The Space Between Questions, Where I Finally Felt Like a Coach
It's been nearly four years since I delivered my first coaching session, and today, I finally feel like a coach.
No more identity crises. No hesitation when someone asks what are you. I am a coach, and a good one at that.
The transition wasn't easy. The past twelve months especially - after leaving my C-suite identity without having fully established myself as a full-time coach who pays the bills through coaching alone. I still haven't reached that point. But something shifted recently, something quiet and undeniable. I realised I'm no longer in the void of becoming the next iteration of me. I'm no longer floating, uncertain, unanchored.
I am a coach. I can't help it.
Three moments crystallised this realisation, and each one felt like coming home.
1. Witnessing transformation
Two of my coaching clients have undergone profound transformations through our partnership, and witnessing their becoming has been one of the greatest gifts. One recently told me that initially, they wanted a teacher to just tell them what to do. But what I offered instead created the conditions for something deeper to unfold.
The process is gentle and slow. It often feels like non-doing. But through that gentle simmering, magical and transformational things happen. I don't impose answers or solutions. Instead, I bring a presence that is accepting, curious, non-judgmental. I hold the space while they question their thinking, shift their mindset, and discover what they already know but couldn't quite see yet.
This is my way of paying forward with what my own coaches have facilitated for me, both as a human and as a coach. And it creates space for my clients to move forward in a way that stretches boundaries gently, without triggering the threat response. Like coaxing a flower to bloom by creating the right conditions, rather than forcing the petals open.
2. The space between questions
I recently observed a peer group coaching session, and something deeply profound became apparent to me. Most of the session was consulting - well-meaning advice, solutions handed across the table. Only brief moments where true coaching emerged. While the group seemed satisfied, I watched what happened in those coaching moments: the air in the room changed. The possibilities expanded.
When we resist giving answers and instead hold space for them to emerge, something extraordinary happens. We move beyond the binary of "this or that," beyond even "both-and," into territory where no predetermined solutions exist and "neither-nor" can take shape. We simply listen, attune to everything present, and watch as answers no one imagined begin to surface.
It's like the difference between handing someone a map and walking the terrain with them in the dark, trusting that their eyes will adjust and they'll see what you never could. The coaching approach doesn't illuminate a path forward - it trusts that the client carries their own light, and in the spaciousness of genuine curiosity, that light grows bright enough to show the way.
3. The lost art of curious questioning
Listening to many interviews and podcasts lately, I can't help but notice how rarely hosts ask truly open and curious questions. Kudos to the guests who don't simply stop at yes or no answers and offer depth anyway.
We still learn something from closed questioning, but the knowledge is limited to where the interviewer takes us. Such a lost opportunity. The experts can only showcase a fraction of what's valuable. It's like visiting a forest but only walking the perimeter path - you miss the entire ecosystem within.
So it seems I can't help but be a coach.
If you're struggling with Christmas gift ideas, consider this: rather than another consumable item, gift yourself or a loved one the power of the coaching experience. Because it truly is an experience. No words can fully describe what emerges, it has to be felt.
But once you experience it, you too won't be able to help but look at the world and yourself in it with more curiosity, more acceptance, and more self-trust. And that, I've learned, is the most transformational gift of all.
With much love and festive cheer,
Dag
