A photograph of me recently prompted an interesting question: What exactly is coaching?
I’m in a forest, working with a group of coaches. No training room and certainly none of the imagery we tend to associate with coaching: two people sitting opposite each other in carefully positioned chairs, one leaning forward attentively while the other apparently experiences a life-changing insight.
It doesn’t particularly look like coaching.
Which is interesting, because it raises the question of what we’re expecting coaching to look like in the first place.
What exactly is coaching?
It’s a reasonable question, although after years of coaching I’m increasingly convinced that it’s considerably easier to experience than it is to define. Depending on who you ask, coaching is a process, a partnership, a conversation, a methodology, a developmental intervention or some combination of all five. Ask enough coaches and you’ll probably receive enough definitions to require another coaching session simply to work out which one you prefer.
My own definition is deliberately simple: a meaningful conversation with an outcome.
I like the simplicity of it, although I’d put rather more emphasis on meaningful than might initially be obvious, and I’m considerably less prescriptive about what constitutes an outcome. Sometimes a client comes into coaching with something wonderfully concrete. There is a decision to make, a difficult conversation ahead, a transition to navigate or something in their leadership that isn’t working as they would like. At other times the starting point is considerably less tidy. They know something needs attention but aren’t yet sure what it is. Occasionally what they need isn’t movement at all, but somewhere to stand still long enough to understand what is happening around them.
All of those can be coaching. Which is perhaps where some of the confusion begins.
So what does the coach actually do?
This question usually arrives fairly early in a conversation with somebody considering coaching. What methodology do you use? Which tools? What model? How will you help me?
Perfectly reasonable questions. If you’re considering spending time and money working with someone, you’re entitled to understand what they actually do.
The slightly irritating answer is that much of what happens in a good coaching conversation doesn’t look particularly impressive from the outside. I listen. I ask questions. I notice things. Sometimes I challenge something. Sometimes I offer an observation or tell you what I’m hearing. Sometimes I interrupt. Sometimes I say almost nothing at all.
There are models I know and approaches that influence how I work, but I don’t arrive at a session with a toolbox looking for something in the client that needs fixing. Nor do I think the value of coaching is demonstrated by the number of techniques I can squeeze into an hour.
In fact, one of the things that interests me most about coaching is how easily a coach can become so occupied with doing coaching that they stop paying attention to the person they’re coaching.
If I’m searching my head for the perfect question while you’re talking, I’m not entirely with you anymore. If I’m mentally flicking through models wondering which one to deploy, some of my attention has moved away from what is happening between us and towards my own performance as a coach.
That doesn’t make tools or models useless. Far from it. We learn them for a reason.
But the model isn’t the conversation.
Coaching isn’t advice in disguise
Another assumption I encounter is that coaching is essentially a sophisticated route to somebody telling you what to do.
This is particularly understandable in leadership and executive coaching. If somebody is working with a coach because they’re struggling with a difficult team, stepping into a bigger role or facing a decision they haven’t encountered before, why wouldn’t they want the coach to give them the answer?
Occasionally I may have experience that is relevant to the situation being discussed. I have led people, made decisions, managed change, got things badly wrong and learned a few things along the way. Pretending I arrive at every conversation as some kind of blank human canvas would be rather absurd.
But my experience isn’t yours.
What works for me may be completely wrong for you. Your organisation is different, your relationships are different, your tolerances are different and, crucially, you’re the person who will still be there after our coaching conversation has finished.
So rather than asking What would I do?, I’m generally much more interested in how you are thinking about what you might do.
What are you seeing? What aren’t you seeing? What assumptions have quietly become facts? What matters here? What are you avoiding? What happens if you’re wrong? What might you already know but not particularly want to know?
That’s where coaching starts becoming interesting.
Sometimes the conversation slows down
Modern working life doesn’t exactly suffer from an excess of uninterrupted thinking.
We move from meeting to meeting, respond to messages while supposedly listening to somebody else, make decisions between appointments and occasionally mistake having thought about something repeatedly for having thought about it deeply.
A coaching conversation changes the conditions a little. For an hour, one conversation gets to matter.
That doesn’t mean every session becomes an intense voyage of self-discovery. Sometimes coaching is wonderfully practical. We might spend most of a session untangling a decision or preparing for a conversation that needs to happen on Tuesday morning. But even then, something changes when there is enough space to hear yourself think.
You may say something and realise you don’t actually believe it. You may hear yourself describe the same problem for the fourth time and suddenly notice your own part in it. A silence may last slightly longer than it normally would, and something else arrives before either of us rushes in to fill it.
Sometimes coaching doesn’t give you somewhere new to go. It gives you somewhere different from which to look.
That, for me, is part of its value.
Who we are is how we coach
There is another part of coaching that is difficult to capture in a neat definition: who you’re having the conversation with matters.
Two coaches can have the same qualifications, know the same models and work within the same professional standards, and the experience of working with them can be completely different. We bring ourselves into the room whether we intend to or not: our humour, curiosity, patience, directness, experiences, assumptions and ways of responding to another person.
For me, who we are is how we coach.
It doesn’t mean the coaching becomes about the coach. Quite the opposite. Part of developing as a coach is becoming increasingly aware of what we bring so that we’re less likely to confuse it with what belongs to the client.
But it does mean that chemistry matters.
I can be an excellent coach and still not be the right coach for you.
That’s why I think the conversation before beginning coaching matters. You’re not simply assessing qualifications or methodology; you’re noticing what happens when you think in the presence of this particular person. Do you feel able to disagree? Can you say the thing you’re slightly embarrassed to say? Do you feel challenged without feeling managed? Can you think here?
Those questions tell us rather more than whether I happen to use GROW.
So, what exactly is coaching?
After all of that, I’m still rather fond of my definition.
A meaningful conversation with an outcome.
I’d just hold all three parts fairly lightly.
The conversation matters because coaching happens between people, not between a person and a methodology. Meaningful doesn’t necessarily mean profound; sometimes the most useful thing we can talk about is the meeting you’re dreading tomorrow morning. And the outcome doesn’t always need to be an action plan containing three SMART objectives and a deadline.
Sometimes the outcome is a decision. Sometimes it’s an action. Sometimes it’s seeing something differently. Sometimes it’s recognising that you don’t know yet. And occasionally it is simply leaving with a little more space around something that felt impossibly crowded when you arrived.
Perhaps that’s why defining coaching is so difficult. From the outside, it can look like two people having a conversation.
Which, of course, is exactly what it is.
It’s what happens within that conversation that makes the difference.
