CLEAR Coaching Model: Peter Hawkins' 5 Stages Explained

The CLEAR coaching model is a five-stage session structure created by Peter Hawkins: Contracting, Listening, Exploring, Action and Review. It differs from most models at both ends: it opens by agreeing what the session is for, and it closes by reviewing the conversation itself as well as the client's commitments.

If you already coach with GROW, CLEAR does not ask you to drop it. It asks for two things GROW tends to take for granted: an explicit agreement at the start and an honest pause at the end. Below you will find what each letter means according to the original source, questions for every stage, a worked session example and the mistakes coaches make most often with it.

CLEAR starts with an agreement: what we will work on today, and how.

Where does the CLEAR model come from?

CLEAR comes from Peter Hawkins, one of the best-known writers on coaching supervision. He sets it out with Nick Smith in Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy: Supervision and Development (Open University Press, 2006), which had an expanded second edition in 2013. That is why you will see it described in two ways: as a model for running a coaching session and as a model for running a supervision session.

Source: the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring describes CLEAR as Hawkins and Smith's (2013) process running from Contracting to Review, through Listening, Exploring and Action. Read the article (IJEBCM, vol. 22, no. 2, 2024).

That origin shapes the model. A supervisor cannot jump straight to solutions: they first need to know what is being brought and why, and at the end they need to check whether the conversation helped. CLEAR carries that discipline into the client session. Our overview of coaching models puts it side by side with GROW, OSKAR and the rest of the toolkit.

What does each letter of CLEAR stand for?

How do you run a session with CLEAR, stage by stage?

C: the contract, even if it takes two minutes

CLEAR's contract is not the commercial contract for the engagement. It is the agreement for this session: what you will talk about, what the client wants to leave with and what role they want you to play. Some sessions call for challenge; others only need space to think out loud. Asking up front saves you from guessing.

• "Of everything you have brought, what matters most to work on today?"
• "How will we know at the end that it was worth it?"
• "How would you like me to work with you today: more questions, more challenge, more space?"

L: listen before you understand

Listening is the stage most often skipped in practice, because the coach believes they have grasped the problem within three minutes. The work here is to let the client tell the whole story, play back what you hear in their own words and notice what goes unsaid: the tone, the repetitions, the topic they steer around. If you lean on powerful questions, save them for the next stage. Open questions and silence are enough here.

E: explore the impact, then the options

Exploring has two moves. First, look at the impact: what the current situation is costing the client, who else it affects, what they have already tried. Then open up possibilities: what they would do if they were not afraid, what they would tell a friend, which option they dismissed too fast. The classic mistake is making the second move without the first, and the options come out thin because the client has not yet felt the weight of the problem.

A: an action the client can deliver this week

The action has to belong to the client, be specific and carry a date. "I will talk to my manager" is not an action yet; "on Tuesday I will ask my manager for 20 minutes to propose the change of hours" is. Also ask what could get in the way and what they will do if it does. For more on closing commitments that actually get kept, see the guide to building an action plan in one session.

R: review the action and the session

CLEAR's review looks two ways. At the content: what the client is taking away and what they have committed to. And at the process: how the session felt, what helped, what they would change. That second half tells you how to adjust the next session, so you both learn from it. Next time, the review opens by picking up the outstanding action.

What does a CLEAR session look like? An example

Laura manages a team of six and opens the session by saying she is "drowning". Here is how a 60-minute session falls into place:

• Contracting (5 min). Of everything swamping her, she picks one thing: she cannot hand off the weekly reports. She wants to leave with a decision on who takes them.
• Listening (15 min). She delegated once, the report came back wrong and she redid it at night. Three times she says "in the end it is quicker if I do it".
• Exploring (20 min). The impact: she gets home late two days a week. The options: hand it to one person with a report template, split it between two, or review it instead of redoing it.
• Action (10 min). On Monday she shows Marta the template, and they agree to review the first one together without Laura rewriting it.
• Review (10 min). She leaves with one line: "reviewing is not redoing". She says it helped that you offered no ideas in the first fifteen minutes.

How is CLEAR different from the GROW model?

Both structure a session, but they put the weight in different places. For a full refresher on GROW, see the step-by-step GROW model guide.

When should you use CLEAR, and when not?

CLEAR fits three situations especially well. First, executive and corporate coaching, where each session's contract needs to be explicit because there is often an organisation paying and expecting results. Second, long engagements, where reviewing each session lets you correct course before the client disengages. Third, clients who arrive with a lot to say, because the listening stage gives them the room they need before thinking about solutions.

It is less useful when the client arrives with a sharply defined goal and little time. In a 30-minute session to prepare for an interview, a brisk GROW is usually more direct. Nor does it make sense to follow it like a script: the stages overlap, and sometimes exploring sends you back to the contract because the real issue was something else.

What are the common mistakes when applying CLEAR?

• Turning the contract into a formality. "What would you like to talk about today?" is not a contract. It is missing the expected outcome and the how.
• Listening in order to reply. If you are already drafting the brilliant question while they talk, you are not in the L stage.
• Exploring only options. Without exploring the impact, the client picks the most comfortable option, not the one they need.
• Dropping the review when time runs short. It is the stage that tells you most about your own work. Keep ten minutes for it, even if exploring gets shorter.
• Not picking the action back up next session. Without follow-up, actions turn into intentions. A kanban board for client agreements keeps them from slipping.

How do you bring CLEAR into your sessions with CoachPro Tools?

CoachPro Tools has no template labelled CLEAR, but you can cover every stage with its modules. Live Notes comes with check-in, GROW, closing and free templates: use the check-in one to write down the contract and the closing one for the review. Commitments from the action stage go onto the agreements kanban, with a date and a priority, and each client's record keeps the history so the next session can open by reviewing what is outstanding. For the exploring stage there are +309 interactive tools.

Frequently asked questions about the CLEAR model

Sources

• Hawkins, P. and Smith, N. (2006; 2nd ed. 2013). Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy: Supervision and Development. Open University Press.
• "Conceptualising how coaching supervisors meet their supervisees' needs". International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 22(2), 2024, pp. 220-239. Describes the CLEAR stages as set out by Hawkins and Smith (2013).