Should we challenge our coachees?

Coaching requires a relationship in which a person can speak with sufficient freedom about uncertainty, conflict, disappointment, or ambition, while also encountering questions and observations that widen their understanding of the situation. I understand support and challenge as two dimensions of this relationship, each of which requires attention to the other. Support establishes trust and reduces the fear that a person will be judged for their present position. Challenge brings attention to assumptions, repetitions, and discrepancies that may otherwise remain outside awareness. The quality of coaching depends partly on how these dimensions are held together over time (Day 2021).

Support as a relational condition

Support includes careful listening, empathy, and a serious interest in the coachee’s own experience. It gives the person grounds to speak before they have arranged their account into a coherent narrative, and it allows uncertainty to appear without immediately becoming a problem to solve. In this sense, support is part of the epistemological basis of coaching: the coach can only understand a person’s situation through what the person is able and willing to articulate.

Such support also has a regulating function. People enter coaching with different histories of evaluation, authority, and exposure. Someone who has frequently been overlooked may find sustained attention unexpectedly difficult. Someone who has learned to adapt to expectations may need time before they can identify what they themselves want. A reliable coaching relationship can create the conditions in which these patterns become available for examination.

Yet support alone can leave certain patterns untouched. A coachee may return repeatedly to the same account of a difficulty, describe the same obstacle in each session, and remain unable to connect this narrative with their own role in maintaining the situation. This is not necessarily resistance in a narrow psychological sense. Repetition can protect a person from an insight whose implications feel demanding, from a decision that carries risk, or from a conflict that has long been postponed. It also indicates that the coaching process may need a different form of attention.

Challenge as an intervention

I understand challenge as a deliberate intervention that invites the coachee to examine aspects of their experience that have become habitual, vague, or protected from scrutiny. It can involve naming a discrepancy between a stated aim and a recurring pattern of action. It can involve reflecting back the force of a word such as “must” or “should,” or asking what assumptions support a conclusion that appears self-evident. It can also involve drawing attention to an avoided subject that becomes visible through pauses, changes of tone, or persistent detours in the conversation.

Challenge therefore concerns awareness before it concerns action. It invites the coachee to examine how they interpret their situation, how they organise responsibility, and how their previous experience enters into present decisions. The coach may ask: “You have described this objective several times. How do you understand the fact that it has not yet moved?” Or: “You say that this decision is impossible. What makes it appear impossible from where you stand?” Such questions have an edge, especially when they touch material that the coachee has organised their life around avoiding. Their purpose is to make reflection more precise.

The form and intensity of a challenging intervention require careful calibration. Laurent Daloz’s (1986) observation that what counts as support for one person may be experienced as challenge by another is important here. Silence may be unsettling for someone accustomed to urgent responses. Direct feedback may be relieving for someone who has been surrounded by vagueness. A coach therefore needs to attend to the particular relational history of the person in front of them, as well as to the immediate effects of an intervention.

Beyond collusion

The language of non-directivity has an important place in coaching, especially because it protects the coachee’s authority over their own life and prevents the coach from turning the conversation into instruction. Yet a rigid interpretation of non-directivity can produce forms of collusion. The coach may remain so closely aligned with the coachee’s existing worldview that no alternative perspective enters the conversation. The coachee receives confirmation of what they already know and may leave with little additional capacity to understand the pattern in which they are caught.

There is also a question of relevance. A stated goal can be genuine and still function as a safe substitute for a more difficult issue. A coachee may want to improve a particular professional skill while repeatedly describing an unaddressed relationship with authority, fear of visibility, or exhaustion that shapes every attempt to move forward. The coach does not decide what the “real” issue is. They can, however, notice when the conversation becomes disconnected from the conditions that appear to organise the coachee’s difficulty and invite a more searching inquiry.

This requires a systemic orientation. Individual decisions unfold within workplaces, families, economic conditions, and forms of social expectation. Challenge should never become a demand that the coachee take responsibility for structures over which they have little influence. At the same time, systemic awareness can become immobilising when it leaves no room for questions about participation, choice, or response. The coaching task involves tracing these relations with care: where are the relevant constraints, and where does the coachee retain possibilities for movement?

A non-antagonistic practice

I would distinguish challenging coaching clearly from the adversarial model of argument. The aim is not to expose the coachee’s error or to demonstrate the coach’s superior understanding. This would damage the trust on which the work depends and would reproduce familiar experiences of judgement for many people. Challenge remains in service of the coachee’s own inquiry, even when it introduces discomfort or disagreement.

The coach must therefore be able to explain the basis of a challenging observation and remain open to correction. A coachee may respond, “That is not how I see it,” and this response can itself become useful material for further exploration. The challenge was not wasted; it has clarified the boundaries of the coachee’s present understanding. The relationship needs enough flexibility to allow such moments without treating them as failure or opposition.

A person who appears stuck may offer a concrete illustration. After several sessions, the same problem may be described in almost identical terms and the agreed steps may remain unattempted. A coach could say: “I notice that we return to this question each time, and I also notice that the actions you identified have not become possible. How do you understand this?” The question brings the process itself into view. It neither accuses the coachee of self-sabotage nor protects them from examining what the repetition may be doing.

A disciplined balance

Research on learning and development has often been interpreted through the proposition that growth is supported by a workable relation between challenge and support. This seems valuable for coaching, provided that the relation is treated as dynamic rather than formulaic. A person’s capacity to work with challenge changes across time and circumstances. Acute stress, experiences of discrimination, or a period of instability may call for greater attention to safety and support. At another point, the same person may need direct feedback or a more demanding question in order to move beyond a familiar account of their situation.

For me, challenge is a skill that requires practice, ethical discipline, and ongoing reflection on the coach’s own motives. It cannot be an expression of impatience, frustration, or a private preference for speed. It needs to arise from careful listening and from a considered understanding of what the coachee is trying to achieve. When used in this way, challenge can support a person in seeing their situation with greater accuracy, recognising patterns that have constrained them, and identifying forms of action that correspond with their own values and conditions.

References

Daloz, L. (1986). Effective teaching and mentoring: Realizing the transformational power of adult learning experiences. Jossey-Bass.

Day, I. (2021). Balancing challenge and support in coaching. In J. Passmore (Ed.), The coaches’ handbook: The complete practitioner guide for professional coaches (pp. 152–162). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003089889-18