The Promise of Coaching: Understanding How Change Happens
The human science behind potential, change, and growth
Why is it that some conversations leave us lighter, clearer, and more confident — while others drain our energy?
Coaching is built around the quality of conversation. It is about creating a particular kind of conversation — one that awakens clarity, courage, and commitment. When done well, coaching changes how people think, feel, and act, not because they are told what to do, but because they reconnect with what matters most to them.
This article opens a new series, Coaching Unpacked, which explores the foundations of coaching: what happens inside these conversations, and why they work.
Unlocking What’s Already There
At its core, coaching is not about teaching, advising, or fixing. It is about unlocking what is already present in a person — their experience, intuition, and capacity to learn.
A good coach does not provide answers. Instead, they hold up a mirror, allowing clients to see themselves and their situations more clearly. With that clarity often comes renewed self-trust and a stronger sense of agency.
Coaching is less like giving directions and more like revealing a path you already sense beneath your feet. When people feel truly seen, listened to, and believed in, something subtle yet powerful happens: the mind opens, habitual thinking loosens, and new possibilities come into view.
How Coaching Works
There is now a substantial body of research exploring how and why coaching can be such an effective catalyst for change — often leading to shifts in perspective, confidence, and action in a relatively short period of time. I will briefly highlight a few perspectives that help explain what is happening beneath the surface.
Psychology has made an important contribution to our understanding of coaching, particularly through developmental and positive psychology. Concepts such as self-awareness, agency, intrinsic motivation, and positive emotion help explain why coaching supports sustainable development rather than short-term performance fixes. Coaching creates the conditions in which people can reflect on experience, make sense of it differently, and mobilise their own resources for change.
Developmental psychology, in particular, informs coaching approaches that support holistic growth over time. Rather than focusing solely on skill acquisition, coaching invites clients to evolve how they relate to themselves, others, and complexity — an essential capacity in today’s organisations.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has also influenced coaching practice, especially in its attention to how habitual thought patterns shape behaviour. While coaching is not therapy, it draws on similar principles when helping clients recognise limiting assumptions, experiment with alternative perspectives, and adopt ways of thinking that enable purposeful action.
Neuroscience has shed light on the well-known “aha” moments that often occur in coaching — sudden insights that reorganise how a situation is understood. Research suggests that such moments are associated with increased neural integration, when previously unconnected ideas come together. In coaching, these insights are often accompanied by emotion, because they touch something personally meaningful rather than merely intellectual.
Coaching has also developed into a robust field of research in its own right, with thousands of peer-reviewed studies exploring its processes and outcomes. One important source is the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, an open-access, international peer-reviewed journal published by Oxford Brookes University.
One of the most illuminating books on how coaching actually works is Coaching Understood: A Pragmatic Inquiry into the Coaching Process by Dr Elaine Cox, Founding Editor of the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching & Mentoring. Cox explores coaching as a process grounded in lived experience, beginning with what she describes as Touching Experience — the moment where the coach–client relationship is established and potential coaching goals start to emerge. In this space, felt and often only partially articulated experience is explored, allowing meaning to surface and awareness to deepen. The book then examines the coaching process in depth, analysing the evolving contributions of both client and coach, and culminating in an integrated understanding of the Experiential Coaching Cycle.
Three Forces That Make Coaching Effective
From my experience as a practitioner, three forces are particularly central to what makes coaching work.
1. Attention and Presence
Being deeply listened to is rare. In coaching, the coach’s full presence creates a safe space where the client’s nervous system can settle and the mind can begin to organise itself differently. Judgment is suspended, curiosity is invited, and attention turns inward in a constructive way. In this calm, focused conversation, new insights can emerge.
2. Powerful Questions
Thought-provoking questions interrupt automatic thinking. Coaches do not ask questions to gather information — they ask questions to support better thinking. Well-crafted questions shift attention from “What’s wrong?” to “What’s possible?”, from assumption to exploration. They ignite curiosity, which is the starting point of all learning. Clients often say, “I’ve never thought about it that way before.”
3. Accountability and Action
Insight alone does not create change. Coaching helps translate awareness into action by inviting small, realistic steps that build confidence and momentum. The process typically begins with something the client wants to change, moves toward a clear formulation of a desired outcome, and then into exploration, experimentation, and action planning.
The coach does not give advice. The client articulates the content throughout the process and therefore takes genuine ownership of the actions they choose to take. Self-generated change is far more likely to be sustained.
As Peter Senge famously put it: “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”
A Cycle of Growth
Together, these elements form a cycle that makes coaching such a potent developmental approach:
Presence → Insight → Action → Confidence → More Presence
Each phase reinforces the next, gradually expanding both self-awareness and capability.
A Real-Life Glimpse
One client, a senior leader, came to coaching feeling overwhelmed by constant decision-making. Her instinct was to move faster, to push through.
In our sessions, she slowed down — perhaps for the first time in years. As she spoke about her challenges, patterns became visible: assumptions she had never questioned, priorities she had lost sight of. Within weeks, she began delegating differently and creating space for reflection and strategic thinking.
Nothing “new” was added. What changed was her relationship with her own thinking. She rediscovered her capacity for clarity.
The Bigger Picture
Coaching works because it honours people’s natural drive to grow, much like all living systems. This is not always recognised in workplaces where the focus is often on weaknesses and errors, and where accountability is too easily equated with blame — a dynamic that can stifle learning and initiative.
In coaching, accountability is understood differently. It emerges from empowerment, agency, and responsibility. A far more attractive — and effective — foundation for development.
Coaches trust that when people are supported with presence and inquiry, they will find their own way forward — and that this self-generated learning is more durable than any external advice.
In essence, coaching reminds us that potential is not something to be installed from the outside. It is something to be invited from within.
Perhaps the best in us is not something we need to find —
it is something we need to remember.
