In a recent coach training, I was being coached by a student coach and I got to see one of the guiding principles of coaching in real time:
The real coaching begins after the coaching
In the actual coaching session, which the coach handled quite well, we discussed how I’d just celebrated my sixty-fourth birthday, and some feelings that were coming up—especially when I chat with friends who are planning retirement (and I am not).
We talked about what’s in my control, like steering the conversation to other topics, including what I’m looking forward to in the coming years.
As I pondered this conversation a couple of days later, I realized this was never really about retirement. It was other topics coming up in those conversations that were bothering me.
And it’s not that my coach wasn’t drilling deeper; she was! She asked questions like, “What’s the real issue? What’s really going on?” And I thought I’d gotten to it.
She even asked, “Are you noticing this in any other situations?” And that’s the question that came back to me later on. “Hmm,” I thought, “I kind of am noticing this in other situations.”
That question was nagging at me. And you know what? The most powerful coaching questions are nagging questions. The kind that keep replaying in our minds after the session, and to which we sometimes get different answers later.
The tricky part is, we don’t always know which questions those will be. If you’d asked me which question was going to nag at me later, I couldn’t have told you. Sometimes we just have to let things stew.
A really good practice would be to say to the people we coach, “Hey, in the next week or so, just give some thought to what we’ve talked about.” Or, “Sounds like you’ve been doing some good thinking here. You may want to do some more thinking about this.”
We can mention this at the start of the coaching relationship, and remind them later on—especially when we sense there might be a new insight beneath the surface, that just needs some reflection time.
Simple Can Be Profound