One of the ideas I’ve been reflecting on recently is how our desire to understand our clients can sometimes get in the way of coaching them.

At first glance, that probably sounds like a strange thing to say. Surely understanding our clients is part of being a good coach?

I don’t think it is.

As coaches, we naturally make sense of what we hear. We listen to someone’s story and our experience starts making connections.

We remember similar clients, similar conversations or perhaps something we’ve learned on a training course. Without even noticing it, we begin to create an explanation for what’s happening.

The difficulty is that, from that moment on, we’re no longer listening with quite the same openness. We’re listening through the filter of our own understanding.

 

The Danger of Making Sense Too Quickly

I’ve noticed wioth the  coaches I mentor, the more experience they have, the easier it becomes to think they know where the conversation is heading.

It rarely comes from arrogance. More often it comes from wanting to help.

But when they believe they’ve worked out what’s going on, their questions can subtly change. Instead of exploring the client’s thinking, they find themselves exploring their interpretation of it. They are very different conversations.

The assumptions are usually quiet. They don’t arrive announcing themselves. They sound more like, “This reminds me of…” or “I’ve seen this before.”

Sometimes they’re right and a lot of the time they’re not.

 

When Labels Become Lenses

I often hear coaches say they don’t feel equipped to coach someone with ADHD, autism or another diagnosis because they don’t know enough about the condition.

I see it rather differently.

An awareness of these conditions is important. It helps us coach ethically, recognise when additional support may be appropriate and avoid making uninformed assumptions.

What I don’t think we need is to understand the condition in order to coach the person.

In fact, the more certain we become that we understand ADHD, for example, the easier it is to interpret everything the client says through that lens. Before long, we’re no longer listening to this individual. We’re listening to our knowledge of ADHD.

The label may describe a diagnosis, but it tells us very little about how this particular person experiences their world.

Every client is unique, regardless of any label they carry.

 

A Different Way of Thinking About Coaching

Over the years, my thinking about coaching has shifted quite significantly.

I used to believe that one of my roles was to understand my client.

Now I see it differently.

As a coach, I don’t need to understand the person. My role is to help them understand themselves more deeply.

That changes everything.

It means I don’t need to search for the right explanation or work out what’s really going on. Instead, I can stay alongside the client, remaining genuinely curious about how they see things and allowing their own understanding to unfold.

I’ve found that some of the most significant moments in coaching happen when I let go of needing to know. That’s often when the client says something neither of us expected and a completely fresh insight begins to emerge.

 

Remaining Curious

Perhaps experience doesn’t make us better coaches because we understand people more.

Perhaps it makes us better coaches when we become more comfortable with not needing to understand.

Our clients are the experts on their own experience. They don’t need us to explain it to them.

They need us to create the conditions in which they can see it more clearly for themselves.

For me, that’s where coaching becomes transformational.

 

A Couple of Questions for you to Reflect on….

Think about your last coaching conversation.

Where might your own understanding, knowledge or experience have influenced the questions you asked?

What might have become possible if you had stayed with curiosity just a little longer?

 

Until next time,

Cath