When I received my PCC credential, I was enormously proud of it. I still am. There are hours of coaching behind those three letters, along with training, mentor coaching, feedback, recordings, assessments and a fairly substantial amount of wondering whether I was actually getting any better.

You would imagine, therefore, that becoming more experienced as a coach would make me more certain about what I’m doing.

In some ways it has. I know more than I did when I started. I have a much deeper understanding of the competencies, a broader range of approaches available to me and considerably more experience of sitting opposite another human being without panicking when I don’t immediately know where the conversation is going. There are things I once had to think about consciously that now feel much more integrated into how I work.

And yet one of the stranger things about developing as a coach is that increased confidence hasn’t necessarily produced increased certainty.

Quite the opposite.

The more I coach, the more interested I become in what I might be missing. I am less convinced that the first thing I notice is the thing. Less interested in finding the perfect question. Less impressed by my own cleverness when I think I’ve understood what is happening. And much more willing to stay with something before deciding what it means.

Perhaps that is part of why I increasingly think of coaching as a craft, and occasionally an art, rather than simply a collection of techniques.

THE STORY ISN’T ALWAYS THE STORY

When I began coaching, I could become very interested in the details of what a client was telling me. What happened? Who said what? What happened next? Why did they do that? The story gave me something to hold onto and, if I’m being completely truthful, probably helped me feel as though I understood what was happening.

There is nothing inherently wrong with understanding context. Sometimes the details matter enormously. But over time I’ve become more curious about the person telling me the story than about my ability to reconstruct the story itself.

A client can spend twenty minutes describing a difficult relationship with their manager, for example, and I could usefully understand the personalities, events and organisational politics involved. But I might also begin noticing something else: the way the client becomes smaller when talking about that person, perhaps, or a phrase they have used three times without appearing to notice it. Maybe what initially sounds like a conversation about somebody else’s behaviour contains something about authority, recognition, conflict, belonging or the client’s own sense of themselves.

That doesn’t mean I get to decide what is “really” going on. If anything, experience has made me more cautious about that. Coaches can become rather seduced by the idea that we’re detecting something hidden beneath the surface, as though the client is a puzzle and our job is to uncover the answer.

I don’t want to solve the client.

I want to become better at noticing what might be worth noticing together.

That distinction matters to me.

SMALL THINGS HAVE BECOME MUCH BIGGER

I used to think a really good coaching session would contain a breakthrough.

You know the sort of moment. The client’s eyes widen, everything suddenly makes sense and the clouds metaphorically part as they announce an insight so profound that you can practically hear the ICF credential assessors applauding in the distance.

Those moments do happen.

They’re lovely.

They’re also not most of coaching.

Some of the moments I’m most interested in now are much smaller. A client pauses before answering something they would normally answer immediately. Their language changes. They say something and then quietly contradict it ten minutes later. They laugh while describing something that doesn’t sound remotely funny. Their energy seems to change when a particular person or possibility enters the conversation.

None of these things necessarily mean anything by themselves. That’s important. A pause isn’t evidence of a hidden truth. A shift in posture isn’t a secret message waiting for the sufficiently perceptive coach to decode it.

But it might be interesting.

So I can offer what I notice.

Something seemed to change when you said that. Did you notice it too?

And then the client gets to decide whether there is anything there.

That has been quite a shift in my coaching. I’m less interested in demonstrating that I’ve noticed the right thing and more interested in making something available for the client to explore.

Coaching isn’t only about listening to what is said. Sometimes it’s about becoming curious about what changes while it is being said.

THE TEMPTATION TO BE USEFUL

There is another tension I’ve become much more aware of as I’ve developed: I really like being useful.

This is not necessarily an ideal quality in a coach.

Or perhaps, more accurately, it’s a perfectly good quality that can become problematic remarkably quickly.

A client describes something difficult and an idea appears in my head. I can see a possible solution. I know a model that might help. Perhaps I’ve experienced something similar myself. Everything in me wants to contribute.

And sometimes contributing is exactly the right thing to do. Coaching doesn’t become contaminated the moment a coach offers an observation, shares something or introduces an idea. What matters much more to me now is noticing why I want to do it and what happens to the client’s thinking if I do.

Am I offering this because it genuinely serves the conversation?

Or because I am uncomfortable not knowing what happens next?

Am I reflecting something back?

Or subtly trying to move the client towards the conclusion I’ve already reached?

That line can be surprisingly thin.

Early in my coaching, I think I sometimes confused being useful with producing movement. If the client was stuck, I should somehow help them become unstuck. If they couldn’t see an answer, perhaps I needed to ask the question that would reveal it.

These days I’m rather less certain that stuckness always needs my assistance.

Sometimes the client needs somewhere to be stuck for a while.

SILENCE ISN’T SOMETHING I HAVE TO FILL

I’ve always considered myself reasonably comfortable with silence, although coaching has occasionally revealed that I am particularly comfortable with silence when I know what the silence is for.

The more difficult version is when the client stops speaking and I don’t know what is happening.

Are they thinking? Feeling? Confused? Have I asked a terrible question? Are they waiting for me? Should I say something? How long has this silence actually been? Three seconds? Thirty? Fourteen years?

Silence does strange things to time.

My temptation, particularly when I was less experienced, could be to rescue the conversation. Rephrase the question. Offer clarification. Say something helpful. Do something that reassured me that coaching was still taking place.

I’ve become much more interested in what happens if I don’t.

A client may be encountering an idea for the first time. They may be trying to find language for something that doesn’t yet have language. They may simply need a few seconds in which nobody asks anything else of them.

I don’t know.

And that’s precisely the point.

Silence isn’t necessarily empty. My discomfort with it doesn’t mean the client needs me to fill it.

This is one of those aspects of coaching that sounds incredibly simple until you’re actually sitting in the silence.

I AM IN THE ROOM TOO

Perhaps the biggest change in my coaching has been recognising that I am not some neutral instrument sitting outside the conversation.

I’m in it.

My reactions, sensations, assumptions, emotions and intuitions are part of my experience of the coaching relationship. If I suddenly feel impatient, unusually protective of a client, intimidated, bored, excited or desperate to help, that interests me.

But I’ve become increasingly cautious about what I do with that information.

If I feel tension, it doesn’t automatically mean the client is tense. If I feel that something is being avoided, it doesn’t mean I’ve uncovered an avoidance. My experience might tell us something about what is happening between us. It might tell me something about myself. It might be completely irrelevant.

The developmental work, for me, is not simply learning to trust my intuition.

It is learning to notice it without automatically believing it.

That is also one of the places where supervision has become so important to my practice. There are things that are almost impossible to see clearly while I’m inside the relationship with a client. Having somewhere to examine my own responses helps me become more discerning about what belongs in the coaching conversation and what I need to take elsewhere.

The coach may be an instrument of the work, but instruments need tuning.

SO WHAT DID PCC ACTUALLY CHANGE?

Receiving the credential mattered to me. It represented a substantial amount of work and a level of professional practice that I had deliberately worked towards.

But I don’t think there was a moment when I crossed some invisible line and suddenly became a PCC-level coach.

The development was happening in much smaller ways.

It happened when I stopped searching quite so desperately for the next question. When I became more comfortable letting the client determine what mattered. When I noticed my urge to rescue and occasionally managed not to act on it. When feedback showed me something about my coaching that I hadn’t been able to see myself. When I listened back to recordings and heard opportunities I’d completely missed in the moment.

And, perhaps most importantly, when I became less concerned with looking like a good coach while I was coaching.

That one is still a work in progress.

There is a strange paradox in learning a craft. At the beginning, we need structure. We learn competencies, models, distinctions and techniques because they give us something to practise. We need language for what we’re doing and standards against which we can examine it. I don’t believe mastery means leaving those things behind.

But eventually something else has to happen.

The framework has to become sufficiently integrated that we’re no longer staring at it while somebody is sitting in front of us.

It’s a little like learning to dance. At first, you’re counting steps. You’re thinking about where your feet should go and desperately trying not to tread on anybody. The technique matters because without it you’re mostly just moving around hopefully.

Eventually, though, you want to dance.

THE ART IS IN THE PRACTICE

That is probably what I mean when I describe coaching as an art.

Not that it is mysterious or instinctive, and certainly not that calling it an art releases us from professional standards. Quite the opposite. The craft matters enormously. Competence matters. Ethics matter. Practice matters. And these are matters of Mentor Coaching.

But none of them can tell me exactly what this particular person, in this particular conversation, at this particular moment, needs from me.

That part has to emerge between us.

And perhaps becoming a better coach isn’t about reaching a point where I finally know exactly what I’m doing.

Perhaps it’s about developing enough craft to notice more, enough confidence not to act on everything I notice, and enough humility to remain interested in what I still don’t know.

Receiving my PCC didn’t make me feel as though I’d mastered coaching.

Thankfully.

It made me want to keep practising.