Having made the offer to coach and it being accepted, there is a powerful instinct to jump straight in and ask the coachee to identify their goal.

Goal setting is the assumed starting point of most coaching. You go to a gym and the personal trainer asks you what your goals are, in order to put together a schedule. You attend a course and you are expected to define your learning goals at the outset. You spend annual appraisal discussions setting goals based around the SMART mantra of specificity, measurability, achievability, relevance and time boundaries.

Goals are good. Goals are motivating. If you can dream it, you can achieve it , is the language of self-help manuals. The most commonly applied coaching model in UK organizations starts from goals. ^[1] Goals are important. The limitations of goals are that often they are premature. There is a pressure to be able to state the goal before both parties are clear on what the correct goal is.

When asked to state a goal early in a conversation, most people will state a goal that they think the other person will view as socially acceptable.

On day one of a course to develop skills in a particular coaching approach, I was paired with a young attractive man in his early 20s. When asked to state his goals he expressed ones linked to applying the learning to his work. Later in the week I coached him, and we returned to the issue...