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 coachee's reality and systemic context), Exploring (working the territory of insight, options, and underlying dynamics), Action (committing to specific next steps and reviewing and embodying them), and Review (closing the loop: what was valuable — not just for the coachee, but also their stakeholders — 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, made with the coachee and, where relevant, their sponsoring stakeholders, about the session's purpose, the working relationship, and how the coaching will co-create value across every level of the system involved, not the coachee's alone. 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 coachee will do next.
A third refinement, reflected in Hawkins' more recent writing, is that Action doesn't stop at a plan. The stage includes a fast-forward rehearsal: the coachee doesn't just describe what they intend to do, they rehearse or embody it in the room — trying the harder conversation out loud, physically walking through the changed posture, running the decision forward — so the session produces a shift that has already begun, not just an intention to make one. This treats an action plan alone as insufficient for real change.
The model reflects Hawkins' broader body of work in coaching supervision and systemic team coaching, where contracting and review — now understood as co-creating value across stakeholders and systemic levels, not just recording individual commitments — are central disciplines.
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, and the fast-forward rehearsal in Action gives embodied practice a place most frameworks skip. 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 their own coachees. And in contract-sensitive contexts such as executive coaching with organizational sponsors, team coaching, or any triangle of stakeholders, its explicit multi-stakeholder 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 — and its value visible to everyone with a stake in it — over time.
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 coaching, team coaching and 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.
Hawkins, P. and Turner, E. (2020) Systemic Coaching: Delivering Value Beyond the Individual. London: Routledge.
Hawkins, P. and Smith, N. (2006, second edition 2013) Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy: Supervision and Development. Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill.
Hawkins, P. and McMahon, A. (2020, fifth edition) Supervision in the Helping Professions. Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill.
The contract at the front and the review at the back are what keep a coaching conversation honest. CLEAR is the model that refuses to leave them implicit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Contracting in CLEAR is an explicit conversation at the start of a session about what the coachee — and, where the work touches a wider system, their sponsoring stakeholders — want from the time together and how they want to work. It typically covers the topic, the desired session outcome, and how the coaching will create value not just for the individual but across the levels of the system involved. 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's needed. With it, the coachee's agency — and the wider stakeholder picture — is built in from the first exchange. In CLEAR, contracting is a working practice rather than a formality.
Action in CLEAR isn't just a to-do list. Alongside committing to next steps, the stage includes a fast-forward rehearsal: the coachee practices or embodies the change inside the session itself, rather than only describing it. That might mean rehearsing a hard conversation out loud, trying on a different physical posture, or walking through a decision as if it's already made. Hawkins' more recent work treats an action plan alone as insufficient — the session should produce a change that's already underway, not just intended.
Review closes the session with a structured reflection on both what was decided and how the session itself worked — and for whom the value was created. The coachee is asked not just what they will do next, but what was most useful, what shifted, and how the coaching co-created value for them and their stakeholders. This feedback loop distinguishes CLEAR from most other session frameworks: it turns every session into data about the coaching relationship and its wider system, not just the coachee's agenda. Hawkins argues this is where most coaching engagements lose accountability — sessions produce actions but never examine whether the process is actually serving everyone it's meant to.
CLEAR fits best when the contracting and review functions matter most. Executive coaching with a three-way contract between coach, coachee, 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 coachee'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.
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.
It suggests the coach takes contracting and review seriously as structural disciplines rather than administrative formalities, and treats coaching as something that creates value across a system, not just for one person in the room. A coach who uses CLEAR will typically open each session by explicitly agreeing what it's for, who it serves, and how — building the coachee's agency in from the first exchange. They'll close by asking not just what the coachee will do, but what was useful and what could work better for everyone with a stake in the outcome. Both moves signal a coach attending to the quality of the coaching relationship itself, not just the coachee's action list. CLEAR is not a credentialing pathway. Coaches from any background can use it, to varying depths of skill.
Expect the session to open with a brief agreement about what you want from the time together — and, if your coaching touches a wider team or organization, whose interests the session is meant to serve. 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, and by the Action stage you may find yourself rehearsing the change itself — trying it on in the room — rather than only planning it. At the close, expect to be asked both what you'll do next and what you found useful. The coach treats your feedback as real data about how the work is serving you and anyone else it's meant to serve. Sessions structured by CLEAR tend to feel more explicitly collaborative than goal-only frameworks, because your voice is built into both the opening and the closing.