I had a shocker during a recent coaching session with my mentor coach, Elias Scultori. I was going on in detail about the difficult situation one of my clients is facing and, when I took a breath, Elias asked, “What if you have nothing to fix here?”

That stopped me dead in my tracks. 

I wasn’t coaching my client, I had become totally absorbed in problem solving with them—a trap coaches fall into occasionally, even after nearly eight years of leadership coaching experience. We know our job is to coach the person to enable them to more easily solve their own problems; it’s not to solve problems for them.

Yet my focus had zeroed in on the problem, and if I were to draw a mind-map of it, the problem we were focusing on would be in the center—and my client would be somewhere out on the perimeter along with me, the coach.

While the Client focuses on solving today’s issue, the Coach should keep a broader view that doesn’t leave the Client out on the perimeter.

Working with someone as a coach is a process of discovery. Some days we coaches do a better job than other days at creating the space for that. We invite our client to establish a focus for the session and ask them to define the outcome they’re seeking—an insight, a next step, a new way of looking at the issue. 

If we do a good job asking questions that are engaging and open-ended, they explore the context of the issue and gain a different view of their role. They connect the dots and choose what they want to do and who they want to be today, tomorrow, and beyond. Each time they do it, they reinforce a healthy practice of discovery and build up their problem-solving muscle.

Here the Client focuses on today’s challenge, and the Coach keeps a larger focus on the Client and their context.

In the case Elias and I were discussing, the client leader was regularly finding themselves upset, reactive, and then demoralized by a colleague’s constant critique. It can help to ask, “What strategies have you employed successfully in the past with difficult people?” But that should be a starting point only. 

Subsequent questions can broaden your field of vision and lead to a more nuanced self-understanding, opening the door to a creative discovery process that works out how you’ll move forward:  

“What’s really important to you that caused you to become so upset?” 

“What kind of leader do you want to be when you’re with others who disagree with you?”

“What’s here for you to learn?”

“What are your values?”

As you engage in answering questions like these, you naturally have new thoughts, build out your self knowledge, and choose new directions. Even without a coach, you can try this when facing any problem. Ask yourself questions that dig deeper into what you really think and why, or that require you to look at the issue from someone else’s viewpoint. 

As a creative discovery process, a good coaching session works in much the same way as a good mind-map. As the client, you establish a focal point and, with the coach’s encouragement, figuratively start drawing out your thoughts on the matter, defining ideas, options, allies, and directions, and discovering where connections might occur. 

Whether it’s a mind-map or a coaching session, it rarely unfolds in an orderly, linear, A-to-Z fashion. But as new ideas appear in a defined space or time, fresh insights and clear next steps commonly take shape, too. Above all, the client works on the problem, and as the coach, you’ll find me back in my client’s corner, helping them explore multiple angles as they decide on the best path forward for them.