Towards Coaching as Encounter

Much of contemporary professional life is organised around haste. Decisions need to be made speedily; targets set and met within shortened time frames; change navigated smoothly; emails crafted and answered within hours; seemingly endless meetings attended, despite their relative unproductivity – all in the context of being expected to be creative, productive and good tempered.

Human-to-human interactions in such cultures easily become performative, more about the transferring of information or the smoothing over of challenges than the meeting of minds, personalities or ‘souls’.

Now of course, I don’t want to appear to be idealistic (even if I am naturally so). There is a place for functionality in some interaction. Organisations cannot function without some perfunctory exchanges. Yet one consequence of living continually within instrumental forms of communication is that genuinely reflective conversation becomes increasingly rare. Many people spend their working lives surrounded by discussion, while finding few opportunities to think carefully about what is actually happening to them, what they really think, or what they may be confronting, or tending to avoid.

For me, coaching is a form of disciplined listening in the context of busyness, the performativity and pressures of work, and the ordinary, everyday challenges of human existence. It is attention to the other while they are amidst some level of confusion; accompanying them while feelings, thoughts and dilemmas are sifted. Coaching is about noticing – in the coachee and their narrative, as well as in the coaching dynamic itself – things which may otherwise be latent or hidden beneath the surface. Often, people know more than they realise. What they lack are the conditions in which what they know can be properly heard, tested, and articulated. Coaching offers such conditions.

The coaching conversations I have and find most meaningful are those in which something is gradually revealed. A person begins to see patterns of judgement or interactions emerging they hadn’t previously considered. Assumptions that they previously operated under gradually become visible. Tensions between values and how they are currently living and working are gradually brought into focus. Present day discomforts are able to be confronted with renewed courage.

I am cautious about highly performative or overly instrumental models of coaching, naturally favouring a relational style, which sees the whole person, not just the person as functionary. Coaching is about discernment: understanding what is actually happening, what matters within it, and what kind of response might allow a person to live and work in greater alignment with their own values.

For me, then, coaching is relational. It is more than the exchange of information about current concerns or the application of particular listening techniques. At heart, coaching is about the quality of the encounter between two human beings. In a world that all too often encourages us to treat ourselves and others instrumentally or superficially, coaching offers an opportunity to meet another person with respect, attentiveness, and curiosity.

The sociologist Hartmut Rosa has argued that contemporary life is increasingly characterised by acceleration, by constant pressure towards movement, adaptation, and responsiveness. Under such conditions, it can become difficult to sustain a meaningful relationship with one’s work, one’s values, or even oneself. Experience begins to feel hurried, reactive, and strangely thin. Coaching, at its best, offers a counterweight to this acceleration, not an escape from responsibility, but a space in which reality can be encountered at a more human pace.

This does not mean conversation alone is sufficient. Reflection without action can become another form of avoidance. Yet action without reflection carries its own risks, particularly when people are moving through periods of transition, uncertainty, exhaustion, or significant change. In such moments, the quality of attention brought to experience may matter as much as the speed with which solutions are reached.

Perhaps this is what coaching conversations are ultimately for. Not the promise of transformation, nor the production of a more successful or optimised self, but the possibility that through careful and sustained conversation, a person may come into a more truthful relationship with their work, relationships, values, and finite life.