How to coach with the CIA Model
The Control Influence Accept (CIA) Coaching Model is a stress-management framework to help you pause, evaluate a situation, reframe your perceived levels of control, and ultimately move forward with increased calmness. Because of this focus on re-evaluation and moving forward, it is an ideal framework to introduce in your coaching conversations.
How do I know when to use the CIA Coaching Model?
Overwhelm can be one of the most significant barriers to moving through challenges, and can hinder your coachee from identifying the true essence of the work they need to do. Often, we can get so caught up in the busyness of life and work that we lose sight of the things we can realistically impact. If this is the case with a coachee you are working with, then this might be a model that can help:
navigate and compartmentalise difficult situations
increase focus, clarity and action
provide an objective lens to support your coachee to maximise their impact.
What is the CIA Coaching Model?
The CIA Coaching Model was first developed by Neil and Sue Thompson in their 2008 book "The Critically Reflective Practitioner." The model provides a practical and versatile problem-solving frame that identifies three ways to respond to a challenge:
Control – What is directly within your control?
Influence – What is outside of your control but can be influenced by you?
Accept and adapt - What is it you need to accept and/or adapt to?
By identifying and understanding the three potential responses to a challenge, you can step back, gain perspective, and take action on the things you can control.
How to use the model in a coaching session
Work with your coachee to describe their challenge and the details of their overwhelm.
What is difficult right now?
What's keeping you up at night?
Create a long list - ideally on post-it notes if available, so you can easily move each of their challenges around. Or, if you are coaching online you could use a platform like Miro to support the brainstorm process.
Next, share the details of the CIA Coaching Model and use powerful coaching questions to explore:
What is directly within your CONTROL?
What is outside of your control, but can be INFLUENCED by you?
Consider the things you cannot control or influence. What is it that you need to ACCEPT? How will you ADAPT?
Physically place their sticky notes, that detail each of their challenges, on the diagram. Once you have a clear view of where each of their challenges sit, you can then start to explore ACTION versus RESPONSE (the left scale of the model).
How will you take action on the things you can control?
How will you respond and adapt to the things you need to accept?
Client impact statement
I felt alone and overwhelmed by the constant looping thought patterns in my mind. I had so many things to do and was facing various live challenges that felt like they were evolving daily. My anxiety and stress had me paralysed and I literally had no idea where to focus next.
Working through the CIA Coaching Model with my coach helped me compartmentalise the challenge and more clearly see the areas I could realistically impact. Rather than worrying about everything, I realised I needed to accept and adapt to the things that were outside of my control. This realisation sent us in to some interesting reflections as my coach challenged my mindset and the way I was thinking about things.
The coaching session had a huge impact on how I felt - from a state of anxious energy everywhere, through to feeling lighter and more focused on what I could control.
~ Clinical Care Team Lead, New Zealand
CIA Coaching Model Guide, Question Sets and Imagery
We trust this article has been helpful - both in helping you understand the model and supporting you in how to use it with your coaching clients. For those of you who want more, we’ve done the work for you and created a full resource pack complete with:
✅ Resource Guide: Instructions on how to use the model
✅ Coaching Questions: For coaches, facilitators and people leaders to help guide coachees or employees through the coaching model
✅ Reflection Questions (Microsoft Word): Simply add your brand and send it to your coachee to complete
✅ Image files (PNG): Image files to add directly to presentations, workbooks or internal documents (three versions, including blank and with questions)
Download your copy here, and let us know how you get on. We love feedback.
Happy coaching,
