With great questions comes great responsibility

With great power comes great responsibility. Apparently, the same applies to asking good questions. 😄 When I started coaching school, I thought I would mainly be learning tools, models and — naturally — how to ask “good questions”. And yes. There were tools. There were models. There were plenty of questions. But the biggest learning happened somewhere else. In pausing. In resisting the urge to suggest. And in discovering how surprisingly difficult it can be not to jump in with a solution — particularly when you have spent more than a decade being professionally rewarded for finding them. In technology, we often ask: What is the root cause? What is not working? How do we fix it? How can we make it faster, better, more efficient? It is an incredibly useful way of thinking. But a human being is not a system to debug.

Not every silence needs to be rescued

That has been one of the most interesting lessons for me. Silence in a conversation can trigger a powerful automatic response: Say something. Ask another question. Help. Do not let this become awkward. And yet sometimes that silence is exactly where the important work is happening. A person hears what they have just said for the first time. Two thoughts suddenly connect. An automatic answer starts sounding less convincing when spoken out loud. And sometimes the coach’s job is simply not to interrupt that process.

Not everyone needs another piece of good advice

That sounds obvious until you happen to have a very good piece of advice. 😉 Especially when you know the subject. Especially when you can see a possible solution. Especially when experience tells you what might work. Coaching is teaching me an important distinction: the fact that I can see a solution does not mean the client needs my solution. Sometimes they need space. Attention. A different perspective. A question worth staying with for a little longer. And genuine trust that they have the resources and capacity to find their own way forward.

The more I learn, the more respect I have for the work

Completing coaching school is an important milestone for me. But it is definitely not the finish line. The more I learn, the less I see coaching as a collection of techniques to master and the more I see it as a responsible way of working with another human being. Responsibility for ethics. For boundaries. For presence. For managing your own ego — particularly when it desperately wants to be helpful. For recognising when coaching is appropriate and when consulting, mentoring or another form of professional support is needed instead. And for genuinely trusting the client and their own process. My next chapter therefore includes more practice, mentoring, continued learning and further development grounded in ICF standards. I am also working towards the ACC credential. Not because I expect to reach a point where I can say: “now I know everything.” I suspect the mechanism works in exactly the opposite direction.

Today, I celebrate

So today I pause. Completing coaching school is something I am genuinely happy about. Tomorrow? More practice. More learning. More listening. And probably more questions. 😄 Because perhaps good coaching does not begin when the coach has a brilliant answer. Perhaps it begins when they can create enough space for your answer to have a chance to emerge.

Read more about how I work and what ICF standards mean to me →