The Coaching Habits You Don’t Know You Have
When we think about developing as coaches, we often think about learning something new. A new approach, a different way of working, another training course or perhaps a deeper understanding of the ICF Core Competencies.
But sometimes our development is less about adding something new and more about noticing what we’re already doing.
No matter how experienced we are, we all develop coaching habits. Some are useful, some probably were useful once, and some have simply become so familiar that we don’t notice them anymore.
When something that works becomes a habit
Most coaching habits don’t start out as bad habits – quite the opposite.
Perhaps you discovered that reflecting a client’s words back to them created a powerful moment, so you started doing it more often.
Maybe a particular kind of question seemed to unlock something for several clients, or you became comfortable with a certain way of opening or closing a session.
Over time, something that began as a conscious choice can quietly become our default.
And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. The interesting question is whether we’re still choosing it.
There’s a difference between doing something because it seems useful for this client, in this moment, and doing it because that’s simply what we tend to do.
The habits that are harder to spot
Some habits are fairly easy to notice once we start looking for them. Perhaps we ask too many questions, interrupt occasionally or move towards action a little quickly.
Others are much more subtle.
We might habitually give more attention to certain kinds of language, steer away from emotion without realising it, fill silence slightly sooner than the client needs us to, or start forming our next question while they are still speaking.
We can also develop habits around what we expect a coaching session to look like. We may have an internal sense of how quickly we should get to an outcome, what a “good” insight sounds like or whether enough has happened during the session.
None of these things necessarily means the coaching isn’t good but once something becomes automatic, we’re less able to decide whether it belongs in that particular conversation.
Experience doesn’t make us immune.
In fact, I think experience can sometimes make our habits harder to see.
When we’re newer coaches, we tend to pay a lot of attention to what we’re doing. As we become more experienced, much of that becomes automatic, which is exactly what we want. We don’t want to spend every coaching conversation mentally checking ourselves against a list of competencies.
The downside of that ease is that those familiar patterns can disappear from our awareness.
That’s one of the reasons I still find reflection on our coaching so valuable, however long we’ve been doing it.
Not because we need to find something wrong, but because there is nearly always something interesting to notice.
A useful question for September
August often creates a natural break. Clients are away, diaries can be quieter and many of us step away from our usual routines for a while.
Then September arrives and, perhaps because of my years in education, it has always felt a little like the beginning of a new year to me.
So before rushing back into coaching exactly as you left it, perhaps there’s an opportunity to get curious.
What have you started doing in your coaching without noticing that you’re doing it?
You don’t necessarily need to stop it, just notice it.
Because once you can see a habit, it becomes a choice again.
Until next time,
Cath
P.S. If this has got you wondering about your own coaching habits, try listening back to one of your recent sessions without assessing whether it was “good” or “bad”. Simply listen for what you repeatedly do. You might be surprised by what you notice.
