As a very special kind of conversation, coaching goes beyond the polite conversation. It goes behind all of the polite interactions that only deal with the surface of a person’s life. With true coaching conversations, there is a feeling that you have a front-seat on reality. The conversation is real; it is authentic; it is getting to the heart of things. It is often emotional, personal, and in it two real people are meeting and encountering what is real at that moment for the client. When it happens, even as an observer, I am touched— and sometimes changed.
Unfortunately, the coaching profession is still in its infancy. There are individuals out there who consider themselves as a Coach because they have always been a good conversationalist with the gift of gab, they have the ability to keep a conversation going, they could talk to anyone about anything, at parties, pubs, social events, etc
As a result, their coaching conversations remain safe, predictable, polite, vague and ultimately superficial. It is lame, wimpy coaching that does not deserve the name.
A coaching conversation probes to find out the most significant thing that you ought to be presenting to your Coach, the thing that will unleash new potentials. Sometimes, it is the thing that you are avoiding, the thing that you most hope the coach doesn’t bring up.
Coaching is about getting to the client’s reality and that’s something that no coach knows anything about. Only the client knows their reality (and most often they do not know very much of it!) We are not the expert of the client! The client is their own expert. It is the job of the Coach to hold the space and to courageously evoke the exploration of the client’s truths.
That’s why we begin with the first question: “What do you want?” and that leads to the next set of questions: “What do you really want?” “And beyond that, what do you want?” “And what want have you not articulated?” “And what do you really, really want that you are not even yet allowing yourself to know?”
Pushing the client in this way demands courage and that’s why you have to be brave, very brave and courageous, to be a coach. After all, coaching is about provoking significant change, to get to the heart of things, to help the client unleash possibilities, and to release them from any and every thing that interferes with becoming fully alive, fully authentic.
That’s why the coaching conversation is more often than not a fierce conversation. It is fierce in that it is an intense, robust, and passionate conversation in which the client is invited to come out from behind him or herself and to become more real than he or she has ever been before. And that can be scary even for a psychologically healthy person. Scary because it means leveling with oneself, telling oneself the truth, and facing one’s truths.
If your coach doesn’t do that as well, come out from behind themselves, be real, present and authentic – then maybe it’s time to find a coach that does!
Co-authored Danny Tuckwood / L. Michael Hall
