There is a moment in coaching that I suspect most coaches know rather well. The client stops talking. Perhaps they have said something unexpected, perhaps the conversation has suddenly gone somewhere you hadn’t anticipated, or perhaps the beautifully formed question that was waiting patiently in your head has become completely irrelevant. Whatever has happened, you find yourself sitting there, attempting to embody everything you understand about presence, while another voice somewhere inside your head is saying: Shit. What do I ask now?

I remember this feeling particularly well from my earlier days of coaching, although I’m not convinced it ever completely disappears. Experience changes our relationship with these moments, certainly. We become more familiar with silence, more comfortable with conversations that take unexpected turns and, hopefully, less convinced that every pause requires us to leap into action. But I still have moments when I don’t know what should happen next and, increasingly, I’m not sure I would want that to change.

Because there is a peculiar contradiction at the heart of learning to coach. We spend an enormous amount of time learning how to coach — competencies, models, contracting, listening, questioning, ethics, practice — only to discover that some of our most interesting work happens when we loosen our grip on all of it. Not forget it, certainly not disregard it, but stop trying quite so hard to demonstrate that we know it.

When you can hear yourself coaching

Learning to coach can be extraordinarily noisy. Listen actively. Don’t lead. Stay curious. Ask open questions. Notice the client. Notice yourself. Don’t stack questions. Don’t solve the problem. Check the agreement. Leave enough silence. Remember the competencies. And breathe.

There can be so much happening inside your own head that sometimes there is remarkably little room left for the person sitting opposite you.

I remember becoming aware of moments when I wasn’t really listening to my client anymore; I was listening to myself coaching them. Was that a good question? Should I challenge that? Have I been quiet for too long? Am I being toochallenging? What am I missing? What would a really good coach do here? All perfectly understandable questions, particularly while developing as a coach, but underneath them I think there can be another, rather more uncomfortable one.

Do I actually know what I’m doing?

Perhaps the answer, at least in part, is no.

Now, obviously, I need to know how to coach. There are competencies to develop, ethics to understand, boundaries to hold and agreements to make. Technique matters. Practice matters. Experience matters. Not-knowing is not an excuse for not knowing your craft.

But once I am sitting with another person, there is an awful lot I don’t know. I don’t know what it is like to be them. I don’t know which part of what they have just told me is actually important. I don’t know what they haven’t said. I don’t know what they are about to realise, whether the question forming in my mind will unlock something useful or land with all the elegance of a brick, and I certainly don’t know what they should do with their life.

That can be an uncomfortable place to sit because not-knowing can feel remarkably similar to incompetence if we haven’t learned to distinguish between the two. So we reach for something: a model, a technique, a clever question, something we learned on a course, something that worked brilliantly with another client last Thursday. Anything, really, that gets us out of that uncomfortable place where we don’t know what happens next.

And sometimes it works. Sometimes, however, I wonder whether the intervention was more useful to the coach than the client.

Dancing in the dark

We talk a lot in coaching about the dance. It’s probably an analogy that has been made to work rather harder than it ever expected to, but there is one version of it that has always stayed with me: presence can sometimes feel a little like dancing in the dark.

You know somebody else is there. You can feel movement, hesitation, perhaps a change of pace or direction, and you take a step without being entirely certain where your foot will land. There is technique involved, of course, but there is also trust. You cannot choreograph every movement because the other person is moving too.

The temptation when we’re coaching is to turn on the bloody lights. To make sense of things, decide what is happening, find the question, identify the destination and get everything moving again. But who said we needed to move forward? Perhaps the hesitation is important. Perhaps the client doesn’t know yet. Perhaps I don’t know yet.

And perhaps neither of us needs to.

What if the silence isn’t empty?

What if the client is thinking, feeling, not knowing, making meaning, finding words or discovering something that didn’t exist thirty seconds ago? What if my beautifully timed intervention actually interrupts the very thing I’ve been waiting for?

This is where the question I ask myself begins to change. Rather than immediately wondering What should I do next?, I can become curious about What is happening here? There is a world of difference between those two questions. The first puts my attention on my performance as a coach; the second puts it back into the relationship and whatever is unfolding within it.

That doesn’t mean silence is sacred, nor that the sophisticated coach simply sits there looking thoughtful until the client eventually does something interesting. I interrupt. I challenge. I share what I’m noticing. I ask direct questions and sometimes take a risk with something without knowing whether it will be useful at all. Sometimes it lands beautifully. Sometimes it falls completely flat. That’s part of the work too.

For me, the more interesting distinction is increasingly about why I am doing something. Is there something happening in the conversation that feels useful to bring into our awareness, or am I simply becoming uncomfortable because nothing appears to be happening?

I’m not always sure.

Which rather conveniently brings us back to not-knowing.

I really do want to be useful

Clients give us their time, their trust and, usually, their money. Sometimes they bring things into coaching that matter enormously to them. Of course I want to be useful, but I think there is a subtle point at which wanting to be useful can become needing to do something useful.

Ask the brilliant question. Spot the pattern. Make the observation. Create the breakthrough. Have the client leave thinking, Bloody hell, that Gareth is good.

Okay, perhaps not the last one.

But I recognise the temptation. There is something wonderfully seductive about being the coach who asks the question. You know the one. The client stops, stares into the distance and eventually says, “Wow. That’s a really good question.” Lovely. Somewhere inside, a tiny fist pumps the air.

And yet I’m increasingly curious about what happens when I don’t need to be responsible for producing the insight. Because the more responsibility I take for creating my client’s awareness, the less room I may leave for them to create their own.

This is where not-knowing starts to feel less like an absence of something and more like a discipline. Can I stay curious for a little longer before I decide what I’m seeing? Can I offer an observation without becoming attached to it being correct? Can I trust the client enough not to rescue them from uncertainty simply because I find their uncertainty uncomfortable?

Those are harder questions for me than remembering which coaching model might be useful next.

And this is where supervision gets interesting

The irritating thing about all of this is that it is considerably easier to notice afterwards.

Why did I interrupt there? Why was that silence so uncomfortable? Why was I working so bloody hard with that particular client? Why did I desperately want them to reach one conclusion rather than another? Why did I suddenly lose confidence? Why was I so pleased with that question? Why did I feel relieved when they found an answer?

This is one of the reasons supervision has become so important in my own practice. It gives me somewhere to bring the moments I don’t understand, not so that somebody can tell me whether I coached well or badly, but so that I can become curious about what I was doing in the relationship.

Sometimes what I notice seems predominantly connected to the client. Sometimes it very clearly belongs to me. And sometimes something is happening between us that is considerably harder to separate. For me, that’s where supervision becomes particularly interesting, because the question stops being Did I do the right thing? and becomes something much closer to What on earth was happening there?

I find the second question infinitely more useful.

Perhaps we learn it so we can forget it

There is a quote from coach and stage director Luc de Belloy that I’ve carried with me for some time:

“Technique is for a coach what a text is for an actor: they both have to forget it in order to be present.”

I love this, not because I think technique doesn’t matter but precisely because it does. An actor can forget the text because they have learned it. A musician can improvise because they know their instrument. A dancer can stop consciously thinking about every footstep because they have spent years learning how to move.

Perhaps coaching isn’t so different.

We learn the craft, practise it, get things wrong, receive feedback, notice ourselves, develop our own way of working and then continue learning. Somewhere along the way, perhaps we loosen our grip on needing to demonstrate everything we know and become a little more able to stay with what we don’t.

Which leaves us sitting opposite another human being who may say something we didn’t expect, followed by a silence we hadn’t planned for, taking the conversation somewhere neither of us knew we were going.

And there it is again. That familiar little moment.

Shit. What do I do now?

Maybe something. Maybe nothing. I don’t know.

And perhaps that’s precisely the point.

Instead of asking What should a good coach do now?, perhaps I can stay with a much more interesting question:

What is happening?

And listen.