I spent last weekend in an ancient Chinese village with my children. One of the photos that I took on that day reminded me about one of the important coaching skills – the ability to move fluidly between zooming in and zooming out in sessions.
Between exploring the smallest details of client’s experience and stepping back to see the bigger picture. Between listening to what is happening in this particular moment and noticing how it connects to the larger story of the person’s life, relationships, or ways of being.
It goes beyond occasionally asking, “What is the bigger picture here?” It’s about developing the capacity to listen at different levels simultaneously, to recognize when a particular detail deserves our attention, when we are getting lost in details, and when a broader perspective might reveal something that neither the coach nor the client has noticed yet.
Sometimes the most important thing a coach can do is zoom in.
Zooming in means paying attention to a single word, a hesitation, a change in tone, or an emotional reaction that seems disproportionate to what the client is describing. It may also mean staying with one experience long enough for the client to discover something they have never quite articulated before.
A client might say, “I always struggle to stand up for myself in meetings.” We could explore this as a general pattern, looking at their beliefs about authority, their relationships with colleagues, or their confidence as a leader. But what happens if we slow down and explore one particular moment?
- What exactly happened in that meeting?
- What did the client notice when someone interrupted them?
- What was their immediate reaction?
- What did they want to say but didn’t?
- What happened in the few seconds between having the impulse to speak and deciding to remain silent?
Something that initially sounded like a familiar issue may become much more nuanced. Perhaps the client isn’t afraid of speaking up at all. Perhaps they are highly sensitive to shifts in relational dynamics and instinctively prioritize maintaining connection over expressing disagreement. Or perhaps they experience a momentary loss of clarity when challenged, which they later interpret as a lack of confidence. These distinctions matter, and we might never discover them if we stay at the level of generalizations.
There is also a danger in staying too close for too long.
We can become so absorbed in unpacking an incident, exploring emotions, examining assumptions, and following every emerging thread that we lose sight of the larger context. The coaching conversation becomes rich in detail, but the client may struggle to understand what all these discoveries mean for them. This is where zooming out becomes valuable.
- What does this experience tell us about how the client tends to navigate relationships?
- Where else does something similar happen?
- How does this situation connect to what they are trying to achieve as a leader?
- What might become visible if we looked at the situation from the perspective of the entire team? The perspective of the organization, or even the client’s longer-term development?
A client might spend twenty minutes exploring a difficult conversation with a colleague. When we zoom out, they may realize that the real issue is a recurring tendency to take responsibility for other people’s emotional reactions. Suddenly, the conversation opens up a much broader exploration of boundaries, responsibility, and the client’s relationship with conflict.
There are many other dimensions to this movement.
We can zoom in on what the client is thinking and zoom out to explore how their thinking is shaped by the environment in which they operate. Another thing we can do is to examine a particular decision and then consider how it fits into their larger system of values and priorities. We can choose to explore a moment of emotional discomfort and then step back to notice how the client typically responds to vulnerability or uncertainty.
We can also move between the individual and the system. A leader may describe frustration with an employee who repeatedly fails to take initiative. Zooming in might help us understand exactly how the leader communicates expectations, responds to mistakes, or intervenes when things go wrong. Zooming out might reveal a wider organizational culture in which initiative is encouraged rhetorically but punished in practice. Both perspectives are necessary, because focusing exclusively on the individual can lead us to personalize systemic problems, while focusing exclusively on the system can obscure the client’s own contribution to what is happening.
There is another dimension that may show up when we coach relationally: moving between the client’s story and what is happening in the coaching relationship itself.
Sometimes the pattern we are discussing is also unfolding between the coach and the client.
We might be exploring how a client experiences pressure to meet other people’s expectations, while simultaneously noticing that they seem very concerned about giving us the “right” answers. Another example: we might hear a client describe how difficult it is to disagree with authority figures, while noticing that they readily agree with every observation we offer. In such situations the coach’s awareness of their own experience becomes especially valuable.
- What am I noticing in our interaction?
- Am I being pulled into a particular role?
- Am I becoming unusually directive, protective, impatient, or eager to help?
- Could something in our relationship offer another perspective on the client’s experience?
Of course, noticing something doesn’t automatically mean we should bring it into the conversation. We need the sensitivity to recognize what might be useful, what the relationship can hold, and whether the client is ready or interested in exploring it.
Zooming in and zooming out are not necessarily sequential activities.
An experienced coach may be listening to the details of a particular story while simultaneously holding several wider perspectives: the client’s stated goal, recurring relational patterns, emotional themes, systemic influences, and what is happening between the coach and client in the present moment.
The challenge is deciding where to direct attention and when to shift it. This is where I see an important difference between following a coaching process and developing genuine coaching presence. We can learn techniques for exploring details, identifying patterns, or shifting perspectives. The capacity to move between these levels with sensitivity requires something more: perceptiveness, tolerance for uncertainty, emotional attunement, and the ability to hold complexity without rushing to organize it into a neat explanation.
Sometimes zooming in on one seemingly insignificant moment opens up an entirely new understanding of the client’s larger experience. And sometimes zooming out allows us to recognize which tiny detail was important all along. The movement can go in either direction. A detail can reveal a pattern, and a pattern can change the meaning of a detail.
Coaches need to become aware of their own habitual preferences.
Some of us naturally gravitate toward detail, emotional nuance, and deep exploration of individual experiences. Others are more comfortable identifying patterns, making connections, and exploring broader perspectives. Neither tendency is inherently better, but either can become limiting when it turns into our default (and predominant) way of working.
A coach who overuses zooming out may move too quickly toward interpretations and miss the richness of the client’s immediate experience. A coach who consistently zooms in may facilitate profound moments of insight without helping the client connect those discoveries to the wider context of their life and work.
Sometimes our preference is less about what the client needs and more about where we, as coaches, feel comfortable. We may zoom out because staying with intense emotions makes us uneasy. Sometimes a coach may keep exploring details because stepping back would require them to tolerate ambiguity and acknowledge that they don’t yet understand the larger picture.
Coaching supervision is so valuable here! It gives us an opportunity to examine not only what we noticed in a session, but also what we repeatedly overlooked, where our attention naturally went, and what might have influenced those choices.
The ability to create a fluid flow between zooming in and zooming out is an important aspect of coaching maturity. It requires us to develop range in our attention, flexibility in our interventions, and the judgment to recognize what kind of exploration might serve the client at a particular moment.
There are many dimensions of the depth of a coaching conversation, and to me one of them is how well we help clients move between different levels of awareness, making connections that allow them to understand both their immediate experience and the larger context in which it takes place.
This article is part of our ICF-aligned coach training resources for coaches developing coaching skills and professional coaching practice. It explores unlearning as a foundational process in coach training and ICF coach training, particularly for coaches working toward an ICF credential or deepening their coaching mindset beyond techniques.
Additional resource: Episode 6 “Global Listening” of our Coaching with Confidence and Care podcast. If you enjoy podcasts and want to hear more professional insights and practical examples, you can listen to the full episode here