Coaching Agreements vs Coaching Assumptions: Knowing the Direction, Not the Destination

Coaching Agreements vs Coaching Assumptions

We were just discussing coaching agreements and why the coach and the client might need them in our Coaching Masterclass. A participant mentioned that it is important to know what the client wants because otherwise the coach would not be able to challenge the client. Upon reflection we figured out that the coach needs to know at least the direction the client wants to take in order to engage on many different levels.

I still don’t believe that you need to hammer out in detail what the client wants as a result of the session.

- The coaching conversation is emergent, who knows what will be the exact outcome.

- The coach and client relationship is not one where the coach is a service provider that is paid to help the client achieve a certain outcome.

- A transactional relationship between coach and client does not seem to me like it would further the progress of the client (but maybe I am partial, as I really am not a fan of transactional relationships in general).

However, as Steve de Shazer said: “You can know what better is, even if you don’t know what good is”. We need to know at least what “better” means for the client, in my view.

We need to know in order to challenge

As our participant stated – if I don’t know where the client is heading, how can I challenge whether something they are saying or doing is serving them or not?

We need to know what to acknowledge

We are not tourists in our client’s lives. We don’t go walking about praising and acknowledging this that and the other thing. What we notice depends on what the client wants. I remember a story that a therapist colleague told me (I thought I had read it somewhere, too, but I cannot find it for the life of me – so if you know where, let me know).

The therapist had two first appointments on the same day. Both were with teenage girls. He had only briefly looked at the files and for some reason mixed up the girls. One was a shy girl with a diagnosis of social anxiety (or something like that) and the other was a girl who was being too aggressive at school. When the therapist started talking to the first girl, he thought it was the girl with social anxiety. As usual, he asked her what she liked doing in her life. She replied with a story about how she loved going to the playground and how she had managed to take back the toy she was playing with from another girl. The therapist enquired how she did that and praised her for her confidence, only later learning that this was the girl who was seen as too aggressive.

To know what we want to acknowledge or pick up, which language and stories we want to strengthen, we need to know the direction the client wants to go in!

If you would like to explore interesting questions like the sense and nonsense of coaching agreements, learn about our courses or simply hang out with a bunch of interesting colleagues, why don’t you join one of our free coaching meetups and exchanges?

‍

‍