In my last post, I wrote about my growing interest in existential coaching, an approach to coaching I wasn’t familiar with but which had picked up my curiosity. I have researched it and now know a bit more about it, so I’d like to share with you what I learned.

Existential Coaching is based on Existential Philosophy

“If he comes to you asking for advice, he has already chosen a course of action. In practical terms, I could very well have given him advice. But since his goal was freedom, I wanted him to be free to decide.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

A student asked Sartre for advice on his dilemma: should he go to war to avenge his brother’s death or stay with his mother? As any good existential coach would have done in his place, Sartre decided not to give him the advice he sought and to let him exercise his freedom.

Sartre was an existential philosopher, playwright, writer, political activist and many other things, but not a coach, not even an existential one. Apart from sports coaching, other types of coaching did not become widely used until the 80s, while the existential sort did not get traction until the 2000s, well past Sartre’s death in 1980. 

Sartre was not an existential coach but had, together with other philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, or Nietzsche, or writers like Camus or Dostoevsky, an immense influence on existential coaching, as this is based, like existential therapy before it, on the principles of existentialism.

Existential coaching has a philosophical foundation but with a pragmatic approach: to help clients live more deliberate and freer lives.

Existential coaches believe in the freedom of individuals to forge their lives, so no single methodology works for all. There is not a unified framework applicable to all existential coaches. Like their philosophical forefathers, they are diverse and unique, but they do share their focus on particular themes: relatedness, uncertainty, anxiety (especially of the existential sort), death and temporality, meaning and meaninglessness, absurdity, freedom, choice and authenticity.

These are universal themes. You don’t need to be an existentialist to ponder about them. I wrote about death, temporality, or the meaning of life a while back already, and that doesn’t make me an existentialist, far from it.

The work of the existential coach

An existential coach will explore these themes and the client’s values in the four dimensions of existence defined by Heidegger: the physical (umwelt), the social (mitwelt), the personal (eigenwelt) and the spiritual (uberwelt). By covering all these dimensions, they make sure they review the client’s worldview from a broad perspective, and they don’t miss anything during this exploration. 

Like in other humanistic coaching approaches, existential coaches believe that their clients have the necessary resources within themselves and the self-actualisation tendencies to find the best solutions for them so that they will put the client at the centre of the session, but they will instil a clearer direction than, for example, person-centred coaches (in person-centred coaching, the coach mainly reflects what she hears to the client, doesn’t guide through questions), by framing the conversation within the existential themes mentioned above and the four existential dimensions. 

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” 

Soren Kierkegaard

Not being who you are, not being authentic, is one of the biggest sins for existentialists. Existential coaches help clients understand who they are and what gives meaning to their lives. They believe life is meaningless and absurd, except for the meaning we decide to give it. There is no meaning of life, but we can find meaning in life.  

Existential coaches explore these and other profound themes like death, freedom, anxiety, uncertainty and relatedness. It is an approach with depth, where clients are pushed to look into their inner worlds and grapple with paradoxes. This depth is arguably its biggest strength. 

Existential coaching may not be the best approach for learning specific skills, but it is one of the most profound coaching approaches, best suited for clients to gain self-knowledge and find meaning, manage life transitions or face major life decisions.

Existence precedes essence, but does it?

“Existence precedes essence”.

Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

Sartre thought that this was the first principle of existentialism. It means that human beings build their essence through their decisions and choices. They exist before they can conceive who they are. They are free to develop their essence. This is why freedom is one of the main themes of existentialism. 

We are all free to do whatever we want as long as we assume the consequences. You are free to leave that job you don’t like or your partner for twenty years, as long as you are OK with being jobless or single. We are not forced to do anything; we set our own limits. Freedom brings with it responsibility. That’s why Sartre famously said that we are all “condemned to be free”. 

This is the most liberating aspect of existentialism, which, despite its gloomy and dark fame, is an optimistic and empowering philosophy. 

However, if “existence precedes essence” is the foundation of the entire existential edifice, it was built on shaky biological, psychological, and philosophical grounds. 

Biologists and psychologists are still figuring out how much of our personality is due to our genetic makeup or life experiences, but they seem to agree that both nature and nurture play a part, which means that at least part of our “essence” is inherited, not defined by us. Attachment theory states that another important part is developed in the early years of life when we are too young to have a real choice about it. 

Also, it is unclear whether free will exists. If we are not free to choose, how can we create our essence through our actions? How can we be “condemned to be free”?

We could argue that it does not matter whether a coaching client is really free to define who they are. As long as they believe they are free, they might find existential coaching helpful.

No goals, no solutions?

Unlike many other coaching approaches, existential coaching is not a solution or goal-focused approach. There is a phenomenological enquiry of the client’s worldview, values and the existential themes and paradoxes preoccupying them, so it lacks the structure and goal orientation of most other approaches. 

That doesn’t mean that there are no solutions or goals achieved. All clients come to a coaching assignment with a problem, aspiration or aim, even if not explicitly stated. They want to achieve something; otherwise, they wouldn’t go through the coaching process. 

In existential coaching, they may not state clearly their goals, and the coach and the client wouldn’t spend the time they would spend on other approaches to define well the goals of the assignment. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work or it doesn’t help clients find solutions to their problems and live more fulfilling lives. 

Existential coaching is a relatively recent approach, and little research has been carried out about its effectiveness as a coaching practice, but it does seem to work in certain situations and for certain types of clients.

As mentioned, it won’t necessarily work on coaching processes focused on building specific skills, but it can be very effective in transformational or developmental coaching. It can help clients know themselves better, find meaning in their lives, manage the existential anxiety we all seem to live with and live happier lives. 

Despite its purely Western origins (mainly from European men), existentialism aims to deal with universal themes. We all think about our death and temporality in this life, what it means to be free or authentic. In that sense, existential coaching can help us all better grapple with these issues and live lives that are aligned with our purpose and values. 

I have started practising it with some of my clients, with their consent. Existentialism is not for everybody, but it works well with some people, especially with the most philosophically minded or reflective ones. 

I will continue learning more about it and practising it. After all, we all think about existential themes once in a while, and I am no exception. Knowing more about it will allow me to be a better coach, but more importantly, to deal better with my own existential issues. 

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Great leaders should think, act and have the mindset of a coach. But what does being a leader coach mean?

Last Friday, I met Txema, my first mentor, and we talked about many different topics, including leadership and coaching and how they come nicely together.

Txema Bilbao was my manager when I was a trainee at ITP Aero, a jet engine manufacturing company near Bilbao, 20 years ago. I was an impressionable pink-cheeked young boy who had recently finished a Master’s in HRM and was eager to learn and start his career. Txema was the Head of L&D in ITP and was (and still is) keen on sharing his knowledge and wisdom with me. 

He was my first mentor and also the best one I have ever had. Sometimes I am lucky.

I learned a lot from him. That experience only lasted a few months, but left a lifelong mark on me. We remained in touch over the years, but in the distance, and this was the first time we saw each other since 2003.

Txema is still his old self, ready to partake in his wisdom and help others grow and develop, while also being cheerful and funny. 

Our conversation was wide-ranging, but there was a topic that touched a nerve with me: how we can develop leaders that act and think like coaches. How can we have more leader coaches?

Over the years, Txema has developed different programs to build the coaching mindset, attitude, and techniques among the leaders and managers in ITP. I won’t go into the details of those programs here, but our conversation made me think about the topic, and I wanted to reflect deeper on it.

The best way for me to reflect better is to write about it, so here we are. Below you will find my musings on the leader as a coach and what leaders can learn from coaches. 

Why we need more leaders as coaches

Let’s first continue with my friend and mentor, Txema, and his definition of leadership. 

For him, a leader is a person who helps other people grow. 

Simple, but great in its simplicity. I could not agree more.

This definition also happens to be very close to that of the coach. A coach also accompanies others to grow and become the best version of themselves. 

A leader needs to achieve some objectives, of course, but she will best achieve them by helping grow her team. For that, she can learn a thing or two from coaches.

A coach helps their clients by asking them questions and using many other techniques, but the central premise of coaching is that a coach doesn’t know the answers but helps their clients find the answers that work best for them. Coaches empower their clients by showing them they have everything they need within them. 

Old school leaders were supposed to have all the answers and make the right decisions all the time. They couldn’t be perceived as vulnerable and had to be seen as taking all the heavy weight of responsibility on their shoulders. 

Future leaders will not be like this. This leadership style doesn’t work anymore. Future leaders will have to be leader coaches.

Great leaders lead with humility. They know they don’t and cannot have all the answers and that their team members need to be empowered and make their own decisions so they can grow and be successful. 

They know sometimes they will have to make the decisions and tell others what to do, but many other times, they will have to ask questions and help others find the best way forward. 

Some things leaders can learn from coaches

There are many things that a leader can learn from a coach and incorporate into their leadership and management toolkits. 

Here below, I will explain the most important ones. 

Active Listening

Active listening and asking questions are the most important skills a coach can have.

The importance of listening is underappreciated, especially among leaders. The traditional image we all had of the great leader was the extrovert, charismatic, outgoing, and visionary communicator. That can work sometimes, but as Susan Cain showed us in her now famous book Quiet, introverted and calm leaders can also be successful. 

You cannot lead others if you don’t listen to them adequately. 

Actively listening allows the leader to absorb all the information they need from their team members, but more importantly, it makes them realise that they are heard and that their opinion counts. 

There are some things to consider to listen effectively, but the main ones are:

– Be present and switch off your internal radio (stop thinking about what you will say next and just listen to the other person until they finish).

– Not only listen to the words but also look at the other person’s body language.

– Connect with them with your own body language (eye contact, nodding, etc.).

– Paraphrase what they said

– Ask clarifying questions.

This last point brings us nicely to the next skill leaders can learn from coaches: asking powerful questions.

Asking powerful questions

Coaches have a certain way of asking powerful questions that leaders could also use.

Coaches ask open-ended questions. They don’t suppose to know the answer beforehand, so the aim of the questions is not to guide the coachee in a specific direction. They are genuinely open questions that want to elicit the correct response from the coachee (correct for the coachee, not the coach).

Leaders could do the same with their team members.

If a colleague or team member has a problem or challenge, don’t tell them what to do, but ask them the right questions so they can look at the problem from different angles, broaden their perspective and find the answer that works best for them.

Don’t tell, ask.

Be egoless

Our egos often interfere with what we are doing, so just be egoless.

Being egoless means being in the moment and giving yourself to others, without trying to always do what is best for you. A coach’s responsibility is toward the achievement of their client’s objectives, not the satisfaction of their ego.

They park their wants and desires on the side to achieve what is best for their clients. They are their servants.

This links with the concept of servant leadership and leadership being about followership. 

Simon Sinek expressed it fantastically when choosing the title of one of his best-selling books, Leaders Eat Last. 

Leaders who eat last, serve others, and leave their egos at the door will succeed; the ones being driven by their egos will not.

The power of vulnerability

Showing vulnerability is not a weakness; it is a superpower.

Coaches know this and use it to their advantage when talking to their clients. They share and display their vulnerability and thus connect better with them.

Leaders should also admit that they don’t have all the answers and that they aren’t perfect, which nobody expects them to be. 

They should say “I don’t know” more often and be open about what they are good at and what they aren’t so good at.

Showing vulnerability demonstrates self-awareness, courage and frankness. It also demonstrates strength.

Displaying vulnerability makes us get closer to and connect better with others, so we should do it more.

Talking about emotions

Coaches are not afraid to talk about emotions; they often talk about them and how they drive behaviours.

Emotions are an essential part of our lives. They are part of our nervous system and guide us in many situations, often much faster and more powerfully than our rational brain. 

The problem is that in our modern society, we don’t talk much about emotions, we don’t acknowledge them, and we try to ignore them or “manage” them as if they were something bad.

Emotions are not good or bad; they just serve a purpose. Some are more pleasant than others, but they all have a function and are, therefore, helpful.

Coaches know this, and many great leaders also know it, even if unconsciously.

To be a better leader, start labelling your emotions, identifying what’s happening inside you, and talking more often about them. 

As Marshall Rosenberg explained in his book Non-Violent Communication, emotions usually tell us we have an unsatisfied need. They are the alarm bells that tell us we are missing something. 

Listen to your emotions and try to understand what they tell you about your needs. Try to understand other people’s emotions and what they lack or need.

Normalise talking about emotions, yours and others, and your relationships with others will improve.

A nugget of wisdom

Txema has his own phrases, his “txemisms” if you like.

They are his, nobody else’s. 

They are original nuggets of wisdom on leadership and personal growth. He told me I should create my own, but I’m not sure I have the wit he has to do it well. 

I’ll give it a try when I’m ready.

One of my favourite txemisms is “trabajar para sobrar”, which is difficult to translate into English, but would be something like “working to become unnecessary”. The idea behind this phrase is that a leader should work to create a team, structure and culture that make him or her eventually redundant. You have to sow the seeds of your own irrelevance.

That’s scary, but if that isn’t egoless and selfless, what is? 

That’s a leader at the service of the organisation and their team. 

That’s how a leader as a coach should think about their purpose in an organisation. Their mission will come to an end one day, but they will need to make sure that when that happens, the organisation they leave behind is ready.

They do that by growing their teams to become the best version of themselves. They do that by acting as coaches.

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These coaching exercises will help you develop the Leadership Qualities required to be an effective Future Leader

The most successful leaders aren’t born—they’re made. 

The secret to becoming a successful leader is in the way you think. It is a question of developing a certain mindset and skillset. Some exercises from coaching can help you get there.

We have already discussed extensively the Leadership Qualities of the Future Leader:

• Being Future Ready.
• Having a clear Purpose.
• Mastering People Skills 
• Being obsessed with Personal Growth.

Here we will look at some coaching techniques, tools and exercises you can use to develop each of them. 

Being Future Ready

Being Future Ready is about understanding the future, not predicting it, and being ready to shape it. 

As a coach, I have used different coaching exercises to help my clients work on their future readiness. 

Let’s look at three of them.

Developing foresight by asking “what if” questions

Coaches work mainly by asking powerful questions, and “what if” questions are some of the most potent questions that can be asked.

When you ask “what if” questions, you are opening windows to new possibilities; you are making the impossible possible. When we receive a “what if” question, our brain creates new neuronal pathways. We start to consider new things that weren’t there before.

It is worthwhile asking “what if” questions one after the other, probing and going deeper into the answers, and not discarding any of the questions or their answers as too unlikely or too absurd. 

When asking “what if” questions, we explore the unknown and try to be creative, so we shouldn’t discard the options that present to us too soon. 

Some good starting questions you can ask yourself or someone you want to coach and help:

– What if my industry got disrupted by this technology or that geopolitical incident?  

– What if I were in that other position/department/company? What would I have to do to be successful?

– What if AI enhances my job? What if it replaces it? 

And so on, you get the idea. 

Writing or ideating fiction scenarios and possible futures

Scenario creation is linked to asking “what if” questions, but it goes further.

When building a scenario, you are creating a fictional world in the future that doesn’t exist, and it probably won’t exist in that exact form and shape, but it could exist, and that’s what matters.

I ask my coachees who want to be ready for the future to create different scenarios of what that world could look like. 

It can be helpful to awaken the creative juices in our minds, so I ask them to write vivid possible future worlds. If they prefer to draw, make a ceramic sculpture, write a song or use any other creative form, that’s great too.

When writing scenarios or possible futures, different possibilities should be explored. As I did in my Possible Futures series, it’s helpful to at least include three types of scenarios: growth, collapse, and transformation worlds.

Signal of change collection

As William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”. 

Signals of change are those little gifts from the future that are already here. They are signs of where the world is going or might be going. They come from different spheres of life (technology, politics, economics, society, culture), and when many signals are pointing in the same direction, they form drivers or future trends. 

When my coachees are really interested in forecasting and the art of foresight, I ask them to collect signals of change. They need to scout the news and the web to find these signals. Sometimes they are easy to find and spot; others are well buried.

The Institute for the Future (IFTF) and other institutions publish signals of change regularly, but like many things in life, the real beauty of it is to find them yourself.

Clear Purpose

Future leaders have a clear purpose that goes beyond their own self-interest and is engaging and inspiring to others.

This is a fertile ground for coaching, and there are plenty of exercises that can be done with clients. Again, let’s look at three. 

Personal purpose exercises

The first step to finding a purpose that is inspiring and engaging to others is to define your personal purpose: What are you here for? What are you meant to be doing with your life? 

Having a clear personal purpose is essential to being happy and living a fulfilling life, but many people wander through life without even thinking about it. Coaches can help people find their purpose, and there are different exercises to do so. 

I explored one method in How to find your Career Purpose in Four Simple Steps, with the four steps being these: 

1. Name what you love

2. Identify what you are good at

3. Find what the world needs

4. Think about what you can be paid for

It is focused on the career, but its scope can be broadened, and it can be used for all areas of life (you can take out number four if you don’t need to be paid, for example).

Other exercises will require the client to write a personal mission statement that defines their values, passions and life goals. These should all be basic things, but not all of us have thought them through, and it is a worthwhile exercise to think about them and write them all down.

Coaches can then work specifically in some of these areas. Some will go deep into your values, for example. There are plenty of other exercises to explore them (see, for example, here). 

The Wheel of Life

The Wheel of Life is an excellent tool to find balance in your life.

It is a simple tool that allows us to look at the different areas in our life: love, relationships, career, friends, health, etc. I will ask my clients to rank the importance of each of these areas and then rate the focus they are currently putting into them. 

In a very visual way, it shows the user the discrepancies between where they would like to focus their attention and where they are actually doing it.

It can be mindblowing to see the differences in front of you.  

Journaling

Journaling is a widely used and very recommendable exercise.

Its most usual place would be in the Personal Growth section below, but I wanted to include it here to focus on a specific type of journaling, the gratitude journal.

As its name indicates, when we write a gratitude journal, we list the things we are grateful for. We show gratitude to others and ourselves by focusing on the things that really matter. The benefits to our mind and well-being have been well-researched, so it is a great habit.

It also helps us realise the impact our purpose can have on others and on making the world a better place. 

By keeping track of all the things you are doing for others and how grateful you are for them, you remind yourself that what you do matters and positively impacts the world.

Isn’t that a nice feeling?

People Skills

Mastering people skills is one of the most crucial skills we can have, both professionally and personally.

We are constantly dealing with people, so being able to manage our emotions, have empathy for others, communicate and listen well, persuade and influence them, and all the set that composes this broad skill set will have a considerable impact on our success in life and our careers.

Coaches work on many aspects of people skills through a wide variety of techniques and exercises.

The empty chair exercise

This exercise can be beneficial to unblock an emotion or overcome interpersonal conflict.

When I do this, I would ask my coachee to sit on a chair and face an empty chair, with me standing behind them so they can’t see me. Then I would ask them to imagine that on the chair in front of them sits the person they have a conflict with or the emotion they have difficulties dealing with, usually sadness, fear or anger.

They will expose what upsets or annoys them, and what they don’t like about the other person’s behaviour or the emotion holding them back. 

Once they have said everything they had to say to the empty chair in front of them (it sounds nuts, but it works), I’d ask them to stand up and sit on the chair in front of them. 

Now they are the other person they are having a conflict with or the personification of the emotion troubling them. What do they have to say? I’d ask them again not to leave anything out and tell them everything they must say. 

Then they would stand up again to swap chairs to respond to what they have heard from the other party. This can happen a few times until the coachee feels both sides have said everything they had to say.

I can ask my coachee a few questions about the experience, but usually, most things have already been said. They have told themselves everything they had to hear. 

This exercise can be cathartic. 

The client builds empathy and really puts themselves in the other person’s shoes. If working with an emotion, they get to understand the emotion’s function and how it is trying to help them. 

The end result is a better understanding of themselves, their emotions or others.

Role modelling giving feedback

Knowing how to give and receive feedback is vital in today’s competitive world.

Giving feedback allows us to help others improve their skills and express our feelings about what bothers us. Unfortunately, many of us don’t know how to provide feedback correctly; fortunately, a coach can help you improve your feedback-giving skills in many ways.

One of my preferred ways is to role-model different situations where the client pretends to give feedback to a colleague, team member or any other person with whom they have interacted. Then, I’ll provide them with feedback on their feedback, so to speak.

I will usually tell them to focus on the facts and to be specific, not to attack the person but the specific behaviours and actions, to make it clear that it is their own perception and not an objective fact, and to share with the other person how they feel as a consequence of that action. 

All these fundamentals make feedback effective.

Through role modelling, the clients have the opportunity to practice real-life situations in a safe environment and receive valuable feedback. As a result, the quality of their feedback improves considerably in a short time.

Rehearsing

Rehearsing a presentation or a complicated and dreaded conversation is also a common exercise I do with my clients.

It is similar to role modelling, but it involves practising for a commitment in the short term, and the remit is broader than merely practising giving feedback.

I will ask the client to deliver the presentation or explain the points they would like to discuss in the conversation they want to have with their manager or client. Then I’ll give them feedback, so they can improve their delivery, communication style, clarity, the points to be included or taken out, and the like. As a consequence, they also gain self-confidence.

Together we will make it much more likelier that the presentation or the conversation will be a success.

Personal Growth

Coaching is a methodology, or even philosophy, for personal development and growth, so everything we do in coaching could be linked to personal growth.

Gaining self-awareness through the Johari Window 

As I explained in this other article, the Johari Window is an excellent tool to gain self-awareness and know yourself better, which is the first step in the long path towards personal growth.

I often explain to my coachees the four quadrants of the window: what is known to self and others (Open), known to self but not to others (hidden), unknown to self but known to others (blind spot), and unknown to self and others (see below).

We discuss what might be lurking in each quadrant for them and explore different ways and strategies to increase the surface of the open quadrant and reduce all the others.

Earlier, we role-modelled providing feedback to develop this essential skill. Asking for feedback and receiving it with the right attitude is equally important, and it is one of the most effective ways to reduce our blind spots. 

The Johari window is an excellent way to start getting to know oneself better and to define strategies to develop that self-knowledge further.

360 review

360 reviews are widely used by HR departments in the corporate world. 

They often involve external consultants and can be expensive, but you can also have a “homemade”, more informal, 360 review that won’t be as comprehensive and detailed but can also still be valuable and full of insights.

The formal 360 implies the line manager, peers, colleagues and direct and indirect reports filling a questionnaire, usually anonymously, and the HR department in question or the external consultants preparing a report with the findings. Then the coach (or a consultant) briefs the subject, asks them questions to gain insights and helps them define an action plan based on the feedback received.

The homemade version is the same but simpler. 

When there is no budget or willingness to engage external coaches or involve the HR team, I will ask the coachee to ask for simple, written feedback from their surroundings: their manager, team members, and the like. This feedback has to be simple, so I’ll usually ask them to provide their three main strengths and development areas.

The outcome you will receive will be less comprehensive, and anonymity won’t be guaranteed (unless the coach or a third party, a colleague or friend, collects all the feedback and doesn’t share the specifics with the coachee). It can still be full of insights.

It will help the client reduce their blind spots, learn more about themselves, and focus on new development areas. 

Exercises to develop a Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, which we have discussed extensively on this website, is crucial for Personal Growth, so I work on it through different exercises with my clients.

Someone with a Growth Mindset doesn’t think skills and abilities are fixed, so there is always a way to improve and develop them. One way to do so is by embracing the power of “yet”.

I ask my clients to think about a skill they don’t master and they think about often. I tell them to add the word “yet” to their thoughts about it, as in, “I’m not good at public speaking… yet”.

It sounds silly, but adding this three-lettered word makes a difference. You are telling yourself you don’t master this skill yet, but you can and will if you practice and work on it. You are building the right can-do and constructive attitude.

In sum, you develop a Growth Mindset.

Another exercise is to reframe all your challenges and difficulties as opportunities. Whenever my client faces a big challenge at work or in their personal life, I help them reframe it as an opportunity for growth and learning. 

Like all the rest, this challenge shall also pass, and with it will arrive new learnings, realisations, and growth opportunities.

Learning through coaching

These are just a few exercises we can use during coaching sessions to help our clients develop and learn new skills.

They can also be used with the help of a mentor, a friend or close partner. Some of them can even be carried out alone.

The future needs leaders who understand what is coming, have the purpose to shape it in helpful ways, and have the people skills and the focus on personal growth to bring that purpose to life. 

Are you ready to step up and become one of them?

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“You cannot improve what you don’t measure”, or so goes the popular management mantra, but how can this be applied to coaching?

The use of executive and business coaching is increasingly widespread in many organisations worldwide. There have been many attempts to measure its financial Return On Investment (ROI) but with mixed success.

When doing a coaching intervention to improve a leader’s performance, it is often difficult (or nigh impossible) to isolate the impact of coaching on the improvement of the leader in question and the financial results they and their team bring. 

There are always multiple factors affecting any business outcome, so even if it may be tempting to use ROI due to its simplicity (we invested X in coaching, and we obtained Y dollars as a consequence), it may not be a reliable reflection of what’s going on in reality. 

Measuring the ROI of coaching may not be as helpful or as easy as it seems. 

However, do not despair, evidence-seeking reader, as there are other ways to measure the success and effectiveness of an executive coaching intervention. 

Here we will look at three frameworks.

Framework 1 – Goal Achievement

Coaches often say that without a goal or challenge, there is no coaching. 

Coaching is a structured process to assist a client in achieving the goals they have defined for themselves, so the goal is an essential part of it. Without a goal, there is no coaching.

Therefore, the simplest way to measure the success of a coaching process will be to check if the goals set up at the beginning of the process have been achieved and, if so, how complete this achievement has been. 

That’s it. Have the goals been achieved? Yes or no. If they have, the coaching intervention has been successful; if they haven’t, unsuccessful.

This measurement can be done directly with the client, but we often involve their line manager or an HR manager from the hiring company. The goals are usually defined at a three-party meeting, which kicks off the coaching process. 

The proponents of this framework often forget that a coaching process is a complex and multi-layered process that can impact the client on many different levels. It happens that the initial goal isn’t the most important one, and there are other hidden goals that need to be addressed but that weren’t defined at the outset of the process.

This framework is the simplest of the three, but its simplicity also means it is the least complete.

Framework 2 – Well-being and Engagement Framework

The coaching academic Anthony M. Grant, PhD, proposes a more holistic and humanistic model that goes beyond the merely financial measures of the ROI and is more comprehensive than the goal attainment framework. 

This framework is called the Well-Being and Engagement Framework (WBEF).

As its name indicates, the WBEF focuses on the well-being and engagement of the coaching client. Grant argues that coaching is a complex process with many facets and outcomes and it goes beyond financial gains. It impacts the well-being and engagement of employees, and this should also be measured.

Based on whether the coachees have low or high engagement and well-being, they should be placed in one of the four quadrants of the WEBF matrix (see below). 

The aim of the coaching process will be to bring the coaching clients as close as possible to the Flourishing or “Happy Worker” area. We can measure the effectiveness of the process by measuring how close we have brought the clients to that quadrant. 

For that, we can use the different measures that exist today in the market for measuring employee well-being and engagement.

As Grant himself admits, this is still a conceptual model. Still, as more coaching practitioners start using it, we will be able to collect more data and measure its reliability and validity to measure the effectiveness of coaching.

If I understood it correctly, this framework leaves out measuring performance altogether. It seems like a big omission to me.

Framework 3 – The Performance, Retention and Well-being Model (Better Up)

The third framework was devised by the virtual coaching platform BetterUp, and it measures business outcomes in three main areas: performance, retention, and well-being.

Like in the previous model, their framework is based on the assumption that coaching is a holistic process with positive outcomes in many different areas, not only on goal achievement and performance improvement, so they try to measure the impact of coaching on diverse dimensions. We see well-being repeated, and retention is added to the equation, both of the coachee and their direct team members.

Retention can be a funny one. I can see why they would use it as an indicator of success in the current climate, with all the talk about the Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting and the like, but an employee leaving a company isn’t necessarily a sign of the coaching process not working. It can be a sign that it is working all too well. 

It sometimes happens that an employee decides to leave their employer as a consequence of a coaching process, because they have realised that their current employment isn’t giving them what they need to feel happy and fulfilled. In such a case, the coaching process would have been a success, but retention would have suffered. 

Concerning measuring performance, something similar to what happens when evaluating the financial ROI might happen. It is difficult to isolate the specific impact and establish the direct causality of the coaching process on specific work outcomes. 

We can assess if the coaching goals have been achieved, but how precisely can we measure if the achievement of those goals has helped the employee successfully close a deal? There are always other factors and other people involved. 

Which framework is better to measure the effectiveness of executive coaching?

It is difficult to establish which framework is better. Like most things in life, it will depend on what you need it for. 

If you want to keep it simple and go straight to the point, focusing on objective achievement should be enough. If you want a more holistic view, both the WBEF and the Performance, Retention and Well-Being Model would be more appropriate. The former omits performance in the equation, and the latter doesn’t include engagement. Both are key omissions, so maybe a mix of the two would be the best solution?

If you want to put a dollar sign on the measurement, financial ROI is the solution for you, but I am not entirely convinced. Mr Grant explains the reasons more eloquently than I do in his paper linked above, so let’s finish this post with some of his words:

“Organisations and workplaces are more than just money-making machines. They are social and psychological contexts in which people live, work and relate. Of course, money-making is important. But so is the development, growth and well-being of the people that constitute organisations and workplaces. We do our clients, ourselves and the coaching industry a great disservice by overly focusing on the financial outcomes of coaching.”

Well said.

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Coaching questions are an important element of a coaching process, but they can also be useful outside coaching. Here we will look at what they are, how to make them powerful, whether AI can ask them and how to use them outside of coaching.

Coaching is the art of asking powerful questions. Timely and relevant questions help the coachee get new insights and see the world from a new perspective. 

The coach doesn’t tell or advise, the coach asks. 

Thus, questions, particularly powerful ones, are the most critical tool in the coach’s toolkit. A coach has many arrows in their quiver, but the coaching question is the most important one. 

The good news is that coaching questions are not only for coaches. The type of questions coaches ask can also be valuable for other non-coaching people, be it managers, parents, or simply good friends, as they can help unstuck situations or foster learning for the people on the receiving end of the questions, and often also for the people asking the questions themselves. 

As we are treating questions as a tool, let’s also structure this post around some questions, which are the following: 

– What is a coaching question?

– What makes a powerful coaching question?

– What are some examples of great coaching questions? 

– Can AI ask good coaching questions?

– How can you use coaching questions outside of coaching?

What is a coaching question?

As I explained in the post linked above, Powerful Questioning was one of the 11 competencies of the coach defined by the International Coaching Federation (ICF). 

Asking questions is an integral part of coaching, even better if they are powerful questions, although not all coaching questions are powerful. They can’t possibly be. They would lose their impact if they all were. 

As we discussed several times in this blog when talking about coaching, a coach doesn’t give advice or tell their clients what to do, but they ask them questions for them to reflect, see their blind spots and get insights and new perspectives, to then put in place actions that will enable them to solve problems and grow personally and professionally.

Thus, a coaching question is the everyday tool of the coach and is their primary means to affect change in their clients. 

Coaching questions characteristics

Coaching questions have the following characteristics:

– They are open questions (so they start with what, where, who, how, etc.), not closed ones (the ones answered by a simple yes or no), that can often be leading and akin to giving advice (“don’t you think this course of action would be better?”). They must leave space for the client to create their own responses.

– They usually look at the future, goal achievement or a solution, not the past or where the problem is coming from. Coaching is future and goal-oriented, and this is reflected in the questions coaches ask. There might be some questions about the past and the sources of the problem to get some context and understand the starting point, but the main focus of the discussion should always be the goal and the direction of travel. 

– They come from active listening based on what the coachee just said. The most powerful coaching questions come from great listening. That’s why the coach must be always present in the conversation and listening, not thinking about the next question they will throw at their client. They need to switch off their internal radio. This is why having a list of “top coaching questions” ready doesn’t usually work. 

– Often, coaching questions explore new options and new alternatives, and help the client put themselves in other people’s shoes or look at things from a different perspective than what they were doing until then. 

What makes a powerful coaching question?

As already mentioned, in coaching, we have what we call powerful questions. It sounds like something mystic and esoteric, but it is relatively simple. A powerful question is a question that elicits a strong response from the client and makes them react. It brings new learnings and new possibilities. An aha usually follows it! 

When you are a coach and land a powerful question, it’s beautiful. The client stops for a moment, you see them think, and their faces change into something resembling surprise first, then understanding and enlightenment, then satisfaction when they have understood something new they didn’t know before. That experience is one of the most rewarding ones I have ever had professionally. You see people grow in front of you, literally. That happens because many things come together, but a powerful question is usually one of them. 

But what is a powerful coaching question? It follows from the characteristics listed above that a good coaching question will be the one that arises from active listening from the coach. It is future and goal-oriented, open and not closed, and opens new possibilities and insights to the coachee. 

The ICF defines on its website what Powerful Questioning means, as it used to be one of the main competencies of the coach:

Ability to ask questions that reveal the information needed for maximum benefit to the coaching relationship and the client.

1. Asks questions that reflect active listening and an understanding of the client’s perspective.
2. Asks questions that evoke discovery, insight, commitment or action (e.g., those that challenge the client’s assumptions).
3. Asks open-ended questions that create greater clarity, possibility or new learning.
4. Asks questions that move the client toward what they desire, not questions that ask for the client to justify or look backwards.

What are some examples of great coaching questions?

The astute reader who has been paying attention will have already noticed that it is impossible to provide real examples of powerful questions because they depend on the situation and the conversation. They are asked from a place of presence and listening. 

Great powerful questions are contextual, meaning it is impossible to go to a coaching session with a list of great coaching questions and shoot them away, expecting to hit a nerve and change the way the client looks at the world. It probably won’t happen. 

Still, some types of questions, or variants, are worth asking as, depending on the situation, they may serve their purpose and become powerful questions. 

There are different phases in the coaching process, and each stage will have its own appropriate questions:

Setting goals and coaching agreement

– What would you like to achieve with this coaching process?

– What is the main challenge you are facing? What is your main goal?

– What are the main barriers hindering you from achieving your goals?

– Why is this goal important for you? What is the purpose of this goal? What is it for?

– How will you know you have achieved this goal?

– Can you visualise yourself achieving this goal? What do you feel?

– What would happen if you didn’t achieve this goal?

Exploring the challenge

– How does person X or Y see this situation? What are they doing what they are doing for? What is their purpose? Is there any other reason why they could be acting like this?

– How will your life change if you change this one thing?

– What other ways are there to look at this challenge/problem/opportunity?

– What emotion are you feeling when facing this challenge? What is this emotion telling you about yourself and your situation?

Setting up an action plan

– Now that you see things differently, what will you do differently?

– How will these actions help you?

– What new learning did you get? How will this learning change your life moving forward?

– If you were X, what other actions could you take?

– What is the purpose of these actions? And their expected impact?

– How will you measure the success of these actions?

I will repeat it because this is critical: powerful questions come from listening and will be the consequence of a well-managed conversation. This list can give the reader some ideas of the type of questions to ask to open the coachee’s mind, but the real powerful questions will be more specific and more in tune with the story they are telling and their personal narrative. 

What good powerful questions have in common is that they make the recipient think and see things from a different perspective. That’s why a few questions above try to position the client in someone else’s shoes or look at a problem from different viewpoints. 

Also, powerful questions often dive into the purpose of things, the what for (looks at the future and intentionality), rather than the why (past, causes).

There are thousands of great questions that aren’t included in this list that can tick and impact the client depending on the conversation and their internal state. 

A few months ago, I asked a manager who was questioning his leadership style how they would feel if they were managed by a manager who had the same leadership style as him. He didn’t like the answer to that question, but the question left him a mark, and today he still thinks about it now and then. A good question can come from anywhere.

On the other hand, the questions in the list above can, in many cases, fall flat and have no impact whatsoever on the client, or they can even alienate them and distance them from the coach. 

It will all depend on the listening from the coach and their intuition that they are asking the right question at the right moment.

Can AI ask good coaching questions?

For all I have said about listening being the best necessary condition for asking great questions, it is weird that we should ask whether Artificial Intelligence can produce good coaching questions, but ask it we must, as things are changing very rapidly in the world of AI.

In The Future of Coaching, written a couple of years ago, I wrote about the possible arrival of the Robocoach sometime in the future, but I concluded that future was still far away.

I still think we aren’t there yet, but considering the advances of AI since that article was published, we may have to move the timelines ahead. 

Right now, all the talk in AI is about ChatGPT, and from what I heard, it is not even the best AI out there. It has been a sensation because it is now open to the public for free, so people are using it and commenting on it on Twitter and other media. That creates hype. 

I also decided to use it to test it and help me with this article. First, I asked it to tell me what it knew about coaching questions. It came up with this.

It’s not too bad. It is a bit simple, with a neutral tone and no irony or sense of humour, but it is informative. It may not be good enough to replace a well-written blog post with a personal touch, but it is getting perilously close. That’s a discussion for another day, though; the question today is whether it can ask good coaching questions. 

So I asked the AI to act as my coach and help me solve a relatively common challenge, namely how to delegate more and better. You can see the conversation below:

What did you think? I found that a bit creepy, and it has its uses, but this is not coaching yet. Chat GPT is like an Alexa on steroids, and it provides some interesting questions and good explanations, but we are looking for something else in a coach. 

A coach not only asks excellent questions but is also present with their whole body, making the client feel listened to. They need to create an emotional connection and interpret what the client is going through. 

Also, the entire body has an important role to play in coaching. A coach must understand the client’s body language and use their own body to elicit change in the coachee. 

A machine cannot do any of this today, and I’m not sure when they will be able to do so soon. I’m sure they will be able to one day, but that day hasn’t arrived yet.

How can you use coaching questions outside of coaching?

Coaching is not only a personal development method but also a philosophy of life. You need to be trained and have some practice to coach others successfully, but anybody can take advantage of the techniques used in coaching to improve their lives and those of the people around them.

I am a certified coach but have also been a people manager, and I often mix the two disciplines. That means that when one of my team members came to me with a challenge or a question, my first instinct was not to tell them what to do but to ask them back the same questions they were asking me, so they had to think the problem through themselves. This is the best way I know for them to grow and learn.

They would tell me something like this, “Hi Iker, I have a problem with this manager I am advising on this HR topic. They don’t want to follow my advice. What can I do to influence them better?”

Rather than telling them, “you should do this and that”, which is often the easiest way, I would always ask them back, “what do you think you should do? And why? What can you do better? What are you lacking in your approach today?” And so on and so forth. 

It’s easy to ask questions to your manager; it is also lazy to expect an answer straight away. As managers, we need to help our people think for themselves. Giving them the correct answer doesn’t help them flourish. So that’s why as managers, we should ask more questions and tell less, like coaches. 

When you ask an open question to someone, you are putting them in the driving seat. You are making them protagonists. They are the ones who will be providing the answer, so they are the ones who will have to think it through. 

The same applies to friends, your partner, and many other personal situations. Tell less, and ask more genuine open questions. People will appreciate your interest in their lives and opinions more than you telling them what to do or oversharing your views. 

How do you make sure you are asking the right questions? Follow the indications above: make them open, not leading or closed; ask about the future more than the past, and above everything else, make sure your questions come from you really listening to what they are saying. 

If you listen to what the other person has to say and have a keen and genuine interest in their words, great questions will flow. They will come naturally, and there is no better question than the natural one. Try it, and, who knows, you may enjoy talking less and listening more.

There is a balance for everything, of course. So please don’t be that person trying to coach all their family members and friends, because they won’t appreciate it. Coaching questions have their time and place. 

Ask more open questions and be interested in what others have to say, by all means, but find the right balance. Above everything else, continue being yourself and acting as a manager, friend, father, or lover.

Use more coaching questions in your life, but find the right time and place for them.

Read more: How Coaching Exercises Can Help You Develop into a Successful Future Leader

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I love coaching. I love coaching and being coached (although the latter can be a bit uncomfortable sometimes; learning about yourself and facing your demons isn’t always pleasant). I think coaching is one of the most powerful development tools there is, and when used properly, it can help people grow to levels they couldn’t have achieved on their own.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion about what coaching is and isn’t. The fact that there are thousands of charlatans and scammers disguised as coaches doesn’t help one bit. 

I have written about coaching before, but I recently realised that I had never written about its basics: what coaching is, its different types, when to use it, and so on. Today we will remedy this oversight, and we’ll finally delve into the fundamentals of coaching.

What is coaching?

Let’s start with the most fundamental question: what is it? 

There are many definitions of coaching, so let’s take one from the most prestigious professional body dedicated to it, the International Coaching Federation (ICF). It defines it as follows:

“ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.

We all have goals we want to reach, challenges we’re striving to overcome and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with a coach can change your life, setting you on a path to greater personal and professional fulfilment.”

“ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.

We all have goals we want to reach, challenges we’re striving to overcome and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with a coach can change your life, setting you on a path to greater personal and professional fulfilment.”

International Coaching Federation

I would like to highlight some concepts from this definition. Coaching is a partnership between equals; the coach and coachee are at the same level. The coach may know a lot about coaching techniques, but they don’t know more about the client’s challenges. They both partner as equals to overcome those challenges and achieve some development goals. 

Coaching is about maximising personal and professional potential. As we will see below, there are many different types of coaching. Some are more focused on the client’s personal life, others on the professional one, but they all endeavour to help the client achieve their goals and maximise their growth to reach their maximum potential.

When coaching, we coach to achieve specific goals and overcome concrete challenges. The coaching goals and challenges provide a structure to the coaching relationship and serve as a guide of where the process should take both the coach and coachee. 

A coaching process is a goal-centred process, and as such, is future-oriented. The coach and client may talk about the past to bring some light on the present challenge, but their focus will always be on the future and what can be done in the present to achieve the desired future state.

Coaching vs mentoring 

Coaching is often associated with mentoring, as they share many characteristics, but are different methodologies with different principles. 

In mentoring, the relationship is a bit more unequal. The mentor is more experienced, more senior, or knows more about a specific topic than the mentee. Mentors guide their mentees through advice and sharing examples from their rich experiences. It is a more guided approach.

In a coaching relationship, they depart from an equal footing, and the coach accepts the coachee is the one who should find their own answers. The coach asks powerful questions, explores different perspectives, challenges limiting beliefs, and helps the coachee identify their blind spots, all in the name of helping the coachee find the best answers. 

It is much more empowering this way. When the answer is given to you externally by an authority figure or someone more knowledgeable than you, you might accept that authority and internalise that learning. Still, more often than not, it will continue being something external to you. The solution was somehow imposed onto you, and it is more difficult for you to make it entirely yours. When you find your own answer, that answer or solution is yours, it usually works better for your problem, and you make it your own, so your buy-in and engagement with it will be much higher.

This empowerment will also allow you to grow and develop your problem-solving skills, self-confidence and a long list of positive attributes.

Mentoring is an excellent development methodology with a broad use case, and it should have its place in anybody’s development, but if we compare them, I believe coaching is the most powerful of the two.

Types of Coaching

One of the characteristics of coaching today is the sheer number of new coaches born every year, touching all aspects of life. There are life coaches, health coaches, relationship coaches, career coaches, executive coaches, leadership coaches, business coaches, team coaches, etc. There seems to be a type of coach for every walk of life. This makes it challenging to find the right coach sometimes.  

The principles are the same, but with some specialisation, so the methodologies and techniques can change. Some, like leadership and business coaching, are focused on professional aspects, whereas others, like relationship and life coaching, touch upon the personal side of the client. This distinction is often meaningless, however. When an executive coach coaches a client, they are coaching the whole person, with both their professional and personal baggage. We are all human beings in all our facets, and if a coach wants to be successful, they must have a holistic approach.

The good thing about having so many types of coaching is that the clients will find the coaches best suited to help them solve their specific challenges. A good generic coach should be able to help their clients in any sort of situation, but the specialisation means the coach will be equipped with the most suitable techniques and approaches for the particular issue nagging the client. 

A word of caution on the proliferation of coaches mentioned above. Nowadays, everybody seems to be a coach; some people call themselves coaches with little or no training. Be careful with these. Coaching a client is a big responsibility and a challenging task. If you are looking for a coach, make sure they have undergone the necessary training and have some experience. I recommend hiring only coaches certified by one of the big international coaching federations, such as the ICF or the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).

When to use coaching

Coaching is one of the most potent development methods there is. It helps coachees find answers to their problems, develop new skills and competencies, know themselves better, and gain self-confidence. 

With so many different benefits and types of coaching, the applications of coaching are wide and varied. It can and should be used in very different situations. 

It can be used in any situation where the client wants to gain self-awareness and self-knowledge. Due to its methodology, based on questioning and looking at things from different perspectives, it is ideal for identifying blind spots the coachee has about themselves. When coaching, the coach often acts as a mirror, reflecting what they perceive from the coachee and helping them learn new things about themselves.

Coaching is also an ideal tool to use when facing a big challenge, dilemma or problem, being stuck and unable to find a solution. It doesn’t work well for engineering problems for obvious reasons. Still, it is ideally suited for issues related to relationships, emotions, “soft skills”, and anything related to the big decisions of life. 

The coaching types more associated with the professional area, such as executive coaching, leadership coaching or business coaching, will often focus on developing new competencies and skills or solving work-related problems. Coaching has traditionally been associated with leaders and has had an elitist whiff to it. Still, nowadays, its access is being democratised, and employees and managers at all levels of organisations are using it more and more to develop leadership competencies, face new challenges and grow into new roles.

We shouldn’t finish this section without talking about self-confidence, that elusive but all-important human characteristic. When you have enough self-confidence, everything seems to work out well for you, all pieces fall into their place, and life feels easy. When self-confidence isn’t there, everything becomes more difficult, obtaining good results gets hard, and it is easy to enter into a vicious circle of ever worse results and lower self-confidence.

A coach can help a coachee leave the low self-confidence trap. They won’t do it by acting as a cheerleader and telling them how great they are (this is the image some people have of coaches, but it isn’t real), but by helping them know themselves better, identify their strengths and development areas and work on them. 

When you identify your blind spots, you know yourself really well, and you know you have shortcomings, as we all do, but that it is possible to work on them and overcome them, it is difficult to remain with low self-confidence for long. 

It is a long way, but it is a journey that can be travelled in company. You can figuratively hold hands with your coach and walk the path together.

Put a coach in your life

I will always extol the virtues of coaching, of course. I started this post saying I loved coaching, didn’t I? I am a coach, so this was to be expected. 

Still, I hope I have been able to transmit to you, dear reader, why coaching can be beneficial or helpful, regardless of your job, personal situation, or moment in life you are in. It can be conducive to gaining self-knowledge and achieving your personal or professional objectives. 

Have you ever used coaching? If so, what did you think about it? If you disagree with anything I said, please leave a comment, as I’d love to hear your opinion and get a different perspective.

If you haven’t used it, why not? Many affordable options are available today, and it is a worthwhile investment. Think about the goals you have in life and what you need to learn and do to achieve them. You can probably do it alone, but if you allow me to give you some advice (even if we coaches don’t usually give it!), go and try a coach, and you’ll see the results. You can thank me later.

Read more: How Coaching Exercises Can Help You Develop into a Successful Future Leader

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Often people come to me seeking advice, and I don’t usually give it, but they keep coming back and asking for more.

I must be doing something right, or maybe it is not my counsel they are after, but something else. They think they want some advice, but what they really want is someone to help them think more clearly. That I can do, and I’ll always be happy to do it.

On the other hand, giving advice isn’t my thing, and it shouldn’t be yours either.

Some personal context

I’ve never liked giving advice.

Initially, it wasn’t because I had thought hard about it and decided it was better that way. That came later. It probably had something to do with my personality. 

I am a hidden perfectionist who hates making mistakes and has traditionally equated error to failure. I know errors are not failures and are indeed the best way to learn; my mind knows it, I know it, but I still hate making mistakes. I think it has to do with me not wanting to show my vulnerability.

I think that’s the reason why I never liked giving advice.

What if I was wrong and my friend or colleague messed it up because of what I told them to do? The consequences were terrible, so I’ve naturally always preferred to ask them questions, and explore different ways but never tell them what to do. It was mainly cowardice and not wanting to be proven wrong, nothing else, but it seemed to work.

People kept coming to ask me for more.

Then a few years ago, I started training to become a coach, and I realised this is what a coach is supposed to do. A coach asks you powerful questions. She doesn’t tell you what to do.

It fitted perfectly with what I was doing without thinking about it, so it made things easier. 

However, the reason a coach doesn’t give advice is very different from the one I had. They don’t want to advise for a simple reason: it is much better for the coachee. It empowers them, allows them to find their own answers, and to learn and grow. 

I learned since then that this applies not only to coaching but to many other aspects of life.

Why you shouldn’t give advice

There are several reasons why you shouldn’t give advice, either in a work situation, to your partner, or to a friend. 

First of all, when you advise someone, you are putting yourself above them. You are telling them, without intending to, “I know more than you, and I am better than you.” This is unconscious and implicit, neither the advice-giver nor the receiver notices it consciously, but both know it deep inside. The message is clear, and often when we receive advice from others, we resent it rather than be thankful for it, even more so when the advice is unsolicited. 

I have got upset many times with people I love because they told me how to do something or what was best for me when I didn’t ask them. I know they meant to help me, but I couldn’t help getting upset by it. It was beyond my control. Maybe it´s just me, but I think it happens to many other people.

However, this is not the main reason not to give advice.

Often people will come to you willingly, asking for advice and tips. They really want to get some help from you. Still, there are two problems with telling them what to do.

First, their learning will be limited. Second, they may not get the best possible answer for their trouble. 

The most effective learning is intrinsic; it comes from within. You learn much more when you figure out something yourself than when someone else tells you how it works. You cannot force anybody else to learn; they need to put in the work themselves.

When you are advising someone, you are shortcutting the whole process and giving them the solution, thus taking away from them the process of how to get there and the learning derived from it. 

It’s like the proverbial phrase about giving a hungry person a fish for a day or teaching them how to fish forever. When you provide them with advice, you are giving them the fish, you are not teaching them anything. You may actually be giving them the wrong fish, which brings us to the second problem, the one about giving them the correct answer.

Real-life situations are not mathematics or exact sciences. There is not one possible correct answer, and there are certainly many different angles and ways to look at them. The values we hold dear will often be an important part of the solution.

What is right for me may not be right for you. 

When someone comes to me with a problem at work, with their partner or a friend, and I tell them what to do, I’m telling them what to do based on my worldview, experiences, and values. I am telling them what would work for me, but this isn’t necessarily the best solution for them.

They are free to take your advice or discard it, but by giving them some ideas, you may be closing their minds to other ideas that could have worked better for them.

This is why it is much better to help them work out the best solution for them, not by telling them what to do or what you would do if you were in their shoes (that’s giving advice, too!), but by asking questions and exploring different alternatives together. 

This is what a good coach does, but also what a good leader, partner, or friend should do. 

The leader-coach, the partner-coach, the friend-coach, the person-coach

Coaching is a technique to help people develop and grow, but it is also a philosophy of life. Its teachings and practices can be helpful in many other aspects of life. 

If you start coaching a friend or a family member when they didn’t ask for it, they will probably find it annoying, so please don’t do it. Still, doing things like listening more, asking more open questions, and not giving advice can get you far as a leader, a partner, or a friend.

When someone comes to you with a problem, and you listen to them attentively, ask open questions that show you understand the intricacies of the problem and help them look at it from different angles, you are helping them find the best solution for them. You are empowering them to make their own decisions, and you are enabling their growth.

There are some basic tips to consider when asking questions, like, for example, asking one question at a time, asking open questions rather than closed ones, or listening carefully to the other person before you ask the question.

The best and most powerful questions are those that come from genuine and attentive listening.

When is it OK to give advice?

I am not doing what I am preaching, as I am giving you plenty of advice here.

This whole post is a monument to advice, as I am telling you, dear reader, what you should or shouldn’t do.

Am I a hypocrite, or is this a typical case of “do as I say, not as I do?”

I don’t believe in absolutes. There are always exceptions to the rule. The topic at hand isn’t an exception. There are many cases where giving advice is not only perfectly fine but would be the best course of action.

It all will depend on the situation, but there are some cases in which it makes perfect sense not to start asking questions and to tell someone directly what they should do. 

For example, suppose the problem at hand is technical or requires specific knowledge and expertise that the person asking for help doesn’t have, and you do. In that case, you should give them the advice they require, as they won’t find the solution themselves or it will take them too long to do so.

Time is another factor to consider. As a leader (or a friend or partner, for that matter), we often don’t have enough time to have a philosophical or coaching discussion about a problem with an easy solution, and it is easier (and faster) to provide what we think is the right answer. 

Learning and personal growth are, at least for me, some of the most important elements in life, but they aren’t the only ones.

Life is complex and full of many moving parts, and sometimes, it will make sense to stop for a moment and ask questions instead of giving advice. Still, some other times, it will be easier and better for all concerned to provide an answer, advice, or tip and get it over with.

I’ll leave it to you to decide when to use each, but if you allow me one last tiny little piece of advice, I would err towards asking more questions and giving less advice. You are probably giving too much advice today, and you haven’t noticed it yet. 

Try listening more and asking more questions, and see how it goes. You can thank me for the advice later.

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A few months ago, when I started this blog, I was talking with one of my former managers about a common acquaintance, how he completely lacked self-awareness and how this affected his work and his relationships with others.

“You should write about self-awareness or the lack of it in your blog,” she said half-jokingly.

“I might, one day,” I half-promised.

And here I am.

A few months have passed since then, but I never forgot about that conversation, and I always thought one day I should write about it. I have touched upon self-awareness in other posts (the Man in the Mirror, The Wise Leader, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the Modern Stoic, or How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs), but this time the entire post is dedicated to the topic.

It deserves its space. As we will see, self-awareness is critical.

A New Year resolution

I don’t tend to pick new year’s resolutions (I chose many new resolutions, but why do they have to be in January and not in October?), but this year I am proposing to improve my self-awareness. 

Why? Because it is one of the most important competencies you can have.

It is the source of everything else. If you know yourself well and are aware of your strengths, weaknesses, motivations, emotions, drives, and desires, you are already well on your way to effectively leading yourself and others to success. 

In Ancient Greece, when people visited the Oracle of Delphi, one of the maxims written on the temple forecourt was “Know thyself”. It is the first step in self-development and growth. Know yourself, and then you will understand your purpose and motivations in life, be happy and improve your relationships with others. 

If self-awareness is that important and beneficial, is it something you can learn?

Nature vs Nurture

Like most skills and competencies, there is a bit of nature and nurture when it comes to self-awareness.

Genetics plays a part, and some people are more predisposed, by nature, to be better tuned to how they feel, what their strengths and weaknesses are, etc. 

Nature always matters, but it is never alone. Nurture also tends to play its part, and self-awareness isn’t an exception. The family environment, schools, the books read, the feedback received, mentors and role models… all of this builds up or fails to build a person’s self-awareness. 

So it is a bit of both.

Someone might have the potential to be very self-aware because it is in their genes, but if this skill isn’t honed and promoted, it will not flourish.

On the other hand, someone with a low potential for high self-awareness might work on it and get closer to the potential dictated by nature and display what would be high levels of self-awareness, even if not genetically predisposed to it.

Self-awareness as part of Emotional Intelligence

Self-awareness is the first of five components of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) as per the model of its leading proponent Daniel Goleman.

He believes it is an essential skill that allows those who have it to know how their emotions affect them and others and helps them improve their performance. People with self-awareness also have a better understanding of their values and purpose, which, as I wrote in another post, are key to high performance, fulfilment, and happiness at work. 

In Goleman’s opinion, self-aware people are able to evaluate themselves realistically and honestly, and are usually perceived as self-confident, even if they often have no problems showing their vulnerability (remember, Vulnerability is a Super-Power!), and they display a self-deprecating sense of humour. 

Self-aware people seek constructive feedback to learn more about themselves and improve, whereas people with low self-awareness often mistakenly think they know themselves well enough, so they don’t like to hear feedback that goes against the image they have built about themselves in their imagination. 

It is my own impression not supported by any evidence, so I might be mistaken, but I have the feeling that there is a positive correlation between people with high self-awareness and a growth mindset, whereas people with low self-awareness tend to lean more towards a fixed mindset.

If you are self-aware, you realise you can learn, grow and get better by practising and making mistakes. 

How to be more self-aware

There are different techniques to improve self-awareness.

Here I will focus on three.

Johari Window

The Johari Window is a technique created by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955, and it helps people know themselves and their relationships with others better. The name comes from a combination of the authors’ first names.

It involves an exercise whereby different adjectives describing a subject end up in different quadrants of a box (see figure). There is a public quadrant, also known as the Arena or the Open quadrant, where known to self and known to others match. This is the area in which our view of ourselves and that of others are aligned. 

The second quadrant is the Blind Spot area. This is where there are things about us others know, but we don’t.

The third quadrant, also known as the Façade or the Hidden area, is where there are things known to ourselves but unknown to others. These are our inner views of ourselves, which often we don’t want others to know, usually due to shame and embarrassment. These are things we don’t usually like about ourselves, so we don’t want others to know them.

Finally, there is the Unknown quadrant, with things neither we nor others know about us. 

The first quadrant can be made bigger through feedback, coaching, introspection, or just by conducting this simple exercise with others, making the quadrants two (Blind Spot) and four (Unknown) smaller. This increases our self-awareness.

We can also reduce the third quadrant, the Façade, by sharing more about ourselves with others and displaying our vulnerability, again making the first quadrant, the public one, bigger. This improves our relationship with others.

The Johari window was devised as a therapeutic exercise involving the subject and the people who knew them selecting adjectives defining them, but I don’t think it is necessary to conduct the exercise exactly as prescribed to get some value out of it. It can make us reflect on what we think are our public and façade windows, make the active commitment to reducing the blind window by asking for feedback and wonder what may lay in the unknown quadrant.

Coaching

Coaching is one of the most powerful methods to increase self-awareness.

After all, the coach’s mission is just that, to accompany the coachee on a journey of knowing themselves better so they can grow and achieve their goals. 

As a coach myself, I have been coached by others several times. Every time I have learned deep, meaningful things about myself that previously I was ignorant about. It never fails to amaze me. 

You think you know yourself very well, and bang, it hits you.

There is always something new you didn’t know that makes you see yourself and others in a different light. It is usually shocking and uncomfortable but also rewarding and enlightening. The truth, especially when it is about oneself, isn’t always pleasant, but it is the truth nevertheless, and knowing it will make you stronger, better, happier… you name it. 

A coach is like a mirror that, through questioning, feedback, and different exercises, helps you look at yourself better.

It’s a mirror that reaches hitherto hidden blind spots and uncovers what has been hiding, often in plain sight for all others but you. Coaching helps you reduce the Blind and Unknown quadrants, be more honest with yourself about your Façade quadrant, and question why you aren’t more public about it.

Know thyself, as the Delphi Oracle said. A coach is like a modern oracle, but she doesn’t tell you about your future. She doesn’t tell you anything but asks you the right questions for you to find your answers yourself.

Meditation

I started meditating through an app called Headspace in 2013 or 2014 but stopped after a few months, and since then, I didn’t keep up doing it regularly. I remember I felt good when I did it, but still, I stopped it for some reason I can’t remember. I guess I find it hard to keep some habits, especially if they are the healthy type. 

Then last year, the pandemic kicked in, and I was spending a lot of time alone at home, getting anxious and stressed, so I decided to give it a go again, this time with an app called Waking Up.

It was a great decision. Covid was terrible for so many reasons, but restarting meditation and writing will be something for which I will be forever grateful to this virus.

Meditation has many benefits, and I would recommend everybody to do it, but this post is not the place to extol all its virtues. We are here to talk about self-awareness, and oh boy, does meditation help with it. 

Meditation is about being more present and in the moment, being conscious of your breath and aware of everything that is happening in your consciousness: thoughts, sounds, sensations of the body, images, what you see in your visual field with your eyes closed (it’s never completely black, is it?). 

The first time you try to focus on your breath without concentrating on anything else, you realise how hopeless a task this is. A myriad of thoughts and images comes racing out of nowhere, and you realise you don’t control your thought process as much as you thought you did. 

As you meditate more and more, you start noticing better where your thoughts are coming from, and the images, feelings, emotions, sensations like heat or cold, the energy passing through your body, and the mood you are in… You start to be more mindful about everything happening through your consciousness, as and when it happens.

You begin to get to know yourself and how your conscious mind works better. 

In sum, you start to be more self-aware.

AI in support of Self-awareness

In this blog, we always tend to keep an eye on the future and how things might evolve and change, so I would like to share something I found interesting regarding AI and self-awareness in Pedro Domingos’s The Master Algorithm. 

Domingos explains that there is an enormous amount of data about each of us online, as we all know, but luckily, it is not located in one single place (yet), nor is it accessible to one single agent.

Google has some data about you, Facebook some more, Amazon knows something else, etc. Domingos believes that in the future, we may have all the data there is about us in a USB or cloud, all in one place, and we could ask the Master Algorithm (this will be the master of all algorithms, the one unifying all the rest, that hasn’t been created yet) to interpret the data for us and tell us who we really are.

In similar lines, Yuval Noah Harari argues in his works Homo Deus and 21 lessons for the 21st Century that we will reach a moment in the near future where AI and algorithms, based on all the data they have collected about us, will know our desires and what drives us better than ourselves. When this future arrives, we may have delegated all our decisions to machines, as they will know better what is good for us.

This is a scary and dystopian thought, and there are several reasons why I think (or hope) we may never end up there, but this is a discussion for another post.

What matters here is that as AI gets better and gets to amass data about us in one place, we may reach a moment when we could get some AI to help us increase our self-awareness. AI would analyse the data, how we did in certain meetings, how we are doing in our work, how we feel about it, etc., and give us advice, some pointers, tell us about our blind spots, etc.

It would be like an artificial mentor but with much more data about us than any human could ever have.

But I think we are still far from this, if we ever get there.

Before we get to that time, we’ll have to continue working on our self-awareness through the old means: introspection and reflection, seeking and interiorising feedback, coaching and mentoring, meditation, and tools like the Johari window. 

And you, how self-aware are you? What are you doing to improve your self-awareness?

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“Computers are useless. They only give you answers”

Pablo Picasso, 1964

When Picasso uttered those words almost sixty years ago, he probably didn’t suspect the vast amount of answers computers would give us. We can look at a map on a handheld device that tells us where the closest restaurants are and what other consumers think about them; we can access an online encyclopedia updated with new world events as they happen; we have access to all the books ever written, all the songs ever played, all the movies ever filmed and pictures of all Picasso’s paintings. 

We can get a mind-blowing amount of information through a device that fits in our pockets, but Picasso’s words still ring true today. Computers are better than ever at giving us answers, but they don’t give us questions. 

And questions are the source of knowledge, learning, and personal growth.

A good question is worth a million good answers

In his book The Inevitable, author Kevin Kelly thinks questioning will be one of the 12 trends shaping the future. Here he explains why:

“A world of super smart ubiquitous answers encourages a quest for the perfect question. What makes a perfect question? Ironically the best questions are not questions that lead to answers, because answers are on their way to becoming cheap and plentiful. A good question is worth a million good answers. (…) 

The technologies of generating answers will continue to be essential, so much that answers will become omnipresent, instant, reliable, and just about free. But the technologies that help generate questions will be valued more. Question makers will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new fields, new industries, new brands, new possibilities, new continents that our restless species can explore. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.”

When you have all the answers you are looking for at your fingertips, asking the right questions becomes increasingly important. As we will see below, coaches are master question-makers, so good coaches will be increasingly sought after in a world full of answers.

Intelligence comes from curiosity and from being able to ask the right questions. We overvalue all the answers we get, but we undervalue questioning. Good questioning is a rare skill, and we don’t give it the importance it deserves. 

Good questions create new fields of knowledge and new realities.

It was a good question (“why did this apple fall onto my head?”) that piqued Isaac Newton’s curiosity to work out the laws of motion and universal gravitation.

It was another good question (“what would you see if you were travelling on a beam of light?”) that got Einstein to reflect on it for years and finally come up with the theory of special relativity that would supersede Newton’s laws.

But good questions aren’t only essential for scientific discoveries and progress; we also need them for our personal growth and to live a happy and fulfilling life.

Asking the right questions for a better life

Two thousand five hundred years ago, Socrates sought to find the path towards a good and virtuous life by asking the right questions. The Socratic method centred on asking questions to stimulate critical thinking, discarding some hypotheses due to their inherent contradictions, so only the best ones would remain. Through questioning, the questioned discover their true beliefs; only through questioning may the questioned achieve wisdom.

From Socrates to Freud’s psychoanalysis in the 20th century, there is a long tradition of getting to know ourselves better by asking the right questions. 

Questions like these have occupied the minds of great thinkers and common people alike for centuries:

“What is the meaning of life? And its purpose? How can I live a virtuous life? How can I be happy? Where does consciousness reside? What is love?”

We are yet no closer to getting a satisfying answer to many of these questions, and that’s because they probably don’t really exist. Good questions don’t have easy or evident answers. 

Living a good life means finding your answers to these questions, but this takes time. This takes a lifetime. Life is what happens while you are finding the answers to these questions. It is the path that matters, not the destination, and the path is about finding the right questions and thinking about the answers. It doesn’t really matter whether your answers are correct. That’s not the point.

Coaching or the art of asking powerful questions

Being a philosopher or a scientist requires you to ask good questions, but I consider coaching to really be the art of asking powerful questions. A good coach asks the right questions at the right moment, and these questions better be powerful, or the coach won’t be doing a good job.

Unlike mentoring, where a more experienced or senior professional (the mentor) imparts their wisdom and guides a mentee by giving them advice, coaching is based on the premise that the coachee has the answers within them. The coach guides the coachee to get to their answers without giving any advice by listening, paraphrasing, and especially by asking the right questions.

This is what makes coaching so empowering and so powerful. The coach doesn’t have the answers; the coachee does. The coachee is whole and unique, and they, and nobody else, know what is best for them. The coach “only” needs to listen actively, sometimes paraphrase what they just heard, and ask powerful questions. It sounds easy and straightforward, but doing it well is difficult because it is an art.

What is a Powerful Question?

Powerful Questioning is one of the original competencies of the coach defined by the International Coaching Federation (ICF). The ICF describes the competency as follows:

“Ability to ask questions that reveal the information needed for maximum benefit to the coaching relationship and the client.

1. Asks questions that reflect active listening and an understanding of the client’s perspective.
2. Asks questions that evoke discovery, insight, commitment or action (e.g., those that challenge the client’s assumptions).
3. Asks open-ended questions that create greater clarity, possibility or new learning.
4. Asks questions that move the client toward what they desire, not questions that ask for the client to justify or look backwards.“

This is fine, but it doesn’t fully illustrate the weight, complexity, and awesomeness of a powerful question. Paraphrasing Justice Potter Stewart when discussing hard-core pornography in a Supreme Court Case, it is not easy to define it well, but you know it when you see it. It’s the same with a powerful question; you know one when you get it asked.

Coaches help their coachees get their insights through powerful questioning. Any person who has been at the receiving end of good coaching practice knows those aha! moments when a coach asks a question that makes them think, look deep inwards and learn something completely new about themselves. We don’t always see some evident things about ourselves and our deeply ingrained limiting beliefs because we are sitting on top of them. It is complicated for us to see them. But then comes a good coach who asks the right question, and zas! you see it. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it, and after that insight, you can then move into defining actions that will get you closer to your goals. That’s the secret recipe for good coaching: listening, questioning, insight, and action.

In a world where more and more answers are readily available and, as Kelly puts it, are “cheap and plentiful,” asking the right questions will be an increasingly important art. Scientifics, academics, and philosophers need to know what kind of questions to ask in their search for truth, but all the rest of us also need to know what questions to ask about ourselves and the kind of lives we want to live. A coach is best-suited to help you find those questions and start walking the never-ending path towards the answers.

The Robocoach is still far off

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the future of coaching. Somewhat provocatively, I stated then that it was easy to foresee a near future in which an AI-based coach, let’s call it the Robocoach, would replace human coaches, as at the end of the day, the heavy lifting in the process is done by the coachee. The coach “only” listens, paraphrases, and asks questions.

Previsibly, I got some deserved flak from some of my coach friends, who believed I was unjustly oversimplifying and dehumanising our role as a coach. It is true, coaching is simple, but the simplest things are often the hardest to do well.

Coaches “only” listen and ask questions, but finding the right, powerful question, that question that will produce the insight the coachee needs at that very moment, that’s an art. That’s why it is going to be so difficult for a machine to imitate it. 

Picasso, who knew a thing or two about art, was prescient when talking about the capabilities of the then-nascent computing technology. He knew they could only give you answers and not questions, and that, although important and useful, doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things. He was right, and that’s why the arrival of the Robocoach won’t happen any time soon.

If you want answers, get a computer. If you want powerful and useful questions, get a coach. A human coach, of course. 

Read more: Coaching questions: how to make them powerful and when to use them

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I love coaching. I really do. That moment when your coachee has that insight and that “aha!” moment, and you see it in the spark in their eyes, the same eyes showing the determination for the new course of action they now see clearly in front of them. That moment, like many others during the coaching process, is priceless.

I love coaching because it allows me to accompany others in their own personal growth journeys, and through helping others, I also grow. A lot. If used correctly, it is one of the most powerful development methods out there. 

I highlighted the word “if” above because it is an important one. It is a big if. There are plenty of bad coaches out there (I won’t say I’m a particularly good one myself, I’m still learning) who pretend to be expert life coaches after a couple of days of training and little experience, and they mix coaching with some esoteric mumbo-jumbo with little grounding on actual science or evidence. There are also many people who call themselves coaches or think they are coaching others when in reality, they are mentoring them, counselling them or advising them. It is not the same thing.

Good coaching

Good coaching is based on neuroscience, is evidence-based, and usually works. A good coach doesn’t know the answers the coachee needs, nor does she pretend to know them, she is only a facilitator who, through active listening, good questioning and clarifying, acts as a mirror in which the coachee can find her own answers and achieve her goals. 

Good coaching is based on the premise that a coachee is whole and has all the answers she needs within her or has the potential to find them outside, but it is her responsibility and she has the capability to do so. It is powerful because it is empowering. 

The most powerful and durable learning is intrinsic, it comes from within, not from others. It is when we reflect, have insight and change our actions and habits that we learn and grow.  

Lifelong Learning

Coaching will have an increasingly important role to play in our workplaces. It already has an important presence today, especially in some regions like the US, Latin America or Western Europe, but I think this will only increase over time as we become lifelong learners and the rapid pace of change in our environment forces us to develop new mental resources to successfully navigate these uncertain seas.

Lifelong learning is one of the main drivers that will shape the Future of Work. We will need to keep learning and reinventing ourselves into our retirements, and this can be both thrilling and terrifying at the same time. There are many ways to learn new skills or develop new habits, but coaching is one of the best ones.

As I explained above, good coaching helps an individual to find their answers and the insights that work best for them. It is also goal and solution-oriented, which is proven to build the right hardwiring in the brain. It is a learning that is tailored to each learner, completely individualised, and that also matters. 

For all this, I believe that coaching will become an important element of the lifelong learner. Coaching will become widespread, we will all learn basic coaching skills, and we will know how to listen and what questions to ask to help others grow and achieve their objectives.

In this context, the figure of the leader-coach will be very important. I think being able to act as a coach will be one of the most important leadership competencies of the future. A leader who is able to listen to her team members, accompany them to find their way towards their goals, not be too prescriptive, but let them make their decisions and learn from their mistakes… This is a leader who will help her team grow, which is what leadership should be about: growing people and inspiring them to achieve results.

Technology and the future of coaching

Technology can bring many benefits to coaching. It is now possible to coach virtually, and during the recent lockdowns, many coaches have had to coach their coaches via Zoom or Teams.

This seemed anathema before, but not anymore. You had to be close to the coachee, sense their body language, be present, build trust and rapport… and all that was better done when you were both in the same room. That’s still true, but the pandemic has shown us that the virtual substitute isn’t that bad. 

Obviously, this opens new possibilities. A coach based in New York can coach, time zone differences permitting, someone in Singapore. Technology will become better and better. Some companies are already developing lifelike avatars that imitate almost perfectly someone’s gestures and movements and will make us feel as though remote people were in the same room with us.

Coaching in the Metaverse, anyone? It sounds like science fiction at the moment, but I think we will be using Virtual Reality to improve the coaching experience sooner than expected.

Apps are another use of technology that can shape and improve the field of coaching. There are already some rudimentary apps around coaching that help you set up goals and follow them up. They have the name coaching in their title, but they are far from it. These are just goal-setting tools, but it is easy to envisage a near future in which coaches can use an app to support their coaching practice.

Their clients could use this app to look up videos, learning tools and resources around the goals they want to achieve; they could follow up on these goals; take related notes; add milestones and actions; communicate with their coach in real-time, both via instant messaging or video calls; and a myriad other useful functions. This would allow a coach to reach more coachees and enhance the coaching process through technology, and the coachee would get an improved service just with the use of one single app.

This app would complement the real coaching practice, not replace it. A coach would have her sessions with her clients and in the meantime, they would use the app to improve their learning and achieve their goals. But what if technology could replace the coach?

The Robocoach is here!

There is a lot of talk about automation lately, but can the job of a coach be automated and replaced by AI? Any coach worth her salt will tell you that´s impossible. Coaching is too human. It requires sensitivity, emotional intelligence, building trust, looking at clues in the body language… there will never be a robot being able to do everything a coach does better than a human being.

Never is a long time, but it’s probably true that AI technology is far from being able to coach better than a good human coach at the moment. Still, there are things that current AI technology can do passably well. It can look at enormous amounts of data, look at patterns and define the best possible course of action. You could train a deep learning system by making it listen to many coaching conversations so it can pick the type of questions that get better results.

There are some types of questions that are very often used in coaching conversations, so a machine could be trained to use them based on what is listening. Powerful questioning comes from great listening, but AI can also listen. It can even understand and react to human emotions.

The heavy lifting in coaching isn’t done by the coach but by the coachee. The coach listens, paraphrases and asks the right questions here and there, but it is the coachee who thinks, makes most of the talking, makes new connections, has an insight, looks at alternatives and defines an action plan. The coach is there only to support the coachee on her journey. The coachee has all the potential to find her answers, she has them inside her, so in that sense, an AI only has to do that supporting role well enough to help the coachee in her quest for answers. 

I’m not sure the current state of AI would allow for some great coaching, but I’m sure in a few years’ time, we’ll have a basic version of it. It won’t be excellent, but it can be good enough. Considering the cost per session of a good executive coach, I think there is a market for the very cheap version of coaching via the Robocoach. It won’t be as good as the human coach, but it will be much cheaper.

As the Robocoach gathers more data and the technology improves, it will get better and better at it, until one faraway day, it becomes better than a human coach, and the coaches follow truck drivers, paralegals and clerks into the growing list of unemployed due to automation.

Coaching as a philosophy of life

I started this article by stating that I loved coaching, and I’d like to finish it on the same note. Coaching is not only a development method, it is a philosophy of life, a humanist one at that. A coach believes that anybody has the potential to grow and improve, and anybody has the capacity to find their own answers. In that sense, I find it profoundly humanist.

Coaching is based on listening to others, not giving advice or imposing your view on them, and on helping them grow through listening and questioning. I wouldn’t advise having coaching conversations with friends or family members if they didn’t ask for it, they can actually find it quite annoying, but you can stand by the tenets of coaching whilst you carry on with your day-to-day life: you can listen more and better, abstain yourself from telling others what to do, believe in the potential for growth of your fellow human beings, be future and goal-oriented instead of problem and past focused, and a long et cetera. 

That’s living coaching as a philosophy of life. I think it helps you live a better life, it works for me, at least. I hope we will live in a future in which there will be more coaching, not less, even if that means being coached by robots.

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