The best thing I did in a session was stop trying to coach
"I'm under a lot of pressure. You won't get it."
A coachee said that to me, mid-session, and I froze.
Not for the reason you'd think. A coach's craft is to stay steady and ask the question that moves the room. In that second, I wasn't steady. My mind was sprinting.
Because you can take that one sentence apart a dozen ways. (In the room, I had about four seconds.)
"I'm under a lot of pressure." What kind? The org? The board? Home? One fire, or the whole horizon? What does she even mean by pressure?
Then: "You won't get it." Is she doubting me? Have I not earned her trust yet? Or is the whole sentence a way to slide this under the carpet and if I push, do I lose the room?
Every instinct I'd been trained on offered a move; the clean reframe, the powerful question, the deliberate silence meant to do the work for you. A technique for each reading of that sentence.
I used none of them.
I put it all down, looked at her, and said: "You're right. I don't get it. So help me, show me what this is."
That's it. No framework, no tactic, no clever silence. I conceded the one thing a coach is quietly terrified to concede: that she knew something I didn't, and that my job right then wasn't to be the one who understood. It was to be the one who stayed.
And the room changed. She didn't need me three steps ahead. She needed to stop being alone in it for an hour. The moment I stopped performing competence, she started telling me the truth.
The part that should worry the person buying the coaching
Every credential on a coach's CV would have applauded the wrong move. There's a kind of coach who is excellent at sounding excellent; fluent questions, tidy summaries, sessions that look impeccable from the outside and quietly change nothing. On paper, that coach scores. In that room, that coach loses her.
This is the thing reputation, hours logged, and a friendly chemistry call cannot tell you: when a leader says "you won't get it," will the coach reach for a technique to look capable, or set the technique down to be useful?
That capacity has a name and a weight. When I built ECCM; the model I use to score whether a coach can actually hold a specific leader. I weighted Relational Dynamics highest of the seven dimensions, at 25%, and made it one of two gates that can rule a coach out on their own. Not because the working alliance is the soft, warm part of coaching. Because it's the part that decides whether any of the rest works.
The evidence is less romantic than the moment
De Haan, Gray and Bonneywell (2019) studied hundreds of coach–client pairs and found that the working alliance; whether the leader genuinely trusts the coach, best predicted whether the coaching worked. Better than the technique. Better than the credential.
So when a coachee says "you won't get it," that isn't an interruption to the coaching. It is the coaching, the alliance being tested in real time, protected or dropped. Grab a technique to steady yourself and you break the one thing that was working.
What this changes for you
You cannot read this off a bio. It is invisible in everything the industry sells coaches on; testimonials, pedigree, hours logged. It shows up only in behaviour, in four-second moments behind a closed door you will never sit in.
So it has to be scored before the match, not hoped for after it. The usual order - pick the impressive coach, hope the chemistry holds - leaves the single most predictive capability to chance, discovered only once the alliance has already cracked.
The fix isn't a better gut feel. It's refusing to match on anything you haven't measured.
The question I'd leave you with
Somewhere in the next quarter, one of your most expensive leaders will look at the coach you assigned and say some version of "you won't get it." You won't be in the room. You won't get a replay.
The only thing that protects that moment is what you checked for before it happened.
So before you sign off the next coach, don't ask whether they're impressive. Ask the harder one: when a leader tells them they won't get it, will they reach for a technique - or for the truth?
P.S. I still don't know everything that coachee was carrying that day. I just stopped pretending I had to and that turned out to be the most skilled thing I did all session. It wasn't in the toolkit at all.