What's the difference between CLEAR and GROW?

CLEAR starts with explicit contracting and ends with review, two stages GROW leaves implicit, and its Exploring stage suits relational, transformational work better than GROW's task-orientation. Most experienced coaches hold both: GROW for the goal-directed spine, CLEAR for the relational bookends.

Who created the CLEAR coaching model?

Peter Hawkins, in the early 1980s, which makes it a contemporary of GROW and by some accounts its predecessor. It reflects Hawkins' wider work in coaching supervision and systemic team coaching, where contracting and review are core disciplines.

Is the CLEAR model evidence-based?

Like GROW, it's a practice framework validated by decades of professional adoption rather than controlled outcome trials, which is the normal status for session models. Its defensible edge is structural: it's the mainstream model that takes contracting and review seriously, the two disciplines most linked to ethical, effective practice in the supervision literature.

What happens in the Contracting stage of CLEAR?

Contracting in CLEAR is an explicit conversation at the start of a session about what the client wants from the time together and how they want to work. It typically covers the topic, the desired session outcome, and sometimes the mode of engagement (exploratory or directive, wide-ranging or focused). Hawkins treats contracting as the container that makes the rest of the session safe and useful. Without it, the coach is making assumptions about what the client needs. With it, the client's agency is built in from the first exchange. In CLEAR, contracting is a working practice rather than a formality.

What happens in the Review stage of CLEAR?

Review closes the session with a structured reflection on both what was decided and how the session itself worked. The client is asked not just what they will do next, but what was most useful, what shifted, and how the coach could work better with them in future. This feedback loop distinguishes CLEAR from most other session frameworks: it turns every session into data about the coaching relationship, not just the client's agenda. Hawkins argues this is where most coaching engagements lose accountability. Sessions produce actions but never examine whether the process is actually serving the client.

When is CLEAR a better choice than GROW?

CLEAR fits best when the contracting and review functions matter most. Executive coaching with a three-way contract between coach, client, and organizational sponsor is one such context, because the session purpose needs to be explicitly agreed among all parties. Team coaching is another, where expectations must be set at the start and checked at the close. Supervision and training contexts also call for the review function. And transformational work generally, where the client's experience of the coaching process is itself part of what is being developed. GROW's strength is the goal-directed spine it gives a focused conversation. CLEAR's strength is the relational frame around that conversation. Most experienced coaches hold both.

What is systemic team coaching and how does CLEAR relate to it?

Systemic team coaching is the discipline of coaching a team as a collective unit: attending to its relationships, its work, its role in the wider organisation, and its stakeholders. The work happens at the system level rather than with individual members separately. Peter Hawkins is one of its leading thinkers, and CLEAR is the individual session model from that same body of work. It shares the architecture of explicit contracting and review that runs through Hawkins' team coaching frameworks. A coach trained in systemic team coaching will likely already be working with these contracting and review disciplines, applied at a larger scale.

What does it mean if a coach uses the CLEAR model?

It suggests the coach takes contracting and review seriously as structural disciplines rather than administrative formalities. A coach who uses CLEAR will typically open each session by explicitly agreeing what the session is for and how it should work, which builds the client's agency in from the first exchange. They will close by asking not just what the client will do, but what was useful and what could work better. Both moves signal a coach attending to the quality of the coaching relationship itself, not just the client's action list. CLEAR is not a credentialing pathway. Coaches from any background can use it, to varying depths of skill.

What should I expect from a session structured by the CLEAR model?

Expect the session to open with a brief agreement about what you want from the time together. A CLEAR-using coach will want to know not just the topic but the kind of conversation you need: exploratory or structured, wide-ranging or focused. The middle of the session follows the work wherever it leads. At the close, expect to be asked both what you will do next and what you found useful. The coach treats your feedback as real data about how the work is serving you, not a courtesy. Sessions structured by CLEAR tend to feel more explicitly collaborative than goal-only frameworks, because the client's voice is built into both the opening and the closing.

CLEAR Model | Coaching Framework

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What the CLEAR model is

CLEAR is a five-stage coaching conversation framework developed by Peter Hawkins in the early 1980s, which makes it a contemporary of, and by some accounts a predecessor to, the GROW model. The acronym maps a session's arc: Contracting (agreeing what this conversation is for and how to work together), Listening (deep, active listening to understand the client's reality), Exploring (working the territory of insight, options, and underlying dynamics), Action (committing to specific next steps), and Review (closing the loop: what was valuable, what was decided, how the process itself worked).

Two design choices distinguish CLEAR from its more famous sibling. First, it starts with contracting, an explicit agreement about the session's purpose and the working relationship, which GROW leaves implicit; Hawkins treats the contract as the container that makes everything else safe and useful. Second, it ends with review, building feedback on both the outcome and the process into every conversation, which turns each session into learning about how the coaching itself is working, not just what the client will do next. The model reflects Hawkins' broader body of work in coaching supervision and systemic team coaching, where contracting and review are central disciplines.

Where coaches use it

CLEAR shows up in three places. As a session architecture, it suits transformational and relational work slightly better than GROW's task-orientation. The Exploring stage legitimizes staying with feelings, patterns, and meaning rather than driving toward options. In coaching supervision and coach training, Hawkins' home territory, it's often the default conversation model, and many coaches meet it there before using it with clients. And in contract-sensitive contexts such as executive coaching with organizational sponsors, team coaching, or any triangle of stakeholders, its explicit Contracting stage does work GROW simply doesn't address.

Most experienced coaches hold both. GROW gives a goal-directed conversation its spine; CLEAR adds the relational bookends, the contract at the front and the review at the back, that keep a coaching engagement honest over time.

The evidence, plainly

Like GROW, CLEAR is a practice framework, not an empirically validated intervention. There is no body of controlled outcome research demonstrating that CLEAR-structured conversations outperform alternatives, and its authority rests on decades of professional adoption and Hawkins' standing in the supervision field. That's the normal epistemic status for session frameworks: they are craft structures, judged by whether they reliably produce useful conversations, and CLEAR has passed that test across forty years of practice. Its genuine, defensible edge is structural rather than evidential. It is the mainstream session model that takes contracting and review seriously, and those are the two disciplines most consistently linked, in the coaching supervision literature, to ethical and effective practice.

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CLEAR stands for Contracting, Listening, Exploring, Action, Review. It is Peter Hawkins' five-stage arc for a coaching conversation, and its signature moves are the bookends: an explicit contract about what the session is for at the start, and a review of both outcome and process at the end.

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