The real action of coaching takes place in the coachee’s life, in the action he or she takes—or doesn’t take—between sessions.

Here’s the key: as long as you are conscientious about framing the conversation as your experience and encouraging coachees to find their own best way while exploring a number of alternative pathways, your experience will be seen as one more potential course of action and not the “expert’s” way. In short, don’t make it a rule that you will never

This may be one of their reasons to seek out coaching. They rely on the coach for the acuity that sees through the chaos and fog.

The outcome of process coaching is a shift in the internal experience combined with new or renewed learning. As we said, coaching is about moving forward, and sometimes progress starts with going into the experience, not skipping over it.

For example, a coachee comes to the coaching session worried about the reaction she expects over the upcoming firing of a team member. The coach asks her to look at the situation from the meta-view—from the point of view of building a work culture—rather than focusing on hurt feelings or upsets.

When people feel listened to in this way, it communicates a deeper sense of support, commitment, and encouragement. If one of your goals as a leader is improved employee engagement, one option might be a focus on modeling Level II listening.

There is no static point in life; life is inherently dynamic. We are constantly balancing.

When a coach is sitting across from a coachee (even by telephone), the coach is not sitting across from a problem to be solved; the coach is sitting across from a person.

The life purpose is a path, not a destination. And along the way, coachees will encounter plenty of voices, internal and external, telling them to go in other directions.