First, do no harm - how coaches can hurt clients

Coaches have conversations with clients, and you might ask how conversations can hurt. They can: when they blame the victim, increase the size of a problem or cement an undesired status quo the client came to address in coaching. In this text, I would like to describe subtle ways in which I have seen coaches unintentionally hurt clients. I will leave out the obvious ethical violations like coaching clients who actually need different support, breaching confidentiality or acting in illegal ways.

Blaming the victim

Coaches want to help clients discover agency. One of the first coaching books, “Coaching for performance” by John Whitmore speaks about generating self-awareness and self-responsibility. If coaches pursue this goal too intensively, they might end up “blaming the victim” and leave the client with a feeling of helplessness and blame. Let’s take the example of a client who was shouted at by their boss. They come to the coaching session, relating the story of how they felt verbally abused. The coach knows that the client cannot control the actions of the boss, and thus asks a question like: “What might you have contributed to the boss’ anger?” in order to “help” the client discover agency around what they might have done differently. In the ears of the client this will sound like they are to blame for the boss’ verbal abuse. I have seen subtle victim blaming in a few coaching sessions and I would caution us all to be mindful of this mechanism when we invite clients to discover agency.

Increasing the size of the problem

Many clients and many coaches like “deep” exploration and the search for meaningful explanation, making sense of the clients’ experience if you will. This, too, can take a harmful turn. Take a client who wants to stop procrastinating. The coach invites the client to discover the “root cause” of their procrastination by asking: “What is it that you are avoiding when you are procrastinating?” The client might respond: “Success!” and the coach might continue by asking: “What is blocking you from wanting to be successful?” The client then goes “digging deep” into their family history and how they were always made to feel “not enough”. The conversation moved from a rather simple problem “procrastination” to “a trauma of feeling not enough” which is endlessly more difficult to resolve and falls into the remit of psychotherapy. Had the coach asked: “What would you like instead of procrastination?”, the client might have replied: “Sticking to the deadlines I set for myself”. The coach could have then invited the client to talk about what that means, what the client knows about themselves that tells them they can do it and could have invited the client to tell their stories in ways that make them stronger.

Cementing an undesired status quo

An undesired status quo can be made more difficult to change by an invitation to attribute a problem to a fixed internal state of the client. For example, if the client feels “not enough” in meetings with the CEO, the coach might introduce the term “impostor syndrome” with the intention of normalizing the client’s behavior. However, there are side effects to labelling problems. A noun crystallizes a situation into a thing. Instead of reflecting on what “feeling enough” might look like, how the client would behave, the coach will invite the client to “overcome the impostor syndrome”. The problem which initially included a situation, other people, the client’s feelings is made into an internal problem of the client which is much harder to change than the situation, responses to other people and how the client may come to feel about it. What was situational becomes individual and internal and therefore harder to change.

If you would like to talk about these or other ways in which coaches unintentionally harm clients and, most importantly, what to do instead, why not come to one of our free meetups and exchanges?

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