We do not create music, we only create the conditions so that she can appear.
Sergiu Celibidache
It took me almost ten years of coaching to understand my main job is to create an environment that acts as a womb. That's the most precise image I've found for it. A womb provides what the growing thing needs without doing the growing for it.
A womb is warm, protected, and designed to hold what is not yet ready to exist fully in the open world. When a coach creates these types of conditions, then growth can take place for the client.
If someone told me ten years ago that the first thing I needed to do was create a womb for the other person, I would have rolled my eyes at them and showed them a great morning routine or how to be more productive. But without this, anything I give them doesn't seem to take root. This is the critical foundation that allows everything else to grow.
This is why creating the womb is more important than the frameworks. You could have one person work with five different coaches, all using the same frameworks, asking the same questions, having the same amount of time with a client, and the client will experience vastly different things with each person.
I don't pull on the flowers in my garden demanding they grow. I create an environment that has the ideal conditions so they can flourish. I'm doing the same thing with a client that I do in my garden. I'm trying to create the conditions where the person feels seen, protected, supported, totally accepted, and has a genuine connection with me. If those are created, then human flourishing can take place.
Programs don't change people. Relationships change people. Coaching is a relationship, and it's different from consulting, therapy, or mentorship, though there's elements of all of them woven in. Coaching at its core is a relationship specifically designed to help someone access a fuller version of themselves than they can access alone.
The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The coaching relationship is the most unique relationship you'll experience, because it's the only one where there is nothing expected of you to reciprocate. A coach is solely focused on you and your growth. Every other relationship in your life will come with expectations. This one doesn't.
One of the things I see in almost everyone I coach is the isolation of the role. They have people around them, but nobody who actually understands what they're going through. Everyone in their life is either adding pressure, expecting something, or biased by the advice they give them. Every client I've ever worked with has said some version of the same thing: there is no one else in the world I can say this to.
How can you possibly share the lack of confidence you have within yourself to your board or to your investors? How do you tell your partner how exhausted you are by them without creating massive backlash? So who do you share the deepest realities you're facing and get unbiased feedback from someone who has spent thousands of hours helping people navigate these very things? If you don't have a coach, you navigate it alone.
The people I've ever worked with are ooking for the same thing at the deepest level. To be seen.
And in our modern world, people are starving for this and rarely ever getting it. Great coaches see people and let people feel seen. They acknowledge what others don't notice. They challenge where there's a clouded view of reality. And they do all of it from a place that communicates, in every moment, this coach truly has my back.
The seeing itself can be an intervention. Before any question is asked, just the experience of being genuinely seen by someone is itself transformative. It gives people permission to be more fully themselves than they have allowed themselves to be in most contexts. When you get someone in your life like this, it's like a release valve that dissipates much of the built up pressure almost instantaneously.
And this extends beyond the formal sessions. Part of what I work to build with clients is the sense that they carry the environment with them. That the quality of acceptance and awareness and presence and self-honesty and non-judgment that is present in our sessions begins to be something they can access on their own, when I'm not present. The womb extends, because what has been developed in that space begins to belong to them.