How Openmind Will Help Measure the Size of the Coaching Challenge
In coaching, one of the most immediate and complex challenges a coach faces is assessing a client’s self-awareness. A coach needs to understand not only what a client consciously knows about themselves but also what may lie beneath their awareness—the implicit attitudes, biases, and tendencies that shape behavior without conscious intention. This is where Openmind, a tool designed to measure both explicit and implicit personality traits, offers a revolutionary advantage. By delving into these layers of self-awareness, Openmind enables a coach to gain a nuanced picture of a client's personal challenges, aspirations, and authentic self-perception.
The Role of Self-Awareness in Coaching
Self-awareness is foundational for personal growth, professional development, and meaningful change. Coaches work to increase this awareness in their clients, encouraging them to recognize not just their overt behaviors but the underlying motivations that drive them. Most clients come into coaching with some level of self-awareness but may not realize the extent to which hidden attitudes and biases influence their actions. Openmind helps bridge this gap by providing insights that transcend surface-level self-knowledge.
The coaching journey becomes especially transformative when a client gains insights into their implicit attitudes. Many of these attitudes are unconscious and stem from deep-seated experiences, cultural influences, and personal beliefs. For example, someone may consciously value teamwork but implicitly struggle with trust, which can inhibit true collaboration. By revealing such insights, Openmind provides the coach with data that can drive powerful, targeted conversations with the client about personal development.
How Openmind Reveals Implicit Self-Perception
Openmind assesses personality across the Big Five traits—Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuro Balance—but adds a groundbreaking dimension by capturing both implicit and explicit attitudes. These implicit responses are automatic reactions that a person may not consciously endorse but that significantly shape their behaviors and interactions. The explicit responses, on the other hand, reflect a person’s deliberate, conscious beliefs. This dual approach allows a coach to see where a client’s self-perception may differ from their deeper, often unconscious self.
Consider a client who scores highly on conscientiousness explicitly but reveals low conscientiousness implicitly. This suggests that while they may view themselves as organized and diligent, their non-conscious tendencies may be less structured or driven. Such a discrepancy provides a coach with valuable insight: the client may struggle with internal conflict or may find it difficult to sustain certain behaviors in the long term, despite their self-image. The coach can use this insight to tailor their guidance, helping the client to explore ways to align their implicit attitudes with their conscious goals.
The Coaching Challenge: Exploring Gaps Between Implicit and Explicit Self-Perception
Openmind’s ability to highlight blindspots between implicit and explicit self-perception adds a new dimension to coaching. These gaps often indicate areas of cognitive dissonance, where clients hold conflicting attitudes that can hinder their progress. For instance:
Inconsistent Self-Image: A client may explicitly value empathy and rate themselves high in compassion. However, their implicit scores could suggest lower levels of empathy, possibly due to past experiences or subconscious biases. For the coach, this discrepancy highlights an opportunity to address areas where the client’s self-image does not fully align with their actions.
Unconscious Biases: Clients may believe they are open to feedback and diverse perspectives, yet their implicit responses reveal a discomfort with opinions that challenge their views. Such biases are often unconscious, but they can significantly impact interpersonal relationships, workplace dynamics, and personal growth. By bringing these biases to light, Openmind allows coaches to help clients become aware of and address these influences in a constructive way.
Misaligned Motivations: A client may perceive themselves as goal-oriented and driven, yet implicit attitudes might indicate a more relaxed approach to tasks. In this case, the coach can help the client explore where their motivations may need realignment, focusing on strategies to cultivate a more consistent sense of purpose.
How Openmind Enhances the Coaching Process
Coaching is often focused on helping clients build alignment between their internal beliefs and external actions. Openmind’s insights into implicit attitudes provide a critical edge in this process, allowing coaches to:
Identify Hidden Growth Areas: Coaches can use Openmind’s insights to pinpoint areas where clients may have blind spots or growth opportunities. For example, a client with high implicit openness but low explicit openness may have untapped potential for creativity that they have yet to fully embrace.
Enhance Self-Reflection: Openmind encourages clients to engage in deeper self-reflection by providing a clear picture of their implicit and explicit attitudes. This often prompts clients to ask themselves probing questions about why certain discrepancies exist, leading to more meaningful self-awareness.
Strengthen Motivation for Change: By illuminating areas where implicit and explicit attitudes align or diverge, Openmind enables clients to see the benefits of bridging these gaps. Clients become more motivated to work toward goals that harmonize their inner beliefs and outer behaviors.
The Transformative Impact of Openmind on Key Personality Traits
Openness to Experience
Clients with high openness typically show a willingness to explore new ideas and experiences. However, discrepancies between implicit and explicit openness can reveal important insights. For example, a client who consciously rates themselves as highly open but has a lower implicit openness score may be unconsciously averse to risk or change. This insight gives the coach a basis to explore what past experiences may be holding the client back and how they might overcome these barriers.
Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness is often associated with organization, reliability, and a strong sense of duty. When a client’s implicit conscientiousness score is lower than their explicit score, it suggests they may find it difficult to maintain consistency. Coaches can help clients explore the factors influencing their implicit attitudes—such as past failures or the fear of commitment—and provide strategies for fostering greater internal consistency.
Extraversion
Extraversion is essential for roles requiring interaction, leadership, or public engagement. A client with low implicit extraversion but a high explicit score may feel uncomfortable in social situations, despite consciously striving to be outgoing. Openmind can help the coach identify if this tension is rooted in self-confidence issues or deeper biases, and work with the client to build authentic social skills that match their comfort level.
Agreeableness
Agreeableness, which includes empathy, modesty, and trustworthiness, is vital for collaborative and relationship-oriented goals. A client with high explicit but low implicit agreeableness may consciously want to be kind and cooperative but struggle with judgment or impatience at a subconscious level. Recognizing this, the coach can guide the client to develop greater emotional regulation techniques and explore how implicit biases impact their relationships.
Neuro Balance
Neuro Balance refers to emotional stability and resilience. A client with high explicit stability but low implicit scores may consciously feel calm and collected, yet be prone to stress and anxiety unconsciously. This disparity can significantly affect the client’s well-being, making it important for the coach to address these hidden stressors and work on strategies to boost resilience.
Practical Applications of Openmind in Coaching
Openmind's data enables a coach to create highly personalized coaching strategies tailored to the client’s unique personality profile. Coaches can:
Design Customized Reflection Exercises: Based on areas where implicit and explicit attitudes differ, the coach can create exercises that encourage clients to examine these inconsistencies, fostering a deeper self-understanding.
Facilitate Targeted Behavioral Training: For clients with low implicit resilience or high implicit biases, the coach can incorporate cognitive behavioral techniques to gradually reshape these automatic attitudes, helping clients respond more authentically in challenging situations.
Enhance Goal-Setting Practices: Coaches can guide clients in setting realistic goals that align with both their conscious aspirations and their implicit tendencies. This dual alignment increases the likelihood of achieving and sustaining progress.
Monitor Progress with Real-Time Feedback: As clients work through their coaching journey, Openmind provides continuous feedback, allowing both the client and coach to track changes in implicit and explicit attitudes over time. This helps to celebrate wins and recalibrate strategies as needed.
Conclusion: Openmind as a Catalyst for Meaningful Change
The integration of Openmind into the coaching process represents a groundbreaking approach to understanding and fostering self-awareness. By exposing clients to their implicit attitudes, Openmind allows coaches to address deeper aspects of personality that traditional self-assessment tools often overlook. This holistic view equips clients with the self-knowledge needed to make transformative changes that resonate on both conscious and subconscious levels.
For coaches, Openmind is more than just an assessment tool; it’s a pathway to deeper engagement, effective communication, and targeted development. By understanding a client’s full personality spectrum, coaches can offer support that is not only insightful but profoundly aligned with the client’s authentic self, ultimately making the coaching journey more impactful and fulfilling for both coach and client alike.