As I have been working with large organizations, I discovered that for many people, "coaching" is much closer to what media has popularized as sport coaching—focused on transmitting specific expertise through observation, feedback, and teaching.
This is of course quite different from the professional coaching that I practice, and while it can be confusing at first, I am comfortable with it.
One of my clients recently raised the topic of "coaching mindset" and emphasized that there might be a need for educating people who receive coaching in order to adopt a better mindset. I investigated and learned that leaders had tried to coach a lot, tried better questions, cleaner feedback, fewer instructions, more listening. Yet, it did not bring any expected change on many of their people. Therefore, the problem must be on the coachee side!
I offered to deliver a workshop to help them overcome their current coaching challenge. And of course, there was not much about changing the coachees, and a lot about coaches unlearning their harmful behaviors to acquire a coaching mindset.
Here are the three essences of a coaching mindset that I developed in that learning experience.
Meet people where they are, not where you wish they should be
Meeting someone where they are does not mean agreeing with their story, lowering your standards, or walking away from accountability. It means standing at their current footing and asking, implicitly: From here—not from where I wish you were—what can you see, feel, choose, and take responsibility for?
This is hard. It requires tolerating slower movement, sitting with ambiguity, and accepting that the other person may choose differently than we would. But without this genuine meeting, any attempt to develop others becomes displacement rather than growth. We end up dragging people toward our destination instead of walking alongside them toward theirs.
The shift here is subtle but profound. It moves the conversation from Parent-Child—where one person guides, rescues, or corrects—to Adult-Adult, where both people are assumed capable of sense-making, choice, and responsibility. This doesn't mean being nice, avoiding challenge, or withholding your expertise forever. It means resisting the slide, often unconscious, into roles where one person must think and the other merely complies, depends, or defends.
A mature coaching mindset also acknowledges a simple truth: sometimes, coaching is not possible. Deadlines, emotional charge, self awareness, or limited trust may be blockers to providing coaching. Ignore these can create confusion and harm the partnership between the coach and the coachee. What matters is not coaching no matter what, but knowing when you are not coaching—and being honest about it.
Believe that every person is full of resources and unlimited potential
This belief is not naive optimism. It is a deliberate stance that shapes how we show up in conversation. When we truly believe someone has the resources they need, we stop trying to fix them quickly, prove our usefulness, or reduce their ambiguity for them. We stop coaching the problem and start coaching the person.
Problem-focused conversations optimize for clarity, efficiency, and resolution. Person-focused conversations optimize for awareness, ownership, and decision-making capacity. The difference shows up in where responsibility lands at the end. Not "I'll think about this and get back to you" or "Let me fix this for you," but "What will you try?" and "What support do you need—and from whom?"
This is not abandonment. It is respect. A coaching mindset trusts that adults grow by choosing, not by being carried.
Trust the coaching
As coaches, we often feel pressure to deliver results. We want to see movement, insight, transformation. This creates a subtle urgency that can undermine everything else we're doing right.
When a session feels slow or stuck, that urgency whispers: Do something. Ask a better question. Offer a reframe. Make something happen. But acting on this urge shifts us from serving the coachee to managing our own discomfort. We start performing effectiveness rather than holding space.
Trusting the coaching means accepting that not every moment will feel productive—and that's okay. Silence is not failure. Confusion is not failure. A session where the coachee leaves without a clear action plan is not failure. Growth often happens in ways we cannot see or measure in the moment.
If nothing seems to be happening yet, let it be what it is. Trust that something will emerge. The coachee's process has its own timing, and our job is to stay present with them, not to force the pace. The moment we start pushing for results, we stop coaching and start controlling.
A coaching mindset is the practice of staying present with another person without stealing their responsibility, even when doing so would feel faster, safer, or more impressive. And this is where magic happens: people begin to grow under their own power.
