Coaching Zone

My reflections on what the value of coaching is. Here I gather my thoughts about coaching.

What coaching is to me

For me, coaching has a spiritual dimension. The coach removes themselves from the conversation: doesn’t advise, doesn’t judge, doesn’t offer their own solutions. This creates a space in which the client can draw out of themselves everything they need. The answers are already in them. The coach only makes room for them.

It sounds easy, but creating such a space is not simple. How often do we feel an enormous urge to advise someone, to share our own experience, to say how we dealt with it? In coaching it works the other way around: the more of us there is in the conversation, the less room is left for the client and the smaller their progress. That’s why the hardest part of a coach’s work is to step back and keep the space open until the client fills it themselves.

At the same time, the conversation is energizing. It does something a person cannot do alone. It’s hard to get out of our own thoughts because we look at them from the very center. Another person who truly listens lets us see them from outside.

It is written into our nature that together we are something greater than we are alone. Working on yourself doesn’t have to be lonely, and the presence of another person adds something that no one can give themselves.

But I mean real presence. Coaching is a shared game of creating space and filling it. The relationship must have the right dynamic; otherwise we can’t say that we are “together.” It’s an important distinction.

The power of a question

A surprising question can open entirely new paths of ideas. Not because it contains the answer, but because it knocks you off the beaten track, freeing the mind from patterns of thinking. Freedom of mind is the foundation of creativity. Such questions are ones you don’t ask yourself, because they wouldn’t occur to you.

What it can give

Above all, it increases the inner sense of agency: the belief that you are the one steering your life and that you can change it. Coaching supports you in reaching goals that you set yourself, whether they concern work, relationships or something else entirely.

It happens that such a conversation brings relief or offers support in a way that could be called therapeutic. But that is neither its purpose nor its premise.

What it doesn’t give

By design, coaching is not therapy or medical advice, does not replace a doctor or psychologist, and does not make diagnoses. If you need that kind of help, reach for it.

If you want to talk

I describe the consultations on the Consultations page.