The difference between good and great coaching

There are numerous reasons to hire a coach, particularly if you are an ambitious person with lofty goals. Working with a good coach provides structure, accountability, emotional support, and a safe place to grow. But there’s a difference between good coaching and great coaching: great coaching is deeply confronting. While good coaching might involve clever reframes and useful tools, great coaching forces you to take an honest look at yourself and accept responsibility for everything you find, even the parts you don't like.

Most people tend to gravitate toward "best practices" like Nonviolent Communication, Radical Candor, boundary setting, and CBT techniques because they offer simple ways to reduce friction in life. Don't get me wrong, these tools are incredibly helpful. But they often keep a person in the shallow end of the pool. It's comforting to stay in this zone! As long as I follow the right framework, as long as I put my thoughts and feelings into the right boxes, then mission accomplished. And sometimes, that's all that's needed.

However, when you keep getting stuck despite all the tools, a deeper transformation might be called for. If it seems that nothing is changing no matter what you do, then it's not a matter of doing, it's a matter of being. When we work at the level of being, we begin to connect with the perspectives, narratives, and beliefs that exist upstream of all the doing. All the patterns that run us so efficiently become more apparent. We start to see how, as Jerry Colonna might say, we are "complicit in creating the conditions we say we don't want."

Yet going to this level is scary for several reasons. For one, it forces us to challenge certain "truths" that we may have held onto for most of our lives. It also invites us to stop blaming the outside world and take responsibility for how we've shown up. And finally, working at this level almost always involves dealing with painful feelings that we'd rather avoid. Yet through that pain, there is also the opportunity for growth and radical change.

It's no wonder why many of us settle for just good coaching. Confronting ourselves is the harder thing to do. But when we become willing to take full responsibility for how we show up in the world, then we've taken a vital step toward freedom. So if you're working with a coach right now, ask yourself how you can take the work from good to great.