Coaching as a Foreign Language

Languages are my hobby. I am always learning or perfecting a foreign language and recently, I thought that there are a lot of parallels between learning to coach and learning a language. When you start learning a language, you feel great at the beginning. From understanding nothing and not being able to do anything in that language to doing and understanding basic things is a satisfying and quick process. The grind of getting the grammar correct, learning lots and lots more vocabulary that follows is much less satisfying. You feel like you are sounding wooden, over correct, you oscillate between trying to be correct (and then you translate and think in your head) and natural (and then you make a gazillion of grammar mistakes). Learning to coach is quite similar, in my view.

Fluency Is Not the Same as Correctness

True fluency shows up when you stop monitoring yourself all the time, which happens both in coaching and in language learning. Early in their development, coaches often “speak coaching” very carefully. They form clean, well-structured questions. They use approved phrases. They avoid anything that might sound directive or wrong. Their sessions are “grammatically correct”, but slightly stiff. There is nothing wrong with that, the main thing is not to stop there. Fluent coaching is not about producing perfect questions. It is about naturally acting as a coach and being able to adapt to different situations and clients without resorting to “vocabulary lists” (aka: questions lists)

Accents Are Not a Problem

When you speak a foreign language, you almost always have an accent. It carries traces of where you come from. Your first language leaks through. This also happens in coaching. Your background, your professional history, your culture, your temperament, your way of making sense of the world… all of this shapes how you coach. Trying to eliminate that “accent” often leads to something artificial. Clients do not need accent-free coaches.

They need intelligible, responsive, human ones.

A coach with a strong managerial accent, a therapeutic accent, a philosophical accent, or a systemic accent is not doing it wrong. The skill lies in noticing when the “accent” is helping an when it is getting in the way of the coaching relationship.

False Friends in Coaching

Every language learner eventually meets false friends. False friends are words that look very similar to a word in your native language but mean something quite different. For example “supporter” in Spanish does not mean “to support” but “to bear with”. Coaching has plenty of those, too.

Words like “clarity”, “accountability”, “solutions” sound shared and obvious. Yet coaches and clients often mean very different things by them. When sessions stall, it is often not because the client is “stuck,” but because coach and client are using the same words while speaking different languages. Just as a language learner is well advised to check their understanding of  a word when they are getting weird looks when using a word, the coach should also check meaning rather than assuming it.

Thinking in Coaching, Not About Coaching

At some point, language learners stop translating. They start thinking in the new language. When I start dreaming in a new language, I take this as a sign of almost being where I want to be (but, hey, I think I make grammar mistakes when I am dreaming, too).

Coaching maturity shows up in a similar shift. Instead of thinking: “What technique should I use now?” or “What competency am I demonstrating?” fluent coaches think from the relationship, from the conversation, from the moment. The frameworks are still there, but they have moved into the background. This does not make coaching sloppy or unprofessional but makes it into a conversation of two humans which is natural and alive.

Learning Takes Time and Exposure

No one becomes fluent in a language by reading grammar books alone. Fluency comes from conversations, misunderstandings, awkward moments, and repair. Coaching development works the same way. Practice coaching, peer coaching, supervision, and reflective dialogue are not add-ons. They are the immersion that allows coaches to stop translating and start speaking. And like any language, coaching is never “finished.” Even fluent speakers keep learning new expressions, contexts, and nuances. Perhaps that is part of what makes it such a satisfying profession.

If you would like to practice coaching as a new language, hang out with a few interesting colleagues or learn about our highly practical courses, why not join us for a free meetup and exchange?

‍