Two faces share one laptop screen, and only one of them leans toward the camera.
The couple are at their kitchen island in Jumeirah Lake Towers, with Henrike on the other end of the call. He's been offered a role in Riyadh. She wants to stay in Dubai, near her sister and the school their son has just started. They've booked six sessions to decide together, and this is the second.
He does most of the talking, and he's brought the move as a plan, with flights home every second weekend. She says very little, and when she does, she says it to her coffee cup.
Henrike, coaching from her spare room in The Springs, has drifted closer to her own screen, toward the wife's half of it. Her questions to him have got shorter. Her questions to her have got softer. Twice she's asked the wife, "And how is that for you?" She hasn't asked him once.
Then he says, quietly, "It feels like two against one in here."
Henrike's next question stops halfway. He's right, and she hadn't seen it until he said it.
None of the three is a real person; Henrike and the couple are composites.
What is relationship coaching?
Relationship coaching helps one person, or two partners together, work toward the relationship they want from here on. Couples coaching is the version with both partners in the session. It works with people who are managing their lives, it looks forward rather than back, and it doesn't diagnose or treat. That's where couples therapy comes in.
Relationship coaches often see individuals too, such as someone deciding whether to stay. The skills overlap. The second chair changes almost everything else.
A free Zoom with Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, is a mutual look: you weigh us as carefully as we weigh you. It runs twenty to forty minutes. Pick from her open times. Or read on.
Where does relationship coaching end and couples therapy begin?
At what each is for, and both deserve respect. ICF's guide for people starting out with a coach describes therapy this way: "Therapy is the space to heal, recover from past traumas, emotional pain, or dysfunctional patterns." It also says: "Both therapy and coaching have their strengths, and they can work together synergistically." (Guide to Experience Coaching, coachingfederation.org, checked on 20 October 2026.)
Couples therapists are trained health professionals. Their work can include assessing what's happening between two people and treating it, and it can reach old injuries a coach isn't trained to work with. A relationship coach works with a couple who are coping and want to move: make a decision together, talk without sliding into the old argument, plan a hard year. The history between them can come up in coaching. It just isn't what coaching sets out to repair.
A few signs, we find, suggest a couple would be better served by a couples therapist, instead of coaching or beside it:
- the same hurt reopens whatever the session is meant to be about;
- one partner is struggling to get through ordinary days;
- a betrayal or a loss is still raw;
- either of them describes something that sounds like trauma.
When you notice them, say so plainly, help the couple find a therapist, and agree together whether the coaching pauses or carries on alongside. The wider line, and the words for saying it, are in coaching vs therapy vs mentoring and when to refer a client to therapy.
One line has no grey in it at all. If abuse or danger is suspected, stop the couples work. Don't try to handle it in a session; refer to qualified support. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Why do a coach's own relationship patterns walk into every session?
Because every coach has a relationship history, and with a couple there are two people to side with. In one-to-one work, a coach's past mostly stays in the coach's chair. With two clients, it tends to pick one of them.
When Henrike was eleven, her parents separated, and for two years she rode the Sunday tram between their flats in Bremen carrying whatever needed carrying: a school report, a forgotten jumper, now and then a note in her mother's handwriting. Her father read the notes standing in the hallway and gave her a short answer to take back. On the ride home she worked out a gentler way to say it.
Nobody put the lesson of those rides into words, least of all Henrike: when two people are at odds, the one with less voice needs someone smoothing the way. Her body learned the lesson as a lean. Around whoever is saying less, she tips forward.
On the call, the lean found the wife within minutes. The husband felt it through a laptop camera and named it before Henrike did.
None of that belongs to the couple, and a relationship coach shouldn't work on anything like it with clients. A client's past, where it needs work, belongs with a therapist. Henrike's past is hers, and its place is her own training. At RSCI, trainees bring histories like hers into the cohort, where the RS Method's removal work is done on the trainee, by the people training them, under supervision.
The trainee goes first, in other words, and RSCI holds to that in one sentence: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained.
Knowing which partner you'd lean toward is useful before a conversation about training. Sara won't work on the lean during a free call. She'll look at fit and route with you, and at which programme, if either, suits you. Book Sara's free Zoom.
What training does relationship coaching need on top of a core programme?
Four layers, in this order.
A core coaching programme. Agreements, listening, presence and questions are the same skills with one client or two, and couples work leans on all of them at once. ICF-accredited coach education is built around those core skills.
Specialist learning in working with two people. Two agendas and one agreement. Staying even-handed when one partner is louder, more likeable or more like you. Working with conflict while it's happening in the room. Checking for safety before the first joint session, on the terms in the paragraph on abuse above. Specialist courses in couples work exist; check what each teaches, and how much you'll practise with someone watching.
Supervision for the sessions that come close to home. Someone experienced who can hear where you leaned, ideally before a couple names it for you.
Your own relationship history, worked on. Worked on, not just told as a story. It's often the layer left until later, and the one a couple tends to find first.
One agreement deserves its own line: before the first joint session, decide how you'll handle anything one partner tells you alone, and say it to both of them. There's one exception, and it overrides the agreement. If one partner discloses abuse to you in private, never raise it in a joint session. Stop the couples work and refer to qualified support. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
If relationships are where you want your practice to sit, choosing a coaching niche looks at building on ground you've walked yourself.
How can you find your own lean before a couple does?
Try a sentence-stem test. It takes about twenty minutes, and it works best done fast, before your more careful self catches up.
- Finish five sentences without stopping. "In a couple, the one who talks more is usually", "The partner who goes quiet is", "When one wants to move and the other doesn't, the fair thing is", "A good partner never", and "When a voice goes up, the other person should".
- Beside each one, write whose voice it is. A parent, a grandparent, an ex, a friend, a film.
- Mark every sentence that took a side. Note which kind of partner it favoured: the louder or the quieter, the one who wants to go or the one who wants to stay.
- Picture the couple you'd least like to coach. Write which partner you'd find easier to like, and in one line, why.
- Read your marked sentences aloud. Notice what your body does, whether it's a lean, a flush in the face or a pull in the stomach, and write down where.
- Before your next joint session, set one anchor. Back against the chair, both feet on the floor, the camera centred between the two of them.
- Afterwards, count your questions to each partner. If the numbers are lopsided, compare them with step 3. Henrike's count, on that call, would have told her before the husband did.
Keep the page. The next time a couple books with you, read your step 3 marks the evening before the first session.
This page is for coaches, and some readers will have finished those sentences about their own relationship rather than anyone else's. If that's where it has left you, a couples therapist or a qualified mental health professional can give you care that no coaching guide is built to give. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Is RSCI the right first step toward relationship coaching?
It can be, as the core programme your couples work stands on. We don't run a relationship or couples coaching certification, so the specialist layer comes from elsewhere. Here's what we do offer, in three parts.
- Coach education first, with ICF inside. Both programmes include ICF-accredited education: Level 1 in RS Method Coach, Level 2 in RS Method Complete. 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.
- Depth before a specialism. Among the people our training page says RSCI is for: "You already coach but know your current toolbox is too shallow." If that's where you are, the core comes before the couples.
- Room in the programme for your own history. RS Method Complete lists "Personal transformation and practitioner development" among what's included. That's the kind of place a lean like Henrike's gets looked at.
In couples work, "them" means two people at once, and neither one more than the other. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Twelve words describe one lawyer's result: years of internal conflict resolved in minutes through a deep identity shift. It's the lawyer's, entirely, and it isn't evidence about anyone else, a couple included.
Robert's free book, Why 88% of Life Coaches Fail, is a PDF of about an hour's reading. Its page lists "The structural reason 88% of coaches stall inside their first three years" among what it covers, and that hour is worth spending before you commit to any training. Request the free book.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Which partner did you side with while you read this? Hold on to the answer, and take it into the free book, which takes about an hour.