a good coaching conversation
There’s an idea in coaching that the skill lies in finding the perfect question, the one sharp enough to open something up on the spot. It’s an appealing picture, and it puts the coach at the centre of it. What I notice in practice is that the question is rarely the thing that matters.
introduction
A good coaching conversation is a conversation. Two minds thinking together, building on your own resources rather than mine, so you arrive at a meaningful solution and direction for your own goal that is genuinely yours. It’s not me asking formulaic questions or reaching for an off-the-shelf tool. It’s a dialogue, and the understanding that comes out of it is one we’ve built together, though the resources it’s built on are yours.
A great deal is happening in that conversation, real thinking, self-reflection, understanding taking shape between us. It’s just not happening as a technique being applied to you. It’s a live, meaningful conversation with intent and purpose, to help you move forward in the direction of your goals.
What happens after it is.
what the silence is actually for
A pause in a conversation looks like nothing happening. Usually it isn’t.
People often stop talking before they’ve finished thinking. The sentence ends, but the thought is still moving, and quite often the useful part of it surfaces a few seconds later, unannounced, and only if nobody has spoken in the meantime. Fill that gap with a question, however good, and what you get is my thought instead of yours.
There’s a second reason, and it matters more. An understanding you’ve reached yourself tends to be more usable than one you’ve been handed, because you end up with the route as well as the conclusion. You can find your way back to it later, in a situation I know nothing about and wasn’t there for. A conclusion someone gave you has to be remembered instead, and remembered conclusions tend not to survive contact with circumstances that don’t quite match the ones they were made for.
And once a plausible answer is on the table, the search generally stops, whoever put it there. So a reasonable suggestion offered too early can quietly cost you the better one you were half a minute away from reaching. That’s the part I think gets missed. The cost of over-helping isn’t that the help is wrong. It’s that it arrives in the place where your own thinking was about to go.
the pull to fill it
None of which makes silence comfortable, and that includes for me. There’s a real pull, as a coach, to offer something the moment a gap opens up: an idea, an option, a question that sounds insightful. It feels like helping, and wanting to be helpful isn’t a bad instinct to have.
But it moves the thinking from your side of the conversation to mine, and it takes ownership of the answer along with it. So I hold a check as I work. When I notice I’m being pulled towards offering something, I ask myself whether that pull is about you or about my own wish to feel useful in the moment. More often than I’d like to admit, it’s the second one. Noticing it is usually enough to hold back.
The harder and more useful thing is to stay with the quiet a little longer than feels comfortable, and to trust that something is going on inside it.
what a session that worked actually feels like
It’s also why the promise attached to a lot of coaching, that the right question will change everything, isn’t one I’d make. The sessions that genuinely help rarely feel dramatic while they’re happening. They feel like a conversation worth having, where something is a little clearer at the end than it was at the start, and where you’ve said one or two things out loud that you hadn’t quite put into words before.
That’s a lower bar, and a far more reliable one. It also accumulates in a way a single dramatic moment doesn’t. Several conversations like that, a few weeks apart with ordinary life happening in between, tend to move things further than any one session ever does, and to move them in a way that’s still there six months later as you develop and apply your new learning and understanding.
Useful over impressive.