What I Had to Unlearn: On Becoming a Coach When You've Spent 25 Years Being the Expert

When I first walked into Module One of the Academy of Executive Coaching's Practitioner Diploma, I was carrying a lot of identity.

Ph.D. Dean. Founder of programs and Centers at multiple universities. The person colleagues and students came to see precisely because of what I knew, the institutional power I held, what I had built. For 25 years, people sat across from me expecting expertise and I delivered it. That was the job. That was, in many ways, who I was.

The first real lesson of coach training was that none of it belonged in the coaching room.

Not the expertise. Not the instinct to drill down into a problem and surface a solution. Not the years of accumulated knowledge about how organizations work, how people get stuck, what usually helps. A coach does not need to know anything about what a client brings. I experienced a peer coach me on a topic she knew nothing about, and the session was one of the most powerful I had experienced. The instrument wasn't her knowledge. It was her presence. Her attention. Her willingness to ask a question, lean back in her chair offering space, and stay quiet long enough for me to find my own way to what I already knew.

That realization was equal parts startling, unsettling, and, eventually, liberating.

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The Advice Monster Is Real

If you're considering coach training and you come from a background in leadership, counseling, teaching, or any helping profession, there is something you should know: your experience will work against you at first. Not because it isn't valuable. It is. But because the habits that made you effective in those roles — the impulse to name what you see, offer a frame, suggest a path forward — are precisely the habits that coach training asks you to examine and set aside.

I had to unlearn the role of expert in the room. I had to learn to wait. Not as a technique, but as a genuine practice of restraint: staying quiet when every instinct said to speak, trusting that the silence was productive, resisting the pull toward the problem when the person in front of me needed something different entirely.

In my second module, I watched a recording of myself coaching. It was uncomfortable to see. I was working the problem, not the person. Too much in my head, too aware of how I was being observed, too quick to follow the thread of a story rather than stay with what was happening for the human telling it. I had spent years being evaluated on what I knew and what I produced. Being evaluated on the quality of my listening, my presence, my willingness to not-know was genuinely new territory.

That discomfort is not a sign that training isn't working. It is the training working.

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Why I Came Back

Two years after completing the Practitioner Diploma, I returned for the Advanced Practitioner Diploma. Not because the first program was insufficient. It was rigorous and genuinely transformative. I came back because I had discovered a new edge in my own practice: a pattern I couldn't fully see until I was coaching regularly.

I create safe spaces. That is real, and it matters. Clients have told me they feel held, genuinely heard, that they can bring difficult things into our sessions and trust they will be received with care. That is not nothing. Safety is a necessary condition for growth. But safety alone is not sufficient. At some point, a good coach has to invite the client to go somewhere they haven't been willing to go on their own. I was stopping short of that invitation. I was, in the words of one supervisor's feedback, almost too supportive — and that excess of care was, paradoxically, a form of holding back.

The APD forced me to sit with that. To understand that restraint rooted in care can inadvertently limit a client's growth. That sometimes the most honest thing a coach can offer is a gentle challenge at exactly the moment the client would prefer not to be challenged.

There was an assessment I did not pass the first time. I knew why, even before the feedback arrived. I had seen the moments and not moved toward them. The reframe that shifted everything came from my mentor. "Getting in there" — the phrase that had been echoing in my head since that feedback — became "noticing and offering lightly but directly." That shift, from a directive I feared to a description of something I already knew how to do, changed how I coached.

I passed the reassessment. More importantly, I became a different practitioner in the process.

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What the Training Actually Builds

The AoEC's model-agnostic approach meant that across both programs I was exposed to a wide range of frameworks: Co-Active, Gestalt, Solutions Focused, psychodynamic theory, somatic approaches, ego development, systems thinking. I did not emerge with a single methodology. I emerged with judgment about which approach a given client actually needs, and the presence to stay with what is happening rather than defaulting to what is familiar.

Some of what I learned, I had already known in other forms. I had spent years working with students navigating shame, self-doubt, old stories that were running in the background and quietly limiting everything. I had my own language for the inner critic long before I encountered the AoEC's frameworks. What the training gave me was discipline and precision: a way to work with those patterns that is grounded in theory, tested under observation, and refined through supervision.

The concepts I return to most in my practice now are not complicated. People need to feel that they matter before they can do the hard work of growth. Silence is not awkward — it is often where the most important thinking happens. Most of what holds people back is not a lack of information or effort. It is an unconscious assumption, a belief so embedded they cannot yet see it as a belief. And people are almost always more resourceful than they think they are in the moment. What they need is someone to stay present long enough for them to remember that.

Those four principles did not come from a book. They came from decades of real work, tested and deepened through the rigor of AoEC training.

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What I Know Now That I Didn't Then

I am now faculty for the program that trained me. I teach in the cohorts where people sit with the same discomfort I sat with: the accomplished professional discovering that what got them here is not what will make them an effective coach. I recognize that moment. I know what it costs, and I know what it builds.

If you are considering this path and you have years of leadership or helping-profession experience behind you, I want to say two things directly.

Your experience matters. The understanding you carry of how organizations work, how people get stuck, what real stakes feel like — that context is genuinely useful. It shapes how you listen and what you notice.

And it is not sufficient on its own. The training exists to turn what you already know into something you can reliably offer, with discipline and care, in service of someone else's growth rather than your own agenda.

That is a different thing. It takes real work to build. And it is worth building.