The sheet of A4 has two columns, and Ilario has filled only one of them.
He drew it up himself, after a one-evening introduction to coaching at a library hall in Al Nahda. The task he set himself was simple. For twenty minutes, someone he trusts would talk about a decision she was facing, whether to leave a job she'd outgrown, and he would only ask questions. Questions in the right-hand column. Everything else on the left.
The right-hand column holds four lines. The left runs to the bottom of the page. "Have you thought about a recruiter." "You could ask for a secondment." A story about his own move from Milan. A spreadsheet she might build. Two websites.
When the twenty minutes were up, she thanked him warmly and said the most useful moment was a pause near the start, when he'd briefly run out of things to say and she'd heard herself admit she'd already decided.
Ilario looks at the page for a long time. Then he writes a third heading at the top, in capitals: WHAT IS COACHING, ACTUALLY?
Ilario and his evening are composites.
What is coaching?
Coaching is a conversation, usually a series of them, in which a trained coach helps a person get clear on what they want and what's in the way, and then act on it. The client sets the agenda and keeps the decisions. The coach brings attention, questions and steadiness, not solutions.
That surprises most people who are thinking about training, because most of the skill is in what the coach doesn't do. They expect a coach to be the one with answers. In practice, as Ilario found, the answers were already in the room, and his were mostly in the way.
If you're weighing whether this is work you'd like to train for, an RS Method Master Practitioner offers a free conversation about whether RSCI suits you. The apply page gives it as "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes". Ask for the conversation. Or read on.
What does a coach actually do in the hour?
Less than you'd think, and with more care than it looks.
The coach listens for the whole of what's said. Not only the facts, but the words the client chooses, what they return to and what they skip. In Ilario's twenty minutes, the most important sentence was one his advice nearly talked over.
The coach asks questions the coach can't answer. A good coaching question opens something the client hasn't looked at yet. "What would you do if nobody needed an explanation?" is a coaching question. "Have you thought about a recruiter?" is advice with a question mark on the end.
The coach notices, and says what they notice. "You've said 'should' four times about this job and 'want' once about the other." The client decides what it means.
The coach holds the client to their own word. If someone says on Monday that they'll speak to their director by Thursday, the coach asks on Friday how it went, without judgement and without letting it slide.
The coach keeps the frame. An agreed time, an agreed focus, confidentiality and an ending. More of the work lives in that frame than most newcomers expect, right up to the last session.
What the coach doesn't do matters just as much. A coach doesn't diagnose, doesn't treat, doesn't hand over a plan and doesn't fix. When a client leaves a session with a decision, it should be theirs, made in their own words. In our experience, that's the part new coaches find hardest, because helping by fixing is what most of us were praised for.
How is coaching different from mentoring, consulting and therapy?
Each is useful. They do different jobs, and a coach needs to know which job they're doing at any moment.
Mentoring. A mentor is someone further along a road you're on, who passes on what they learned there. The value is in their experience and their judgement, and much of what they offer is advice. Coaching borrows a mentor's warmth but not their answers. The client's road may look nothing like the coach's, and the coach doesn't assume it should.
Consulting. A consultant is engaged for expertise. They study a problem and come back with a recommendation, a report or a fix, and the client pays for that answer. A coach is engaged for something else: helping the client find and own their answer. Many coaches also consult, and that's fine, as long as both of them know which hat is on. Managers meet the same tension with their own teams, as we set out in coaching skills for managers.
Therapy. Psychotherapists, psychologists and counsellors work in a health profession, with clinical training, and they can assess and treat mental health conditions and work with deep distress or trauma. That's work a coach isn't trained for. A coach works with people who are functioning in their lives and want to move. When what a client brings looks like it needs clinical care, such as low mood that has lasted for weeks or any risk of harm, the coach's job is to help them reach a doctor or a mental health professional. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
There's also no single kind of coaching. Approaches differ in what they pay attention to, and we compare four of them in coaching approaches explained. Underneath every approach sits the same hour: someone talking, and someone listening well enough for them to hear themselves.
Why is the coach the instrument?
Because the only tool in the room that's always there is the coach.
Ilario's left-hand column shows where his attention went during those twenty minutes, and most of it went to him.
Watch what happens in him when the person opposite stops talking. The silence lasts two or three seconds. In that time his jaw sets, his breath rises high in his chest, and a pressure gathers behind his breastbone that feels, to him, like being weighed and found light. Then a map comes out: options, contacts, the next three steps. The pressure eases as soon as he's talking. People thank him for the map, and it's often useful. It's also the quickest way out of the pause.
That's the sense in which the coach is the instrument. A client can't hear themselves over a coach who needs to hand over a map. Where the urge to give one comes from belongs to the coach, and it shows up in the room whether or not the coach can name it.
For a coach like Ilario, the change comes from letting go. What he sets down, in his own work, is that pressure behind the breastbone, the felt sense that a silence is an exam he's failing. A pause can then be a pause, and the map stays folded until somebody asks for it. The kind of coach he becomes is still his to discover.
Our training is ordered around exactly this, because the instrument is tuned before it's played: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained.
That free conversation is a sensible place to say out loud what your own left-hand column might hold. The question you'd be asking an RS Method Master Practitioner is whether our training is the place for you to learn to leave the map in your pocket. Find a time on the apply page.
How can you tell whether coaching suits you before you train?
Try a no-map twenty minutes. It's the exercise Ilario half ran, done on purpose. You'll need a pen, a sheet of paper and about forty minutes in all.
- Ask someone you trust for twenty minutes. Tell them you're exploring coach training and want to practise listening. Ask them to bring a real but ordinary decision, nothing painful or urgent.
- Draw two columns. Questions on the right, everything else on the left. Keep the sheet beside you, face down.
- Set one rule out loud. "For twenty minutes I'm only going to ask questions and say back what I hear. No advice." Saying it helps both of you.
- Let the first silence last. When they stop talking, count to five before you speak. Notice what your body does while you count.
- Afterwards, fill in the columns from memory. Every question on the right. Every suggestion, story and solution you offered, or nearly offered, on the left.
- Ask them one thing. "Which moment helped you think most?" Write their answer down exactly as they say it, and don't explain or defend anything.
- Read the left-hand column last. Circle any line that came out in a silence. Those circles say more about whether coaching suits you, and what training would need to work on, than a page of right answers would.
A note of care. This exercise isn't therapy or medical care, and it's no substitute for either. If the person you're practising with is in treatment or in recovery, their doctor, therapist, programme and people stay exactly where they are, along with any medication and support. If the conversation turns towards real distress, stop the exercise, listen, and suggest they see a doctor or a mental health professional.
What does RSCI train a coach to be in the room?
Three things, the first two in our method page's own words.
- A seat that doesn't flinch. The method page describes what the training produces as "A practitioner whose presence does the work." The questions matter. What holds them up is the coach.
- Someone who can stay when it gets hard. In the same section, the page puts it as "Someone who can sit with what arrives and not flinch." That's the opposite of Ilario's map, and it's trained, not wished for. Both programmes include supervised practice, so the staying is learned with someone watching.
- A clear ICF route. RS Method Coach includes the ICF Level 1 education pathway, toward the ACC. RS Method Complete includes Level 2. 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.
However the hour is spent, the coach's part comes down to our razor. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Mais Mohammed, filmed in her own words: "The best decision I took for myself in my entire life."
The way we train coaches to hold an hour like Ilario's is set out on The Method.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Ilario's best moment was the pause he didn't mean to leave. For the method built around pauses like that, read The Method.