Is your coaching happening in a bubble?

A coaching relationship can feel productive and honest and still be missing something important. If the only version of events being examined is the one built inside the coaching room, you may be working from an incomplete picture.

I once had a conversation with an associate coach that pulled me up short. We were working on the same leadership programme with different clients, and something came out in passing. His client was on the receiving end of my client’s behaviour, and it was doing a good deal of damage. My client had never mentioned it. As far as our sessions went, that part of his world didn’t exist.

He wasn’t hiding it from me. We’d built a strong relationship and he brought a lot to our sessions. But because the room felt so open, neither of us had noticed the edge on his openness; it went as far as the version of his world he chose to bring in.

Why this happens

Meaning in coaching gets made between the two people in the room. What gets named and explored is shaped by both of them, which is part of what makes coaching feel different from other professional conversations.

It carries a cost. If coach and client are making meaning together, they are also, without intending to, deciding what gets looked at. A coaching relationship with no outside reference points can become a closed system that feels coherent from the inside and isn’t accurate.

I’ve watched this happen in my own practice. Sessions that felt rich and productive, and then something arrived from outside; a 360 result, an offhand comment from a colleague. And the story we’d been building together looked rather different.

What I do about it

None of this is a reason to distrust the coaching relationship; it’s what makes any of those conversations possible. But on its own it isn’t enough.

The best coaching I’ve been part of, on either side of the conversation, has had some way of bringing the outside world in. Sometimes that’s structured stakeholder feedback. More often it’s a plain question about whose view of the situation we haven’t heard.

If your coaching exists only between you and your coach, it’s worth asking what might be true about your impact on other people that neither of you can currently see.