The client asks it in the third minute, kindly, the way someone asks about the weather.
"So how long have you been doing this?"
Lindiwe hears herself answer for most of two minutes. The training modules. The supervised hours. The workshop she flew to in her first month. The three books she's read on presence, and a sentence about how coaching is really about listening. The client, a finance director nearly twenty years older than her, nods at every item and says, "Great."
For the rest of the hour she's somewhere slightly above the conversation, checking how it's going. When he says something about his brother that his voice doesn't expect, she's busy deciding whether her last question sounded experienced enough, and the moment passes without either of them going near it.
Afterwards she sits in her car in the building's basement and types a message offering him a refund for the session. She reads it four times, and doesn't send it.
Lindiwe is a composite. The message in her drafts folder is more common than most new coaches would guess.
Why do so many new coaches feel like imposters?
Because a new coach is new, and the doubt knows it. In the first months you're doing something you haven't yet done many times, with people trusting you with things that matter. Some doubt is simply accurate. In our experience, the harder part is a second layer underneath, older than coaching, that turns "I'm new" into "I'll be found out".
The phrase imposter syndrome is an everyday name for that, not a diagnosis. And the useful question isn't how to make the doubt disappear. It's what the doubt is doing, and whether it's running your sessions.
If you're still choosing where to train, and wondering how a programme would handle this part of you, that question can go to an RS Method Master Practitioner on a free call. Going by the apply page, it lasts "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes". Ask for the call. Or read on.
What is the doubt actually guarding?
Look at what Lindiwe's two minutes did. They didn't inform the client. He'd asked a light question and would have been content with a light answer. They protected her. Every item on the list was a sandbag against the moment someone decides she isn't good enough.
In our experience, a new coach's doubt usually guards one of three things.
Being seen as not enough. This is the one Lindiwe met. It shows up as over-explaining, a long answer to a short question, a training certificate mentioned without being asked about.
Getting it wrong for someone. This one makes a coach careful in the wrong places. They steer away from anything that might go deep, because deep is where a mistake would matter.
Being found out by the client's own expertise. A coach meets a surgeon, a founder, a judge, and quietly assumes the client can see through them. So they ask clever questions instead of simple ones, to keep up.
Each of these protects the coach. None of them helps the client. And they all move the coach's attention to the same place: away from the person in the chair and onto the coach's own performance. Once that happens, sessions tend to get busier and shallower at the same time. Clever questions are often a sign of it; we look at what that does to questioning in powerful coaching questions.
Which part of "who am I to coach?" deserves a hearing?
The accurate part.
A coach in their first year really doesn't know what a coach in their tenth year knows. That's no flaw. It's a fact that belongs in how you work: in clear agreements, in supervision, in referring a client on when what they bring needs a different kind of help, in saying "I don't know" when you don't. Doubt of that kind keeps a new coach humble, and it makes them safer to work with.
The other part asks a different question. It isn't "what don't I know yet?" It's "what will happen when they see me?" You can tell it apart from the first by what it makes you do. The accurate doubt makes you ask for supervision. The older doubt makes you perform.
New coaches often collect qualifications and labels to answer the second voice, and it rarely works, because the voice was never really asking about qualifications. We looked at that habit, and at how to tell a method from a label, in coaching approaches explained.
So the aim isn't confidence. A confident coach can still be performing. The aim is a coach who can feel unsure and still stay with the client, because the unsureness no longer needs managing in the middle of the session.
Where does a coach's doubt come from?
Rarely from a shortage of hours. In Lindiwe's case it shows up as something she does without noticing.
Watch Lindiwe closely and you'll see she's listening for something while she coaches. The moment a client starts relying on her, part of her attention turns toward the edge of the room, as if someone more qualified were about to walk in, sit down beside her and take over. Nobody ever does. She keeps listening anyway.
That listening explains both halves of her afternoon. The two-minute answer is her getting her credentials in before the newcomer arrives. The refund message in the basement is her handing the session back before anyone asks for it. Neither one is about the finance director. Both are about the footsteps she keeps expecting.
That kind of listening belongs to the coach's own material. It doesn't belong in a client's hour, and a client can't be asked to work around it. The finance director deserves a coach whose attention stays on what he's just said about his brother.
That's the reasoning behind a principle RSCI holds to with every trainee: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. In practice, trainees go through the work themselves first, and learn from the inside what it's like to be listened to by someone who isn't listening for anything else.
If a sound like that runs through your own sessions, it's a reasonable thing to raise on the free call with an RS Method Master Practitioner. The call itself covers one thing: whether RSCI suits you as a place to train. Request your call.
What can you do when the doubt turns up in a session?
Try this across your next five sessions, paid or practice. It takes a few minutes before each session and a few minutes after.
A word first. This practice isn't therapy or medical care. If you're working with a doctor or therapist, keep going with them, and if you're in recovery, your programme and the people supporting you stay where they are. If the doubt comes with weeks of low mood, poor sleep or dread that won't lift, please talk to a doctor; that's beyond what a coaching practice is for. You can stop at any step.
- Before the session, write a short, true answer to "How long have you been coaching?" Two sentences at most: how long, what training, and any supervision or mentor coaching you actually have in place. Then stop writing.
- Notice the pull to add to it. If you feel a third sentence coming, write down what it would have said. That sentence shows you what your doubt is guarding.
- In the session, watch for the moment your attention leaves the client. Typical signs: composing your next question while they're still talking, checking how the session is going, wanting to sound experienced.
- When you catch it, go back to the last thing the client said. Not the last thing you meant to say. Their words, or their pause. Ask about that, simply.
- Afterwards, mark each moment you went into proving. Just the moment, and what the client was saying just before it.
- Say your two-sentence answer aloud before each of the next sessions. If it still pulls a third sentence, notice whether the pull is stronger or weaker than last time, and with which kind of client.
- Bring the marked moments to your supervisor or mentor coach. Let someone else help you read them, rather than deciding alone what they say about you.
In our experience, the short answer from step 1 lands better with clients than any longer one. Most clients ask the question to be polite. A calm answer tells them more about you than a list does.
How does RSCI train a coach to sit with the doubt?
Three parts of how RSCI trains bear on this kind of doubt.
- Your own material comes first. Our method page puts it directly: "The cohort surfaces your own unresolved material." Whatever turns "I'm new" into "I'll be found out" gets attention in your own training, before any client depends on your attention.
- Practice that gets watched. Our training page lists "Hands-on work and supervised practice" in RS Method Coach and "Advanced supervised practice" in RS Method Complete. The moment your attention drifts to yourself becomes something a supervisor can see and name, not something you have to catch alone.
- An ICF route without inflation. RS Method Coach includes ICF Level 1 education, toward the ACC. RS Method Complete includes Level 2, toward the PCC, and it can also support an ACC application first. 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.
None of the coach's doubts change what the coach is there to do. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Marko Mladenovic, on the RS Method: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state. I feel like I have finally found the answers on my question, Who am I?"
How RSCI trains the practitioner before the practice is set out on The Method.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Plenty of new coaches have a message to a client they wrote after a hard session and never sent. If you have one, The Method shows how RSCI trains the person who wrote it.