The client's picture freezes on a half-blink, her mouth still open around a word she hasn't said.
For four seconds there's a spinning circle, and a woman at a kitchen table in Mizhar, stopped mid-thought. Then the sound catches up all at once, a little too fast, and she has finished the sentence and is looking straight into her camera.
"Did you get that?"
Ingeborg didn't. She also knows where her eyes were when the picture stopped, because it's where they'd been for most of the session: on the small square in the corner of her screen, where her own face sits, nodding, making sure it looks interested.
"Sorry, the line went," she says, which is true, and she asks her client to say it again. The second version is tidier. Whatever nearly came out the first time doesn't come out at all.
Both women are composites. In our experience, the square in the corner trips up more new online coaches than the connection does.
What is online coaching, and does it work as well as a room?
Online coaching is coaching over video or a call instead of in a shared room. The agreement, the questions and the attention stay the same. What changes is how much of the client a coach can see, and what has to be said aloud. In our experience, it works well when the coach adjusts for that.
Plenty of the coaches we know now do much of their work this way, and some senior clients ask for it first, because a screen fits a diary that a meeting room doesn't. A room would carry a lot of the session on its own; online, more of it has to be said. So the useful question for a new coach isn't whether to coach online. It's what to do differently when you do.
Planning a practice that will live mostly on screen? The craft behind it is worth choosing a training for, and a free call with an RS Method Master Coach from our team is where to weigh whether RSCI should be that training. Its length, in the apply page's words: "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes". Ask for a free call. Or read on.
What does a screen take out of a session, and what does it leave?
It takes more than people expect, and less than they fear.
What goes. Most of the body, for a start. You see a face and a pair of shoulders, so a foot that starts tapping or hands that go still in a lap never reach you. The room goes too: the arriving, the sitting down, the walk to the lift afterwards, where in our experience clients often say the important thing. And silence changes character. With even a slight delay, a pause can mean thinking or a frozen picture, and a client who isn't sure which will often fill it.
What stays. The voice, which carries more than most coaches notice until the picture is gone. The client's exact words. The face, closer than it would be across a table. Your attention, which shows in the timing of what you say next. And the agreement, which matters more online, not less.
There's one more thing a screen keeps that a room doesn't: the client's own setting. They're often at home, or in a parked car, or in an office with a glass wall. That can make a session feel closer. It can also mean someone is in the next room, and the client edits every sentence for them.
How you were trained is a separate question from how you'll coach. If you're weighing the formats of coach training itself, we've compared them in online or in-person life coach training.
How does presence come through on video?
Through small habits, kept every session, more than through anything technical.
Say what a room would show. In a room, a client can see you're still with them during a silence. Online they can't always tell. Early in a first session, say it once: "If I go quiet, I'm thinking with you, not frozen. Take all the time you need." Then the silences can do their work.
Ask for what the camera misses. You can't see the hands, so ask. "Where are you sitting right now?" "What do you notice as you say that?" Clients often tell you more in answer than you'd have seen.
Slow down your turn-taking. A small lag makes people talk over each other, and the client usually gives way. Leave a beat longer than feels natural before you speak, and the client keeps the floor.
Look at the person, not at yourself. Check your framing before the session, then hide your own picture if your video software lets you, or cover that corner of the screen. A coach watching their own face is, for those seconds, coaching themselves.
That last habit sounds easy. For some coaches it's the hardest one on the list.
Why does the coach's own face get in the way?
Ingeborg couldn't tell you when the checking began. She only knows it runs without her. The moment a client's words come close to something real, her eyes slide to the small square, the way a hand pats a pocket for keys that are already there. Nothing in the square needs her. She checks anyway, and for those seconds she's coaching herself, not the woman at the kitchen table.
In a room the pull mostly goes unnoticed, because nobody puts a mirror on the table. Online, every session comes with one, and the pull finds it every time.
A pull like that lives in the coach, not in the screen, and it's in the coach that it can be cleared at the root. Once it's gone, her eyes rest on her client because nothing in her is waiting to be checked.
A coach's own reflexes are where RSCI starts, in the words of the principle we train by: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. For an online coach, that can be as small as where the eyes go.
A habit like Ingeborg's is worth raising before you settle on a training. That choice, whether RSCI fits the practice you're planning, is what the free call is for. Pick a call time.
How do you set up an online coaching session well?
Agree the screen before you need it. Most of what goes wrong online is something nobody said in the first session: where the client will sit, who can hear, what happens when the line drops. Put the answers in your coaching agreement, not only in your head.
Keep the records side simple. Notes go on a device only you use. Nothing is recorded unless the client has agreed in advance, and you delete what your agreement says you'll delete. The rest is in how we'd set up a one-person practice. Privacy rules differ from one country to the next and change over time, so treat this as general guidance, not legal advice.
One word on scope before the steps. Coaching on a screen is still coaching, so it isn't therapy or medical care, and it replaces neither. A client who's being treated for anything, or who's in recovery, keeps their doctor, their recovery programme and their support, and a video session sits beside all of that.
Then try a screen check before each new client. Allow ten minutes the first time and two after that.
- See yourself from the client's side once. Join a test call from a second device, or ask someone you trust to join, and look at what they'll see: light, background, sound, how close you are.
- Frame, then look away from yourself. Set the camera near eye level, check the framing, then hide your own picture or cover that corner.
- Agree the drop plan in the first minute. "If we lose each other, I'll ring your phone within a minute." Have the number written down before you start.
- Ask about privacy, without assuming. "Can anyone hear you where you are? Would headphones help?" If the answer is uncertain, offer to move the session rather than carry on.
- Agree a word for interruptions. Something short, such as "pause", that lets the client stop the session for a moment without explaining why.
- Say what your silences mean. Once, early. Then let the silences run.
- End more slowly than the software does. Leave a minute without an agenda at the close, and let the client leave the call first.
Afterwards, write one line: where your eyes went during the moment that mattered most. Over a few weeks, that line says more about your online presence than any equipment list.
What should training give a coach who'll work mostly online?
It needs three things, and each of them is part of RSCI's two programmes.
- Your own habits, looked at before a client's. Among what RS Method Coach includes, our training page lists a "Personal inner-work component". Habits like Ingeborg's belong to that work, long before a client is on the far side of your screen.
- Study on your own time, with live practice alongside it. In the page's words, "The training combines self-paced online study with live practitioner training and supervised application." RS Method Coach includes two days of live practitioner training, and RS Method Complete includes five days of live training in Dubai.
- ICF education built in. ICF Level 1 education comes inside RS Method Coach and leads toward the ACC. RS Method Complete carries Level 2, which leads toward the ACC or, with more coaching hours behind you, the PCC. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
On the page, RS Method Coach is listed at AED 18,000 and RS Method Complete at AED 35,000, each with ICF education included.
Our standard for a coach is the same in every session. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Talya Whitaker, on her own RS Method experience: "There are no words for how this has changed my life, changed every cell of my being."
Each programme's modules, live days and supervised practice are listed in full at life coach training.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Most screens give a coach a mirror, wanted or not. What each of our programmes asks of the person behind the camera is laid out on our life coach training page.