How does coaching actually work?

Good coaching can be a game changer. It can be the difference between a constant state of stress vs. a state of energised optimism; a feeling of being stuck vs. a sense of clarity and direction; or decision-making based on self-doubt and fear vs. confidence. It can also be the key to navigating practical challenges — strained relationships, important business decisions, difficult conversations; or developing new skills — leadership, communication, giving feedback etc. But how can all this change happen? How does coaching actually work? It seems so simple, is there more to the story? I set out to answer all of these questions.

To determine how coaching works, you’ve first got to look at what it is that people actually want to get from it — ultimately that’s the measure of success. I’ll group the intended outcomes I often see into three categories:

1. Situational — these are sometimes the more ‘practical’ challenges that a coaching client might want to work through — strained relationships, providing tough feedback to an employee, making key business decisions etc. Often this is the area where you might see the quickest progress as there are real world situations that need to be dealt with. I think about this as the most shallow level of change.
2. Skills-based — this is sometimes an extension of (1). I don’t just want to navigate this one situation of giving tough feedback, I want to become skilled at giving feedback in general. Practice makes perfect, so navigating situational challenges is a sure fire way to start developing a skill, but you need to go deeper to internalise the key learnings and be able to generalise, hence I think about skills-based change as a level deeper than situational.
3. Mindset — mindset is really the deepest but most profound level of change. You might be navigating situations with ease, and building generalised skills, but if that doesn’t convert into actually feeling better then what’s the point? Common mindset challenges I see include things like: ‘I’m my own biggest critic’; ‘I just feel stressed and anxious all of the time’; ‘I struggle to feel optimistic’; ‘I hate conflict’; ‘people are always looking to me for answers. Sometimes I just don’t have them’; ‘I’m burnt out.’

So with those three categories of outcomes in mind, let’s explore what actually happens in coaching.

Coaching provides people with dedicated space and time for thinking and introspection. I had a client once refer to this as her ‘clean time’. This ‘clean time’ provides the opportunity to think and process information a little differently compared to our defaults.

It allows us to verbalise the thoughts going round in our heads, which prompts a process of sense-making — the German writer Heinrich von Kleist wrote that we usually hold an abstract beginning of a thought, but active speech helps to turn the obscure thought into a whole idea. Writing can be an alternative approach here, but people tend to feel less free to simply write in unstructured ways, whilst speech gives them that freedom. So the verbal sense-making process is a key way to gain clarity of thought.

It provides a low stress, low cortisol atmosphere that allows us to do our best creative thinking — a meta analysis of the scientific literature on stress, highlights the evidence that stress negatively impacts our ‘cognitive flexibility’, which in turn makes it harder for us to solve our own problems, whilst low stress allows us to do our most creative thinking. It might be one reason why you so often come up with an answer to a tough challenge on a walk or in the shower.

Open, expansive questions provoke expansive thought — like peeling an onion, it’s often possible to observe the different layers of a client’s thinking unfolding as they explore something further and from different perspectives.

It helps us to identify our blindspots in the way we process the world — a coach can help to join the dots so that a client develops a greater awareness of how they’re processing the world, where their biases and blindspots lie, and how that might be impacting their thoughts, feelings and actions.

It allows us to explore what’s possible, free from judgment — it’s rare to have a space, even amongst close friends and family, in which you truly feel that you can explore freely and voice what’s on your mind, without fear of repercussions or judgment.

It creates accountability for action — although talk is good, action is what matters. It’s no good saying you’re going to do things if you consistently fail to put them into practice. A Coach can become an accountability partner, helping you to keep yourself on track. One study showed that having this kind of accountability partner increased participants chances of successfully doing the thing they said they were going to do from 65% (when they simply publicly declared their intention) to 95%.

It creates awareness that enables us to start breaking old patterns — with a greater awareness around how we’re processing the world, we can start to break longer term patterns. Imagine sledding on a snowy hill. The first time you sled down the hill then you can take almost any route. The more you sled down it, the more a track begins to appear that guides you down the hill. Eventually, it becomes almost impossible to get down the hill without following that same path. Awareness, in this analogy, is like fresh snowfall that allows us to pick a new path once more.

All of these things combined can be incredibly powerful in creating change, but what happens if we delve a bit deeper into the inner workings of the brain.

Some important scientific truths

To understand how coaching can aid that deepest level of mindset change, it’s important to acknowledge how the brain works, and how that shapes how we think, feel and act:

• Our brain is the control centre — this seems obvious to say but our brain is the control centre for our thoughts, feelings and actions, and it’s shaped by a mixture of nature and nurture — our genes, brain chemistry, upbringing, culture, life experiences etc.
• Our brains change over time in response to the stimuli they are exposed to — the concept of neuroplasticity explains how the wiring of our brain changes over time. For example, they’ve tested the brains of London taxi drivers preparing for ‘the knowledge’ — a test in which they have to be able to navigate between any two places in London without using a map or any technology — and have shown how the size of the hippocampus expands over time to optimise for this newfound talent. This plasticity is a double-edged sword — on the one hand it means we can change a lot about how we think, feel and act over time; on the other hand it means that too much exposure to the wrong stimuli can lead our brains to adapt and optimise for things that are unhelpful, such as negative thought patterns for example.
• We don’t process the world as accurately as we think — we like to think of ourselves as rational, good judges of reality, but the truth is that we contain all sorts of biases and inaccuracies in the way we process things. Even something as basic as the image below — looking at the vertical lines only, which line is longer, A or B? The answer is that they’re exactly the same length (measure if you don’t believe me) but we just don’t process that accurately. Remember the blue dress/gold dress debate online? This inaccuracy in the way we process things can play out in trivial ways, like this example, or in much larger ways — I wrote previously about how our brains tend to overindex on the negative here.

A and B are exactly the same length. Feel free to measure if you don’t believe me!

So if we accept these truths: that the brain is the control centre; that it changes over time in response to stimuli; and that it processes the world far less accurately than we think; then we can start to understand the potential for mindset change through coaching — by bringing awareness to what our brain processes, how it processes, and starting to influence what we internalise.

There are yet to be any coaching-specific longitudinal studies that look at long-term brain changes, but there is some compelling meta analysis from the world of therapy, showing the changes in the brain’s circuitry as a result of talk therapy. Given the similarity between certain elements of coaching and therapy, it suggests to me that if a study were done, then similar effects might be observed, which would explain the how behind the deepest level mindset change.

So coaching is definitely more complex than it might first appear. It creates a level of awareness that is the perfect agent for change at different levels, from the shallower situational, through to the deeper level mindset change. When we explore some of the inner workings of the brain then there are clues to help us understand the true depth of change that might be occurring and how that happens. All of this helps us to understand how coaching actually works.