But how many coaches, would you guess, actually know how to free the human mind in front of them? How many coaches are driven to find out how much further clients can go in their own thinking before they need input from the coach? How comfortable are most coaches if the client never needs input? How many coaches can track the proportion of the client’s talk to the coach’s at about 12 to 1?

How long, would you surmise, most coaches deeply listen before they speak? Five minutes? Three? How about 30 seconds? How many coaches are truly comfortable with silence?

And how many coaches know how to set the mind free of untrue limiting assumptions -- cleanly, elegantly, and in record time?

How many coaches provide the quality of attention possible by never taking notes?

Some. But not nearly enough. Most of us accumulate knowledge, skills, models, maps, theories and inventories. We are qualified. We are, in fact, “armed for bear”. But in all of this, we often don’t know how to be with clients in such a way that they think for themselves.  We don’t actually know how to provide the conditions for them to breakthrough to insights, perspectives and strategies essential to their optimum progress, but unavailable from us.

It is just possible that the most fundamental coaching expertise -- and the most advanced -- the skill without which no coach should make a move, and from which all other skills and tools should spring is the creating of a Thinking Environment. The client’s own thinking should come first. And often, surprisingly often, it is all that is needed. In this sense, as coaches we are paradoxically essential and irrelevant.

This process is both simple and complex. There are many variants. But here is one:

Ashley had her eye on a promotion. She talked for ten minutes about the position. Then she said, “I want this job. And I am capable of doing it really well. But you should see the competition.” She paused. She looked down. I focused my attention on her, and my interest on where she might go with her thinking. I said nothing. About 30 seconds passed. She looked up. “Going for it is going to be scary.”

Again she was quiet. She looked away. Many more seconds passed. “I think that is it,” she said. “I am scared.”

I thought of questions to glean more information; questions to guide her; insights to offer;  history to explore. But instead I asked, “What more do you think, or feel, or want to say?” True to the nature of the human mind, Ashley, in the presence of that question, had many more thoughts. She talked for ten more minutes. Clarity increased.

She was quiet. She looked up, “What I want most from this session now is to prepare for the interviews. That feels terrifying. But that is what I want.”

Every coaching theory would have an approach for this moment. But I chose one to keep her thinking for herself. I asked, “What are you assuming that is keeping you from preparing for the interviews?

She knew immediately. “I am assuming that I might not get the job. Because even if I ace the interview process, they still might not choose me.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is possible that you might not get the job. But what are you assuming that causes that to stop you from preparing for the interviews?”

She thought about that. “I am assuming that if  I hold back, I can blame the failure on not going full out. That’s it. I am assuming that if I go full out and then am rejected, I will be lost.”

“Do you think it is true,” I asked, using her words exactly, “that if you don’t go full out and then are rejected, you will be lost?”

Ashley was quiet for nearly a minute. I stayed interested in where her thinking was going.

“Objectively true?.” She looked up. I said nothing. “No,” it isn’t true,” she said. “It can’t be. In fact the opposite is true. If I hold back, I will have let myself down. Then I would truly feel lost.”

“So what is the true, liberating assumption?” I asked.

“What is true,” she said, “is that if I go into full flight, I win no matter what.”

Ah, the unpredictability and eloquence of the client’s own words. And now, the most elegant thing of all (linking the liberating assumption with the session goal), the Incisive Question – again all her words. “If you knew that if you go into full flight you win no matter what, how would you prepare for the interview?”

“Oh,” she said, without hesitation, her eyes full of light and her voice energetic, “I would…”

Ideas tumbled from her.  She aced the interviews.

“I am glad I got the job,“ she said six months later. But I know that more important than getting the job was seeing for myself that full flight is winning. That opened a new world to me. I use that question still. It works many places.”

Ashley produced that result herself. My ideas for her, my other questions, my other tools paled beside the power of giving her uninterrupted attention and helping her construct the Incisive Question. Both generated the insights from inside her. It was she who found the answers. She needed me in order to do it, yes. But she needed me to be the expert in creating a Thinking Environment for her. She needed my attention and my very few, carefully targeted, questions.

She needed me to have the courage to trust her intelligence.