Overview

You don t have to have chemistry with your client. You don t have to be best friends or dinner companions, but you must have a workable relationship in order to fulfill your coaching work. Sometimes people attempt to hide behind roles executive, parent, boss and have the power or authority of the role replace the relationship. It won t work. Roles may provide the circumstances, but only the relationship can provide the foundation.

To communicate is to enter the other, while watching ourselves carefully, to enter without usurping. . . . To usurp the other is to annul him, to prevent him from returning the gift; it is the refusal to accept his discrete word; it is to violate his inner home without allowing him to enter ours; it is the arrogance of someone who believes himself to be an entirely fecundating force and refuses to receive. The univocal gift, without reciprocity . . . is not communication, but violation.

M. F. Sciacca

In a sense, the coaching relationship is a strange topic to bring up because, as Medard Boss said earlier, we already and always have a relationship with everyone and everything we encounter, whether we are aware of it or not. Consequently, it s always the case that we do have a relationship with our potential client. The question remains, however, what is the nature of that relationship? Is it sturdy enough to sustain itself during the sometimes tumultuous events of coaching, and does it have the necessary qualities to allow...