The levels of listening in coaching, and what gets in the way of the deepest one

You're forty minutes into a session on Zoom, laptop on the dining table, the sun going down over the rooftops outside your window.

Your client is talking about her mother moving in with them. The extra bedroom, the new routines, how her mother rearranges the kitchen. She says it all lightly. She even laughs once.

You're nodding. You reflect back that it sounds like a big adjustment. You ask a good question about boundaries. She answers it.

And then, about ten minutes later, you realise you've been thinking about your own mother for most of that time. The phone call you haven't returned. The way she always comments on your weight. You've been in the session, technically. You've said the right things. But you missed the moment, somewhere in the middle, when your client's voice dropped and she said, almost to herself, "I just don't know where I go now."

You heard the words. You didn't hear her.

What are the levels of listening in coaching?

Different coaching schools describe them differently. A simple way to see it is three places your attention can rest: on yourself and what you'll say next, on the client's words and their content, or on the whole person, including tone, body, energy and what they aren't saying. Coaching depth depends on which one you're in.

Coaches move between all three, often in a single session. The skill is noticing where you are, and what pulled you there.

What does each level sound like in a session?

Here are the three, described in our own words.

Listening to yourself. Your attention is mostly inside your head. You're preparing your next question while the client is still talking. You're judging how the session is going, or whether you sound competent. You're reacting to the story with your own memories, opinions or discomfort. The client can usually feel this, even if they couldn't name it. They tend to give you a tidier version of things, because tidy is what the room seems to be asking for.

Listening to the words. Your attention is on the client's content. You track the facts, follow the storyline, reflect back accurately and ask sensible follow-ups. This is good, solid coaching, and much of the practical work of a session happens here. But it stays on the surface the client has chosen to show you.

Listening to the whole person. Your attention widens. You hear the words, and also the pause before them, the laugh that doesn't match the content, the shift in the voice when a particular name comes up. You notice what the client circles around and never quite says. At this level, the most important thing in the session is often a sentence spoken almost to themselves, like "I just don't know where I go now."

ICF's 2025 Core Competencies (checked on coachingfederation.org on 4 October 2026) name this as competency 6, "Listens Actively", and describe it as focusing on "what the client is and is not saying". The sub-points include noticing the client's "emotions, energy shifts, non-verbal cues or other behaviors" and integrating "the client's words, tone of voice and body language". In other words, ICF's description points at the third level.

If you'd like to talk about where your own listening slips, Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, offers a free conversation on Zoom, and she'll tell you plainly whether we're the right fit. You can book it through our apply page. Or read on.

Why do coaches drop back to listening to themselves?

Because something in the client's story touches something in them.

In the opening scene, you didn't forget how to listen. Your client's story brushed against your own mother, and your attention went with it. In a fraction of a second, you stopped listening to the client and started listening to your own unfinished business. You kept nodding. You even asked a good question. But the deepest moment in the session went past you, because you were somewhere else.

We all have places like this. A client's grief that's too close to your own. A client's anger that sounds like someone from your childhood. A client's success that stirs something you'd rather not feel. In those moments you don't choose to stop listening. You're pulled.

This is the part that often goes missing when training starts with technique. Listening techniques assume your attention is free to place where you want it. Often it isn't. A technique is only as good as the nervous system running it, and a nervous system carrying unresolved material will keep dragging attention back to itself, especially when the session gets close to that material.

It's the same reason coaching presence can't be added on as a skill. Presence and deep listening are two views of the same thing: what's possible when nothing inside you is competing with the client for your attention.

How do you listen without your own material getting in the way?

Not by trying harder. By having less in the way.

You can practise noticing when you've drifted. You can use routines to arrive. Those help, and you should use them. But the biggest change comes from somewhere else: from the material itself losing its charge. Once you've done your own work around your mother, a client's story about a mother is just a client's story. It doesn't pull. Your attention stays where you put it, and you hear the quiet sentence in the middle.

That's why RSCI is built on the Inner Work First Principle: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. You do your own work first, inside the cohort, under supervision. The places that pull you out of a session get found and resolved in you, so your attention is free when a client needs it most. You'll still drift sometimes. Everyone does. But you'll drift less, and you'll come back faster.

If that's the part of your training that's been missing, the free conversation with Sara is the place to start. You can book it here.

How can I check my own listening after a session?

Try a five-minute body check straight after your next few sessions, practice clients included. Your body often knows where you left before your mind admits it.

1. Sit still for one minute before you write anything. Feet on the floor. Notice where in your body the session is still sitting: chest, throat, stomach, jaw.
2. Recall the moment you felt most tense. Not the hardest question. The moment your body reacted. What had the client just said?
3. Ask: whose story was I in at that moment? Theirs, or mine? Be plain with yourself. "Mine. My father." "Mine. Fear of looking incompetent."
4. Recall the moment you felt most settled. What level were you listening at then? Often it's the moment you stopped trying to be useful.
5. Write one line in your log. "Left the room at the mother story. Back after the boundaries question." Nothing more.

Over a few weeks, the log becomes a map. The same few places will keep showing up. Those aren't listening problems. They're the places your own work is waiting, and they're useful to bring to supervision or mentor coaching.

The same check is worth doing after a discovery call, where the pull to impress can quietly take over your listening, and after any session where a client cries.

What should a coach training give you so you can listen at depth?

Listening exercises are easy to find. Before you choose a training, look for three things.

1. Your own inner work, done first. Inside the training and under supervision, so the material that pulls your attention away gets resolved in you before it costs your clients.
2. Feedback on where your attention went, not only what you said. Mentor coaching and supervised practice that catch the moments you left the room, and help you see why.
3. A method for what you hear at the deepest level. When a client says the quiet sentence, you need to know what you're looking at and how to stay with it, not reach for the next technique.

That's what RSCI is built to give you. A method, the RS Method, built over twenty years of practice. A cohort where your own work comes first. And a razor that sums up what listening is for. To witness. To hold. To walk them home. You can't witness what you can't hear.

Listen to what the work can leave in a person once it has gone deep. Three years on, Marko Mladenovic described where it left him: "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?" Change of that kind starts with someone listening below the words. Those words belong to his life; they aren't a forecast for anyone else's.

If you'd like to learn to listen at that depth, start by being listened to, in a free conversation with Sara. Book it through our apply page. You can also read how the method works, and how we train it, on The Method.

Robert Simic, training the next generation.

P.S. In your next session, there'll be a moment when a client's story sounds a little like yours. You'll feel the pull before you've decided anything. If you'd like help with what's underneath that pull, book your free conversation with Sara.