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Coaching isn’t teaching: it’s really different. People new to coaching often don’t appreciate the difference. So they fail to appreciate how much more important is trust in the coaching relationship.  All coaches need first to gain trust, then work properly to maintain it,  if they’re going to be as helpful to their clients as they might. I’ll say a bit about how we do that in a moment.

Over-crudely, we could describe teaching as the passing of knowledge from one party (teacher) to the other (student). There is obviously a degree of trust needed: students need to trust that their teachers know stuff and trust what’s in the books. (By the way, that’s not to be taken for granted as the versions of history taught even in European countries vary a lot!) Moreover, as in all uneven relationships (where there’s more power or authority on one side), trust is also needed in the teacher’s professionalism, right behaviour etc. 

Coaching is absolutely, fundamentally not the passing of information or knowledge from coach to client. The key technique used in coaching is not telling but asking. It is by the asking of questions that the coach gets the client to explore, realise things, gain belief and confidence. The best questions are very open ones: “what options did you consider?”, “what difficulties have you found with these situations?”, “what do you want to achieve?”. Personally, I also find very powerful certain prompts like “Tell me more”, “Go on”. So, unlike teaching, much more information is shared by the client than by the coach. The coach uses questioning and prompting to help the client to delve into the issues they have come with, to better understand their own perspectives etc.  Very, very often it’s helping the client to see what’s “right in front of their eyes”, accept a variety of options or gain belief in their own skills, capabilities, strengths.

Coaches’ techniques, styles and “specialist areas” vary a lot so it’s hard to generalise about their use of information and knowledge, but of course we do use it. When I coach I frequently introduce models or concepts that are new to the clients and they will sometimes undertake to read up on things between sessions. For instance, there are coaching models that are helpful sometimes and many leadership models that I might introduce when working on clients’ leadership issues. 

So you might ask why is trust such a big deal if the coach is mostly just asking questions? 

One of the main reasons relates to the issues being worked on which are usually personal to the client.  In teaching there’s usually some sort of curriculum and it’s not the students who bring it. In coaching, on the other hand, the client comes to the table with some personal issue or goals that they want to work on, things about them they might change a bit. The client sets the Agenda which is never a lack of knowledge about something, it’s more likely a lack of belief, confidence or self-understanding.  The client isn’t saying “I don’t know how the 100yrs war started”, they’re saying “I struggle with these situations” or “I lack confidence in myself when facing these challenges”. 

So the work coach and client do together has to delve into what lies behind the challenge, often involving emotions and personal histories, very rarely issues of knowledge. It is because this work has to explore these personal matters that trust is so important and, of course, alongside the question of the client’s trust in the coach sit questions of confidentiality. 

All proper coaching relationships start with the agreement of a coaching contract and it is one of the key tools for establishing trust. This contract does cover organizational stuff, but more importantly it covers issues like the different responsibilities of the two parties (what they commit to bring to the work), their trust in one another and their maintenance of total confidentiality. The contracting process is really important; you can’t just hand over a document, you have to discuss it, agree it verbally and finally sign a document. Then you regularly have to recontract a bit, typically as you start each session.

As you proceed, the client needs to maintain trust in the coach if they are to be as honest and open as possible.  So the coach’s behaviours throughout the relationship matter a lot. Maintain confidentiality, do what you said and say you’ll do. 

One of the great values coaching offers that can be really hard to find at work is a totally “safe space” where you can be open, vulnerable and discuss weaknesses, fears and frustrations as well as saying how great you are. That high degree of trust and confidence that nothing you say will ever be shared are vital. In this light it’s worth saying that when I coach people I often get to really know them in a pretty deep way and I always feel that this is a privilege 

There’s knowing and there’s knowing. Amongst the worst interview questions I’ve seen too often is “what are the hallmarks of good teamwork?”. It’s terrible because good answers to it tell you nothing about a candidate’s teamworking skills; you can probably find good answers by Googling and knowing what good teamworking is doesn’t mean at all that you are good at it. It’s all too true that being good at interviews doesn’t mean you’re a good employee. It still surprises and disappoints me that so much recruiting is almost entirely based on interviews.

Another example is about people being able to say yes and no. Most relatively intelligent people know how to say yay or nay and in fact could give sensible advice about these apparently simple responses: “take your time before answering”, “don’t be too flattered by the invitation…”, “allow your concern for the person’s feelings to affect how you answer, not what your answer is..”. Yet, many very clever people have a lot of difficulty for instance in saying no to requests or invitations. Understanding what’s “good practice” doesn’t mean you do it.

When I’m coaching clients about these difficulties (however old, young, senior or “junior” they may be) I don’t find a lack of understanding, rather I always find that what sits beneath their difficulty are some emotions. There are some give-away phrases that might pop up: I don’t like confrontation, I’m a people-pleaser. Often however I have found that these propensities aren’t recognised by the clients but become clear when we explore situations, issues and past challenges. 

My role as a coach is never to give super advice about best practice; in these cases it is rather to help them acknowledge, understand and “know” these emotional backdrops, explore possible options for managing them or managing the yes/no situations without allowing their emotional “baggage” to dominate.

There are so many types of intelligence. I’m hopelessly lost without a SatNav but unusually good at many word games. I can’t calculate 8 moves ahead over a chess board but I can read between the lines well and so forth. The phrase “emotionally intelligent” is a bit of a misnomer if we assume intelligence is akin to calculating or deducing. In coaching (as in influencing and leading) we have to be attuned to clients’ emotional backdrops, attitudes, biases and sensitivities. One of the roles we have in coaching is helping clients to become more attuned to their own.