A Coaching Paradox

There's a moment in almost every coaching engagement where the coach has to make a choice. The client is stuck, they've described a problem, and then they go: "I don't know, what do you think?" They're looking at you with that particular expression, the one that says, I can't grow a skill I was never taught, I came here for answers. And you have an answer or two. A good one, probably. It's sitting right there, fully formed and practically vibrating in your chest.

That answer comes from your experience, your framework, your previous client work, or your story of what it means to get unstuck. Getting unstuck felt so good, and we want to pass that on by helping. Even though the distance between your answer and the one your client actually needs might be a canyon wide, it just feels like... you're about to be really, really helpful.

Coaches are helpers. It's the reason most of us got into the work. I came out of ops management, years of watching people get stuck on rigid policy, or poor communication, or trying the ongoing dance of family needs and work demands. Coaching brought the discovery that the right question at the right time really could change everything. The power of being heard and seen by someone else.

The rub is that "helping" is an addictive feedback loop. When a client has a breakthrough in session, you feel it too. You were present for transformation. You facilitated it. My coach supervisor calls it "the juice," the thing that drives us to keep coming back to this craft. And the more you do this work? The more skilled you become at engineering those moments.

Read that again, because that's the real paradox.

Asking the question you already know will crack something open. Holding a silence you've learned to cultivate. Reflecting back the exact phrase and emotional beats that will land like a depth charge. These are real skills, and they can also be, if you're not careful, a form of control, maybe even close to— dare I say, manipulation, dressed up as coaching presence.

I'm not saying this to be provocative or shock value, because I've definitely been guilty of this. In my first few years of coaching, I got very good at a particular move: wait for the client to circle a topic two or three times, then drop that clever question that Uno-reverses the whole perspective. The client has a strong emotional reaction, starts singing praises about how much they needed that session, calls it a major breakthrough. Everyone goes home happy.

Except the reframe was mine. The client borrowed my understanding of their situation and walked away with emotional validation rather than their own insight. And I got to feel like I'd done something important. It feels like service and it looks like service. But the person who benefited most was the coach.

The hardest version of this paradox is the one where helping is actually avoidance.

The coach who rushes to a solution because we hear something that an actionable goal can fix. The coach who fills in the silence too quickly because raw, unresolved pain is difficult and uncomfortable. The coach who offers validation when the moment actually calls for silence. The coach who wants to make sure the client knows how much value they're getting.

These are two faces of the same problem: the coach's needs driving the client's session. In the first version, you do too much because it feels productive. In the second, you do too much because discomfort or inaction feels bad for us. Either way, the work has quietly become about the coach's agenda, not the client.

You might catch yourself doing this with clients who are genuinely in distress. There's a person across from you who is suffering, and every impulse in your body says do something. Offer a perspective. Ask a grounding question. And sometimes that's exactly right. But sometimes the most useful thing is to let the room be uncomfortable. There are times those bad emotions have their own purpose. That might take letting the client actually feel said emotion they're trying to move past, even just for 30 seconds uninterrupted. To resist the urge to make it better, because "better" in that moment means more comfortable for the coach.

The hardest version of this paradox is the one where helping is actually avoidance.

This is especially true with high-performing clients. Executives who are used to being the smartest person in the room will happily let you do the intellectual work, especially after back-to-back decision making meetings all day. They'll engage with your frameworks, share openly, agree with your observations, and yes, they'll write that testimonial.

They'll also leave the session feeling like something happened.

But they didn't do anything. You did.

It never feels like this at first, but sometimes the best sessions can seem like you didn't get anywhere. The client talked, but maybe you struggled to get a clear objective. Or you felt like you circled the same issue only to end up where you were at the start and you tan out of time to land a goal, or a commitment, to kick off next session with.

However, maybe the next time you check in, the client tells you all about an insight that you never could have handed them, because it was built from materials only they had access to.

That's the version of this work that doesn't feed the coach's ego. It's slower. It's less satisfying in the moment. But the client walks away owning what they found, and that autonomy and ownership is the difference between a breakthrough that lasts a session and one that feeds into true behavior change.

But they didn't do anything. You did.

I don’t have a five-step framework for avoiding these traps. That would be ironic... also probably unhelpful.

But I will say this: get a coaching supervisor. Not just a mentor who reviews your recordings. A trained coaching supervisor whose job it is to ask you the same uncomfortable questions you’re supposed to be asking your clients.¹ If you’re newer and can’t afford one yet, find a peer who will honestly hold that mirror and that space with you. When we don’t do our own work, we end up falling into the same trap we’re trying to help others overcome.

Pay attention to the sessions that feel great. Not just to celebrate them (you absolutely should be celebrating) but to ask yourself honestly: who did the work? Whose insight was it? Did the client arrive at something, or did you deliver something? Miles Davis said that music is about the notes you don’t play.² The same principle lives in every coaching session. The distinction between your silence and your insight is sometimes the whole game right there.

Pay attention to the sessions that feel great — not just to celebrate them, but to ask yourself honestly: who did the work?

And when you feel that vibrating answer in your chest, the one you're sure will crack everything open... hold out just a little longer. See what happens when you don't offer it. See what your client does with the space you leave.

The distinction between your silence and your insight is sometimes the whole game right there.

They might surprise you. They usually do, if you let them.

¹ Coaching supervision as a formal practice is more established over in the UK and Europe than in North America, where many coaches still rely on peer consultation or mentorship, if at all. Supervision specifically examines the coach’s process, internalization, and how that feeds back into the coach themselves and their sessions. If you’re unfamiliar, the EMCC and several ICF chapters have started offering CCE sessions or frameworks worth looking at.

² The attribution is disputed: it might be Thelonious Monk, or could be apocryphal entirely like most L&D anonymous quotes and parables. But whoever said it first understood something about restraint that most of us learn the hard way.