Hardest Coaching Lesson

The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn as a coach is that my job is not to make my clients think like me. 

When I first started coaching, I was eager to share how my way of thinking and reasoning helped me overcome chronic pain and enabled me to be a happier and healthier human being. 

At first blush, this makes sense. I’ve developed good ways of thinking, can explain those principles, and advise others on how to apply those principles. What’s wrong with that? 

Let me ask this: do you listen to advice you get? Really? 

For every bit of advice, I filter out probably 99% of it. Most of it doesn’t feel like it applies, is subjectively true but not relevant. Others are truisms like “Relationships are built on communication, so just communicate!” Still other bits assume that I have skills or abilities that I just don’t.

Of course, this all assumes I can get my ego out of the way, because even great advice is useless if I assume I don’t need it. 

Advice just doesn’t work! It’s not an effective communication mode.

Luckily, there is a mode that works even better: asking curious questions. 

Let’s take the example of a new coaching client. They come to me because they are trying to move from one field to another field without taking a pay cut. 

Option 1: I advise them to model their experience after others in the new industry, look for jobs of similar title, connect to people already in that role, etc. 

This advice is the standard advice, and all I would be doing is confirming what they already know, but wasting their time and money. They most likely won’t return for another session, nor should they!

Option 2: I ask instead “In two years, how would you feel if you hadn’t made this shift?”  And ask “What have you tried to do to make this shift?” “What else?” “How would  youknow if what you are trying is working?”    

I don’t need to offer a solution, I need to help them discover a solution that they build on their own, then harden that solution by making it measurable and tied to their root motivation. By offering no advice, but asking questions that approach the problem from a new light, they will be unstuck and have thought of solutions that I could never have seen because I am not them. 

At the root, these questions work because I’m not programming my client to think like me. I’m helping them refine how they think and how they problem solve. They will make decisions, weigh risks, consider options, be more creative than I could ever be, because they understand their situation and what matters to them. 

My job as a coach is to help open the door to new thinking, not to indoctrinate my clients into my way of thinking.