflective, not stepping over anything

This is where the path of Mastery, and IGNITE Mastery Program, comes in. Too often, coaches give up on the MCC path not because they lack technical skills, but because they lack the inner transformation that makes those skills sustainable - an unlearning and a re-learning that goes against our human designs and defaults. IGNITE was designed to bridge that gap, providing the tools and techniques but more importantly, the transformation while building them. 

Whether IGNITE is the course for you or you decide to go elsewhere, I invite you to keep this in mind - expanding your self-awareness alongside your coaching capacity, equipping you to navigate the moments when you or your client is confronted, challenged, or unsure, IS Mastery. Make sure you're working with an MCC Supervisor, your own coach, or a personal mentor. Don't "reach the peak and miss the point" :).

Because coaching mastery, (and leadership mastery!), starts with self-mastery. 

The more we understand our own language and behaviors, the more grounded, present, curious, and partnered we become for our clients. That’s when evoking awareness transforms into more than a competency, it becomes a way of being in life… my favorite part of the transformative journey of coaching :). 

Ultimately, the 2025 ICF Core Competency updates affirm that coaching is evolving toward greater depth, professionalism, and humanity. Evoking awareness sits at the center of that shift. It is the competency that turns transactional coaching into transformational coaching. When we practice evoking awareness with ourselves as much as with our clients, we don’t just guide others into growth, we ignite awareness in our own lives as well.

Onward, awareness-lovers!

With deep love,  Lisa