If you want to do coaching right, you are doing it wrong!

Coaching is not like many other skills. In playing classical music on a piano, there are wrong notes you can play and right notes. In math, there is a wrong way to do sums and a right way. Your accountant can do your books the right and the wrong way. Playing classical music on the piano, sums and accountancy all have in common that there are agreed norms of correctness which have been codified. If the sheet music specifies that an A must be played, you need to play it, if the task is to add 2 to 3, you need to answer 5 and if your books are not balanced, well, they aren’t. The standards of correctness are valid in any and all cases of the activity being performed.

Coaching is not like this. There is no codified way of “right” or “wrong” responses in any given moment. Contexts vary, coaching styles are different, clients have different life experiences with coaching, cultural conversational customs are divers. Also, conversations are much too emergent to be able to predict whether what the coach is doing is “right” or “wrong”. As coach and client are co-creating their conversations throughout their conversation, the coach can only know after the fact if they asked “a good” or “a bad” question. What cannot be known is whether what the coach said was “the right thing” or “the wrong thing” as we do not have a second universe to compare alternative responses. Coaching is more like jazz music in which a “wrong” note can inspire anew development, a new tune, a chord switch, a lovely response from a fellow musician.

Yet, we encounter students who want to “get it right” in our classes. They ask a lot of “what if” questions trying to be prepared for any situation. They memorize questions and structures and are surprised if the clients don’t stick to the script that they have written in their heads. As they are struggling and stumbling, some even blame the teachers or the program: “It doesn’t work! I am doing everything “right” but it is not working!”. This attitude is fueled by developments like the Credentialing Exam of the International Coaching Federation which asks candidates to chose “the best” and “the worst” response to a coaching scenario delineated in a few sentences. When I read those, I want to scream: “It depends!!!” (Golden headline of all complex tasks: It always depends!)

When learning coaching the attitude of wanting to “do it right” can really get in the way of actually learning how to coach. While focusing on “doing it right” the coach is observing themselves and their compliance to imaginary standards of correctness rather than engaging in an alive conversation with their client. When the client does not respond as desired, it is easy to blame them, label them as “uncooperative” or worse “uncoachable”.

Coaching maturity is about an increasing comfort with “getting it wrong”. When coaches know how to repair interactions that went in an unhelpful direction, they can be braver in the session. The coach can start to show up as the person they are rather than a watered down version of a coaching bot who is asking “the right” questions.

So if trying to get it right, makes you wrong either way, how do you learn to coach? By experimentation, feedback and reflection with the assumption that there is no wrong or right way to coach. There are only ways that fit you and your client and experimentation to get there.

One of my favorite sayings from my time as a theologian is from Martin Luther: “Sin boldly”. You’ll get it wrong and you and your client will learn from it. You’ll ask for feedback from supervisors and mentors and you’ll figure out what is the best way for you to communicate your intention in coaching.

If you want to be wrong with us, why don’t you join us in one of our free meetup and exchange sessions?

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