Slow looking is a coaching skill

Museum researchers have been measuring how long people look at pictures for decades, and the numbers are humbling. Jeffrey and Lisa Smith's study at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001 timed visitors at a median of seventeen seconds per painting; a follow-up at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 found a median of twenty-one. Phil Terry started Slow Art Day in 2009 as a direct answer to this: five works, ten minutes each, then lunch and conversation. Shari Tishman, at Harvard's Project Zero, wrote the book on the practice in 2018 and called it, simply, Slow Looking.

Coaches have the same problem with a different object. A client gives an answer, and within two or three seconds the coach is already composing the next question. The answer gets seventeen seconds, if that. Whatever was underneath it never surfaces, because the coach has moved on before the client has.

When we trained the hosts for THE WALK, slow looking was the first thing we practised, and we practised it on pictures before we practised it on people. The exercise is not complicated. One image, one timer, ten minutes, no talking. At the end, each person says one thing they noticed in the last two minutes that they had not noticed in the first two. There is always something. The figure in the water is standing on something you cannot see. The door is slightly ajar. Your own breathing changed around minute four.

Then we did the same thing with a recorded coaching answer. One client sentence, played once, and two full minutes of silence before anyone was allowed to say what they heard. The hosts found this far harder than the picture. Several admitted that in a real session they would have asked their next question before the client finished the sentence.

What slow looking trains is the tolerance of not yet knowing. The first thirty seconds in front of a picture are spent recognising it (a corridor, a hand holding a cup). The next few minutes are spent noticing how the recognition was incomplete. The last few are spent noticing yourself noticing. The same three stages happen when you sit with a client's answer instead of using it as a springboard. First you hear the content. Then you hear what the content was standing in for. Then you hear what the hearing is doing to you, which is often the most useful data in the room.

If you want to build the muscle, use the Slow Art Day format on yourself once a week. One picture, ten minutes, phone face down. Keep a line in a notebook: what did minute eight give you that minute one did not? After a month, try carrying the same patience into your next session. Let the client's answer sit for a count of five before you speak. It will feel like an eternity. To the client it will feel like being heard.

My guess, before the October reports are in, is that the hosts who ran the best circles were the ones who were most uncomfortable in that first ten-minute exercise in August.