Beyond Coaching Skills: What exactly are we training when we train a coach?

What Are We Really Developing in Coach Training

I have been pondering this question increasingly over the years, particularly as I have spent more time training, mentoring and supervising coaches. It is a deceptively simple question, although I have come to believe that it sits at the heart of coach education. What exactly are we training when we train a coach? At first glance the answer appears almost self-evident. We teach people coaching skills: how to listen more carefully, ask better questions, establish coaching agreements, facilitate reflection and support meaningful action. These are, after all, the observable skills that distinguish coaching from many other helping professions. Yet the longer I work in coach education, the less convinced I become that these skills alone explain why some coaching sessions are more impactful for people than others. Competence undoubtedly matters, but competence alone seems insufficient to account for the quality of certain coaching conversations.

Perhaps the answer may partially lie in the assumption that coaching is fundamentally a behavioral discipline. Much of professional education, not only in coaching but across many professions, proceeds from the belief that if we can identify the right behaviors and practice them consistently enough, expertise will eventually emerge. There is obvious wisdom in this approach. Skills require repetition. Yet behavioral competence tells us remarkably little about the quality of perception that gives rise to those behaviors. Two coaches may ask precisely the same question, and the client may experience those interventions in entirely different ways. The difference often lies in what the coach has perceived about the person, the relationship and the moment before deciding that this particular question has become possible.

The Difference Between Performing Coaching Skills and Becoming a Coach

Can we really teach coaching without simultaneously educating perception?

As a coach educator, my professional philosophy is that coach education is less about teaching interventions and more about educating perception. Before a coach decides what to say, they have already made countless largely invisible observations:

• What deserves attention?
• What can be parked?
• What can remain in the background?
• What emotional movement has just occurred?
• What assumptions am I bringing into my understanding of this client?
• Which aspects of this conversation feel obvious simply because they reflect my own experience of the world?

None of these questions can be answered through technique alone. Perception is hardly ever neutral. We observe another human being through the accumulated experiences that have shaped us over decades. As we learn to understand another person, we are simultaneously learning to recognize the lenses through which we understand them. In that sense, every coaching program is inevitably also an education in self-awareness, whether it explicitly acknowledges this or not.

Developing the Coach as a Whole Person

One of the reasons we have chosen to teach coaching through a relational, cultural and emotional lens from the very first program is that these dimensions take time to get developed and embodies. It takes more effort to add them later as optional refinements. They shape every coaching conversation from the very beginning, whether the coach notices them or not.

A coach training approach that is intentionally focused on relational, emotional and cultural lenses differs fundamentally from programs that focus primarily on competency acquisition. Competencies remain important because they provide the structure within which reflective practice can unfold. Yet competencies are not understood as the destination. They become the visible expression of something deeper that is gradually developing within the coach. Curiosity becomes less a questioning technique than a genuine orientation towards another person’s experience. Presence becomes more than sustained attention; it becomes the willingness to allow one’s own assumptions to remain provisional. Listening becomes not merely the ability to hear words accurately but the discipline of noticing what one habitually fails to hear.

This inevitably changes the role of practice within coach training. Practice is no longer simply an opportunity to demonstrate competence or receive corrective feedback. It becomes an opportunity to study oneself while coaching.

• Which clients immediately evoke confidence, and which evoke uncertainty?
• When do I begin trying to rescue?
• Which personalities invite me to become more directive than I intended?
• Which emotional expressions make me uncomfortable?
• Where do I become eager to solve rather than understand?

These observations are part of learning to coach well because, whether we acknowledge them or not, they shape every intervention we make.

Emotional and Cultural Intelligence for Coaches

The cultural dimension of this process is also important in my own thinking. Coaching borrows the language of universality, speaking as though curiosity, challenge, trust or leadership carry essentially the same meaning across contexts. As an expat living abroad for more than 16 years I see that every client enters coaching with culturally informed assumptions about authority, respect, emotion, learning, disagreement and competence. So does every coach. These assumptions are rarely problematic in themselves. Difficulties arise when they become ignored. A coach who believes they are responding simply to “the client” may in fact be responding to a client as interpreted through their own cultural expectations. Training, therefore, is not merely about developing cultural knowledge. It is about developing cultural humility — the capacity to recognize that one’s own interpretation is always partial, always situated and always open to revision through dialogue.

Coaches who become accustomed to reflecting on the question, “What cultural assumptions might both of us be bringing into this conversation?” often discover that what initially appeared to be an individual characteristic is, in fact, embedded within a much larger context. That curiosity protects the coach from one of the greatest risks in coaching: mistaking one’s own worldview for universal reality.

Listen to my podcast episode on cultural sensitivity for coaches

The same could be said of emotion. Many coaching programs quite rightly encourage emotional awareness, yet emotion is often treated primarily as something belonging to the client. Relational coach education asks a rather different question, among others.

What is happening emotionally within the coach while this conversation unfolds?

It does not mean that coaching become centred on the coach’s experience. Coach’s internal responses frequently become part of the relational field. A sudden impulse to reassure, an unexpected sense of frustration, an unusual feeling of admiration or protectiveness — these reactions need neither be suppressed nor trusted unquestioningly. They require reflection and discenrment. Over time, coaches gradually learn that their emotional experience becomes most valuable not when it is acted upon immediately, but when it is held with sufficient curiosity to become another source of inquiry.

Supervision occupies such a prominent place in our coach training programs at UpThink Coaching. Supervision is often misunderstood as quality assurance or professional support. Those functions certainly matter, but the deeper purpose is developmental. Supervision repeatedly returns the coach to the question:

What part did you play in creating the conversation you are now describing?

The coaching conversation is still all about the client. But coaches are neither detached observers nor omniscient interpreters. Coaches are also participants whose own way of relating continuously contributes what becomes possible in the space.

One of the unintended consequences of highly competency-driven education is that it can may encourage performative coaching. Learners become understandably preoccupied with doing coaching correctly. They monitor themselves continuously against behavioral indicators, worrying whether they have challenged enough, remained silent for long enough or asked sufficiently open questions. This anxiety is entirely understandable, particularly for coaches seeking professional credentials. Yet if left unexamined, it can produce conversations in which the coach is more attentive to their own performance than to the person sitting opposite them. Ironically, the pursuit of competence may temporarily interfere with genuine presence. Relational training attempts to hold both realities simultaneously: the importance of developing excellent coaching skills while gradually becoming less dependent upon performing those skills.

The Broader Impact of Becoming a More Relational Coach

This has consequences that extend far beyond coaching itself. New coaches often begin training expecting to acquire a new professional skill. Many leave recognizing that they have also become more attentive colleagues, more thoughtful leaders and, perhaps most importantly, more reflective human beings. Coach education does not aim to change people’s personalities; it is not therapy. Rather, sustained engagement with dialogue inevitably alters how one encounters difference, ambiguity and uncertainty. One becomes slower to assume, quicker to inquire and increasingly comfortable remaining in conversations that resist immediate resolution. Those qualities are not confined to the coaching room.

See what our coaching grads say about that

Benefits for Coaching Clients

The benefits for clients are long-term. People do not experience coaching as a sequence of competencies being competently delivered. They experience the quality of another person’s attention. They experience whether curiosity feels genuine or procedural, whether challenge emerges from partnership or performance, whether silence feels spacious or uncomfortable, whether disagreement remains possible without threatening the relationship. Coaches who have been educated through a relational, cultural and emotional lens are generally better equipped to recognize these subtleties because they have spent considerable time learning to observe them within themselves. Rather than relying exclusively on models, they are able to respond to the uniqueness of the relationship unfolding in front of them.

What Makes a Truly Effective Coach? Beyond Models, Frameworks and Competencies

As a coach educator, mentor and supervisor I no longer think of coach training primarily as teaching people how to coach. Of course it does that, and it should. But beneath the visible curriculum lies a more profound form of learning which asks future coaches to examine not only what they do, but how they perceive; not only how they listen, but what allows them to listen; not only how they ask questions, but what assumptions shape the questions they find possible to ask.

In the end, the most enduring outcome of coach education is not limited to the acquisition of a professional methodology at all. These qualities cannot be downloaded from a model or memorized from a competency framework. They emerge through practice, reflection, supervision and the repeated experience of discovering that becoming a coach is, in many respects, inseparable from becoming a more relational human being. It may be the gradual development of a person whose way of meeting another human being has become more discerning, more spacious and more deeply relational than it was before training began. That, at least, is the kind of coach we are inviting into the profession through our programs.

Author: Luba Diasamidze PhD, PCC

Reach out to Luba to work with her as your mentor coach or supervisor.

If you want to become skillful at working with clients’ emotions in sessions, learn more about our PCC-path Program at UpThink Coaching, Beyond the Tools: Advanced Coaching in Emotional, Intercultural & Relational Spaces