My Coaching Approach: Helping the Client Find a Better Way
Anyone can be a coach. As a professional who has dedicated academic, economic, and intellectual energy to the practice, the open and unregulated nature of “coaching” has frustrated me in the past. But as I release my grip on the beauty of the craft, I appreciate the promise that the open-ended definition of coaching offers. We cannot grasp so tightly something that so many need so deeply. The ultimate goal of great coaching is not just to help your clients succeed. It’s to shift the nature of conversation, creating greater links between our intuition and our action. Helping leaders reconnect with their strengths, transforming them top players of their game into coaches themselves.
And in that spirit, here’s how I coach.
After more than two thousand hours of paid client coaching, I’ve tried many different approaches. When I think about the memorable clients who have experienced meaningful breakthroughs, it wasn’t the method that did it. It was this.
Start.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in wanting your clients to do pre-work. Many of them even ask for it. Some people show up with detailed lists of the topics and issues they most want to discuss. As a therapy patient, this is usually how I show up. While there’s nothing wrong with being prepared with an idea of exactly what the most pressing issue is and how you’d ideally like to resolve it, it’s often easier and more effective to begin with a baby step.
Rather than ask clients what they most want to accomplish in a session, I start with the easiest first step they can imagine. This is similar to many therapeutic approaches to counseling, having patience and trust that a deep and meaningful issue will surface, but not worrying too much about beginning there.
Coaching pro tip: Don’t cancel if it seems the client is in a different energy space than normal. Sometimes we are at our most accessible when our guard is distracted by stress. Meet them where they are. Even if the only issue you start to discuss is that they didn’t sleep well last night, or that they’re looking forward to a sandwich, start. It’s all important.
Listen for the unsaid.
Your job as a coach is to hold a sacred space, one where the ethics of coaching and confidentiality enhance psychological safety. Coaching is not chatting or mentoring. Your value is in your ability to tune your ear to a different frequency than most conversations.
In the coaching world, we call this Level 3 Listening, or “Global Listening,” and it’s a progression beyond listening to respond, or listening to hear. Listening to understand means you are hearing tone, emotion, pause, body expression. It’s a deeply empathetic practice, and it takes courage both to listen that way and to let what you’re picking up pass through you and back to the client. You aren’t listening this deeply for your own ideas. You don’t do this to build your concept of your client, or even to develop a deeper relationship. You listen this way so that you can bounce it back to them, and help them name what’s truly important.
Throughout the pandemic, I’ve engaged in coaching conversations with more executives than I used to, and there have been more breakthrough moments in these sessions than I remember at any other time in my coaching career. Tears are common. Pain is palpable. There is a shift of energy that happens when a client expresses a meaningful definition of their issue in their own words. It’s usually a short sentence that my first grader could read. This year alone, I’m thinking of several of these such moments. “You know what? I’m lonely,” released one leader who had out-lasted her founding partners in a successful tech start-up turned booming business. The leader of a coffee chain sighed mid-sentence, and said, “I think I just really miss the way things used to be.” Another executive repeated their realization several times, “I’m afraid I’m doing it wrong.” It doesn’t matter what the issue is, but when you reach that kind of discovery, something releases. And then you can work together to unlock it.
Help them see from a different perspective.
Coaching is not telling people what to do. They can get that from any rando with a social media account. At this point in coaching, you use your privileged position of outsider to help them understand the problem from additional angles. (And by problem, that doesn’t have to be fixing something that is broken. It could be following a dream, enhancing a connection, meeting a desire for something better.)
I have had several excellent coaches in my life. With two different coaches, I remember apologizing deeply for sharing what I did, terrified that I was asking them to bear my burden with me, afraid and guilt-ridden that the weight of my challenge was so heavy for me, how dare I lay it on someone else. Both coaches, who otherwise come from extremely different backgrounds, said exactly the same thing: “it’s not heavy for me.” Both times it was hard to believe, because I was so wrapped inside myself. But this is the benefit of coaching. Human beings are generally rather terrible at metacognition, thinking about how we think. It’s why we need assessments and profiles and friends and mirrors. We build our self awareness through the additional perspectives we can gather, and acknowledging that our struggles are not burdensome to our coaches is yet another perspective worth knowing.
In Strengths coaching, this is another place to spend time helping clients understand their current state through the lens of their unique talent. Maybe it’s by asking how their strengths are making this challenge extra painful, or how their natural patterns of thought are leading them to experience what’s happening. This isn’t cheerleading. This is awareness-building. Don Clifton said the greatest good we can do for another is to reveal to them their strengths. As a coach, you’ve got the best seat in the house. Use it well.
Walk with them until they can take a step on their own.
Regarding a specific transformation I experienced, my friend wrote this: “You’re crossing over a bridge, and it seems you want a friend to walk with you. I’ll be that friend. We’ll take these steps. But I’m not going all the way to the other side. That last step is yours to take alone.” This is what great coaches do, they walk alongside you by designing action, holding you accountable for making progress, maybe even reminding you that you’re capable of bigger strides and helping you find ways to dance, hop, or skip your way across. And then they remind you of your power and encourage you to step into it.
If today’s top talent needs coaches in their corner, rather than bosses in the tower, we have to accept that coaching can be practiced casually and frequently. Sure, when I study the craft, I’ll be paying attention to the lines and steps, like engaging in a ballroom dance competition. But I sure hope that competition readies me to boogie freely on the street and encourage others to do the same. I’m in it for the change we can create by shifting how we listen to each other, by encouraging people to listen more deeply to themselves. We’ll all dance differently. What matters is we begin.
