The Art of Coaching

Chapter 9Facilitative Coaching Conversations

Read this when:

• You need strategies to gently elicit a client's thinking or help a client release emotions
• You feel stuck in your coaching and want different ways of engaging in conversation with a client

Coaching Conversations

When I first started coaching, I had a hard time describing what I did with clients. “We just talk,” I'd say, “Mostly, we have conversations.” While it's true that coaching happens in conversations, there's a lot that's gone on in order to arrive at the conversation, a lot that a coach does during the conversation, and a lot to do after a conversation. For a coach, the conversations themselves can be cognitively, emotionally, and even physically exhausting, because a lot ...