Life Coach Ramblings

I’ve learned a lot from nearly a year of going to coaching school. Here are a few (out of many) that have stuck with me:

1. Listening skills are foundational.

They’re even more important than asking “great” questions.

Training to be a coach taught me to listen for clues on how a client sees their world. That means not interrupting, and listening not just with my ears but with my eyes. It means noticing shifts in tone, pace, or body language. And sometimes, it means listening with my heart.

Listening for its own sake, without rushing to respond, is freeing. It’s like sitting beside a river with a fishing pole in hand, waiting for the tug that tells you something meaningful has surfaced.

2. Thinking about the next question gets in the way of coaching.

If you’re worrying about your next question while your client is still talking, you’re not giving them your full attention.

I’m still working on this, but listening for potentially meaningful information stops me from anticipating what I’ll ask next. I can’t listen intently and come up with questions at the same time. It’s anxiety-inducing, which causes me not to coach well. If you stay with your client, what to ask or say next will naturally come to you. This, of course, requires taking the pressure off yourself to ask the “perfect question.”

Thinking is the enemy of the coach.
— Marcia Reynolds (Coach the Person, Not the Problem, p. 67)

3. You won’t know it’s “the perfect question” until it’s asked.

What makes a question perfect anyway? Perfect according to whom? You or your client?

I’ve asked questions that I thought weren’t particularly remarkable, and yet they led to breakthroughs. I’ve also asked ones that I thought were going to lead to some kind of shift and they ended up falling flat.

Whether a question is good or not highly depends on how your client responds, which you can’t predict.

4. When you give advice, you make the conversation about you.

We default to giving advice because not knowing feels uncomfortable. Uncertainty is fluid, untamed, and messy. When someone shares a problem, our instinct is to fix. We make suggestions, start asking “Have you tried…?” and assume they want answers.

It’s very human to feel this way. Sometimes I think that uncertainty is the bane of human existence. But sometimes people don’t want (or need) to be fixed, they just want space to weigh their options. Sometimes they just want comfort. If you jump in with advice before asking what they need, you’ve taken away their choice in how to be supported.

5. Coaching is about letting go.

This is one that I still struggle with, because I want my clients to leave sessions feeling better than they did at the beginning. I want them to feel like the coaching is working, that they’re moving closer to their desired outcomes. But I often forget that the outcomes depend on their dedication to their growth. They’re the ones who have to carry out the actions and behavior/thinking shifts that lead to change, after all.

Not worrying about your next question and not being attached to the outcome of a session are just two ways that coaching is really about letting go and being present. There are other ways that it’s about letting go, but I’ll save that for another post.