Over-Enthusiasm in Coaching

Have you noticed specifically in coaching, the widespread use of hyper-positive facial expression and vocal modulation?

There's nothing wrong with engaging with coaching clients in a different way to what one would in a social conversation. This is well recognised in related modalities,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7047748/

https://www.deltastate.edu/PDFFiles/student-success-center/academic-advising/delta-state-academic-advising-microskills.pdf.pdf

Yet there's something about coaching as a modality, that has many coaches tending towards being evangelical or charismatic in their gestures and tones, as a norm. Here are some thoughts about why this might be, and how expressions and voice modulation can appropriately enhance the value of coaching.

Coaching is not about making clients feel good, endorsing their worldview, exclusively affirming their beliefs or being supportive. It is about helping clients understand themselves, their relationships to their challenges, other people, and the world with more clarity and insight. From this, which may include a transformational experience, the client can generate more options relevant to a wider scope of scenarios. In so doing, the client may also release burdens in a cathartic experience, and feel relief, joy, presence, or peace, to name a few.

These positive and liberating experiences can not and should not be aimed to be induced by the coach however. If they occur, they are natural outcomes emerging from high quality coaching.

So what is it that has this mode of being characteristic of the coaching modality?

• Coaching too often being model and process -oriented. If the model or process is the star of the show, some coaches looking for a place to feature may hype their charisma to fill the gap. An over-reliance on structure results in the coach not having opportunity to really relate to the client. In authentic relationships, there's no putting on shows or facades. When coach and client are relating to each other fully, whatever emotions and their manifestions emerge are relevant to the moment, will change moment to moment and over the course of the relationship.
• Coaching recognised as not being therapy. One way of distinguishing coaching from therapy is to imagine therapy as working with clients from a negative value (of whatever they are experiencing) to a non-negative value; whilst coaching works with people from a positive value to a more positive value. A shallow interpretation of this is that the coach HAS to be positive, cheery and motivational. The legacy of motivational speaking and its conflation with coaching is apparent here too.
• Coaching too often having an exclusively behavioural focus. Practitioners taking a behavioural approach may not acknowledge what emerges within the relationship, and mask/compensate for this by being overly-enthusiastic.

Coaches using non-relational approaches do not necessarily default to overenthusiasm, but these approaches might give context to why the coach's mode is incongruent with the client's.

Some questions to ponder

- Am I working harder than the client to be positive?

- How do I resonate with the client's modes (feelings, gestures, thinking)?

- What is my inner process (feeling, thinking, behaviour) when a client is experiencing something difficult?

- What are my beliefs about the shadow/unconscious?

- What are my beliefs about distress?

- What are my beliefs about personal change? Where have those been challenged?

About Me. I have practiced as a coach since 2008, and as a coach supervisor since 2015. I have a background in military helicopter operations, flight instruction and leadership of the South African Air Force's formation aerobatic team.