Originally Posted on The Coaching Tools Company as Beyond Sessions 2: When Coaching Skill Stops Being the Problem
| This article was originally published by The Guiding Matrix and is republished on The Coaching Tools Company website with their kind permission. The article was written by Dr Steve Jeffs, and all rights remain with the original author. |
There’s a shift that happens in coaching practice that’s difficult to describe until you’ve experienced it.
It doesn’t announce itself clearly. It doesn’t arrive as failure. In fact, it often appears when the coaching itself is working. Sessions land well. Clients are engaged. Conversations are meaningful.
And yet, something feels unresolved. Not in the coaching. In the delivery.
Because the sessions are good, this tension can be easy to misinterpret. It often shows up as quiet self-doubt — a sense that you should have this figured out by now. But what’s surfacing here isn’t a lack of skill. It’s a developmental signal.
What I Hear at This Stage
When I sit with coaches at this stage, I hear a familiar set of observations.
A coach will describe sessions that feel solid — sometimes powerful. Clients are moving. Insight is happening. Then I’ll ask about the engagement as a whole, and there’s a pause.
“I’m not always sure where we are.”
“Every engagement feels different — I’m figuring it out as I go.”
“I feel like I’m carrying the entire journey in my head.”
These aren’t signs of incompetence. They’re signs that the structure needed to hold the journey hasn’t been installed yet.
Session-by-session delivery allows for responsiveness and honours what emerges. When coaching functions as occasional support, this works. The ceiling appears when you’re guiding someone through sustained transformation — when continuity across weeks starts to matter more than what happens inside any single session.
Without that structure, you have to improvise — session by session, decision by decision. That improvisation works for a time. Skill can compensate. Presence can carry things forward. But over time, improvisation becomes load.
When Coaching Skill Stops Being the Edge
When coaching skill stops being the edge, engagement leadership becomes the edge. This isn’t a failure — it’s a developmental stage with a predictable next step.
Coaching skill allows you to show up fully in the room. It gives you the ability to listen deeply, challenge thoughtfully, and stay with what’s emerging. What it doesn’t provide is clarity about the journey itself.
Skill alone doesn’t tell you what should happen before coaching formally begins, how discovery is meant to unfold across time rather than being compressed, how momentum is maintained when the work gets difficult, or when and how an engagement should move toward meaningful completion.
These aren’t coaching questions — they’re engagement leadership questions.
And for many coaches, delivery has been improvised — not because they are disorganised, but because no one taught them how to design it. This is a stage, not a failure.
The Cost of Carrying the Engagement
When a structure doesn’t exist, you become the structure.
Every decision about pacing, sequencing, and transition has to be held mentally. Each session begins with a quiet recalibration: Where are we? What’s next? What needs attention now?
Over time, this creates cognitive load that never quite eases, subtle pressure to perform in every session, difficulty articulating the value of the work beyond individual conversations, and uncertainty about whether transformation will integrate or simply fade.
Much of this effort is invisible to the client. But it’s felt by you. And when coaching is delivered this way over months or years, it doesn’t just feel effortful — it starts to feel unsustainable.
What This Tension Actually Points To
If you’re recognising yourself here, it doesn’t mean you’re behind. It means you’ve reached the point where coaching skill is no longer the bottleneck.
You can coach. You can hold presence. You can create insight. The work inside sessions is not the issue. What’s missing is a professional coaching delivery structure that allows transformation to unfold across a journey — rather than relying on you to carry everything moment by moment.
This is often the stage where structure stops feeling like a constraint and starts feeling like relief.
Who This Is For
This tension typically appears for coaches actively working with clients who feel confident in-session but sense improvisation becoming load rather than flexibility. If you’re still building coaching presence or focused on client acquisition, this likely isn’t your stage yet — and that’s fine.
Where This Leads
If this tension feels developmental rather than personal, you’re sensing what Beyond Sessions addresses. It’s a professional space where journey-level delivery becomes operational, not just conceptual. This shift from conceptual to operational benefits from freedom that is built upon structure and this is what Article 3 explores in depth.
This is part 2 of a 6 blog series helping coaches to elevate their professional impact.
Written by Dr Steve Jeffs & Erwin de Grave
