What To Expect From Coaching

Understand what happens in coaching sessions, how coaching differs from therapy and mentoring, and what techniques coaches use to help you think more clearly about your situation.

Many people arrive at their first coaching session concerned that they will not be able to explain themselves well enough. They worry that they will not find the right words to describe what is happening in their situation, or that their thoughts are not organised enough to communicate clearly. If you recognise this concern, you can put it aside because it is not something you need to manage.

Coaching does not require you to be particularly articulate or to have worked out exactly what you want to say before you speak. What matters is that you are willing to be honest about your situation, and any decent coach will be able to work with whatever you bring to the conversation. If something you have said is not clear enough, your coach will ask questions to understand better, and if they need additional information or context, they will ask for that as well.

Something you will probably notice during coaching sessions is that when you finish speaking, your coach will pause before they respond. This happens because sometimes, in that moment of quiet, you will think of another point that matters or remember something relevant you had not yet mentioned, and the pause makes space for that to happen. However, there will also be times when you have said everything you want to say and there is genuinely nothing else to add, and that is completely fine. You do not need to add something just for the sake of filling the silence. When you have expressed what you want to say, your coach will continue the session, moving to the next question or following whatever thread seems most useful.

The way coaching works is relatively straightforward. Your coach is responsible for guiding the conversation and asking questions that help you think more clearly about the situation you are working through. Your responsibility is simpler, which is to answer honestly. You do not need to provide perfect explanations or carefully prepared responses, just straightforward honesty about what is actually happening for you.

The process is effective when you are willing to describe things as they are, even when your description comes out messy or not fully formed. Your coach will take what you have said and work with it, asking questions that help you examine your situation from different angles, clarifying the parts that are unclear, and helping you identify what matters most. They will notice patterns or contradictions that might be worth exploring, and they will challenge assumptions when that seems useful. The point is not to have everything figured out before you speak, but to use the conversation itself as a way of thinking things through more clearly than you could on your own.

How Coaching Differs from Other Approaches

People often confuse coaching with counselling, therapy, or mentoring, so it helps to understand what coaching actually is and where the boundaries lie between these different practices.

Counselling and therapy generally focus on emotional healing and processing past experiences, particularly when those experiences have caused distress or difficulty in your current life. If you are dealing with trauma, grief, mental health conditions, or deep emotional wounds, therapy is usually the appropriate route because therapists are trained to work with psychological pain and to help you process and recover from it. Coaching, on the other hand, assumes you are reasonably well-functioning and focuses on where you want to go rather than where you have been. It is forward-looking and concerned with what you want to achieve or change, not with healing past hurt.

Seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist is a clinical process that involves diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions. These professionals are medically or clinically trained to identify and treat psychological disorders, and their work is based on clinical assessment and evidence-based treatment protocols. Coaching does not diagnose anything, does not treat mental health conditions, and is not a substitute for clinical care. If you need clinical support, coaching is not the right option.

Mentoring is different again because it relies on the mentor having direct experience in your field or situation and offering advice based on what has worked for them. A mentor will typically tell you what they would do, share their knowledge, and guide you based on their own expertise. Coaching does not work this way. A coach does not need to have experience in your specific field or situation, and they will not tell you what to do or give you advice based on their own life. Instead, they work with the assumption that you already have the insight and capability to find your own answers, and their job is to help you access that through questioning and exploration.

What Coaches Actually Do

The main tool a coach uses is questioning, but not in the way you might expect. These are not questions designed to gather information for the coach's benefit, but questions that make you think differently about your situation. A good coach will ask open questions that do not have simple yes or no answers, questions that require you to reflect, examine your assumptions, and consider perspectives you might not have thought about before.

For example, rather than asking whether you think something will work, a coach might ask what would need to be true for it to work, or what you are assuming about the situation that might not actually be the case. These kinds of questions shift your thinking and help you see things more clearly. A coach will also listen carefully to what you are saying and reflect it back to you, sometimes using your exact words and sometimes rephrasing to highlight something you might not have noticed. This reflection helps you hear your own thinking from a different angle and often reveals patterns or contradictions that were not obvious when the thoughts were just in your head.

Coaches also challenge assumptions, not to be confrontational but to test whether the things you believe about your situation are actually true or whether they are limiting you unnecessarily. If you say something cannot be done, a coach might ask what makes you certain of that, or what would have to change for it to become possible. This is not about proving you wrong, but about loosening the grip of assumptions that might be holding you back without you realising it.

Another common technique is exploring different perspectives. A coach might ask you to consider how someone else involved in your situation sees things, or how you would advise a friend facing the same challenge, or what you would think about this situation if certain constraints were removed. These shifts in perspective often reveal options or insights that were hidden when you were stuck in your usual way of thinking.

Coaching also involves helping you set clear goals and holding you accountable to them. This does not mean a coach will tell you off if you have not done what you said you would do, but they will ask what got in the way, what you learned from that, and what you want to do differently going forward. The accountability is not punitive but practical, designed to help you understand your own patterns and make conscious choices about how you want to proceed.

What all of these techniques have in common is that they put the work on you. The coach is not there to solve your problems or tell you what to do. They are there to create the conditions in which you can think more clearly, see your situation more accurately, and make better decisions for yourself. This is why coaching works best when you are willing to engage honestly with the questions, even when they are uncomfortable, and when you trust that the process of thinking things through out loud with someone asking the right questions will get you somewhere useful.

To find out more about coaching with Persefone Coaching book your free discovery session. If you don't want to jump in with a video call then you can also just email: persefonecoaching@gmail.com

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