To the degree that coaching backslides into psychotherapy, coaches are eager and willing to explore client feelings. When creating space for an inquiry and listening deeply for concerns, giving airtime to client feelings seems natural and in step with what you’re there to provide.
This is not the path to giving great coaching.
Great coaching tends to care little for feelings. Recognizing and acknowledging feelings, certainly. But indulging, never. Focus on feelings beyond acknowledging is the purview of rumination, which tends to backfire spectacularly, making problems seem worse and bigger.
Great coaches aren’t dismissing of feelings, they’re just not there to let clients wallow in them. When I was all about the feelings in a session, confronted by this or that, the best coaches I’ve worked with would give me a simple choice along these lines:
“You can either honor your feelings in this moment, or honor who you are as a capable individual. If you want to honor your feelings, call me back when you’re ready to be more than that.”
They weren’t callous. They were standing for me being bigger than whatever reaction I was having in the moment.
Best of all, they were tending to my feelings in a much more effective way, by playing the long game. Because when your life is bigger, when you’re relating to yourself as capable, and when you accomplish, feelings handle themselves.
If coaching is just the conversations, it’s very easy to let those conversations drift toward (and linger on) feelings.
With CA, the conversations are routinely accompanied by shared session notes, action plans, and the tracking and reviewing of Metrics.
In other words, there’s real stuff to be attended to. Stuff that was created from an intentional place. This keeps the coaching relationship on track.
