Beyond Expertise: The Inner Work of Coaching Mastery

This newsletter is inspired by Empower World's Coaching and Leadership Podcast conversation with Seasoned International Executive Coach, Coach Supervisor, Andra Morosi, Episode 263 - 'Coaching the Living System: Embracing Complexity and Emergence'

As coaches and leaders, we can spend years developing our knowledge, gathering experience and building confidence in what we do. And then, perhaps, comes one of the more challenging stages of our development: learning to let some of it go.

The more experienced we become, the easier it can be to believe that we should recognise the pattern, understand what is happening, know the right question and have some sense of where the conversation needs to go.

Yet what if our experience becomes most powerful when we no longer need to prove it? What if mastery requires us to hold what we know lightly enough to discover something we don't yet know?

Executive and team coach, and coach supervisor Andra Morosi - who has worked globally with coaches, leaders and teams - captures this beautifully: “You only get it through practice, you don't get it through knowledge. You get it through letting go.”

Letting go doesn't mean forgetting what we know

Our experience and knowledge matters to a point: the models, theories, competencies and approaches we have learned shape our capacity to notice and respond. The invitation isn't to discard that wisdom; it is to stop needing it to support our partners their own answers and way forward.

We can probably all recognise moments when we've heard something familiar and thought, I know what's happening here. Perhaps we've worked with a similar challenge before, recognise the behavioural pattern, or already have a question forming before the other person has finished speaking.

That's where experience can become both a gift and a potential limitation. However familiar a situation might appear, the person in front of us has never had exactly the same conversation or experience of thoughts in exactly the same context, at exactly this moment before as ourselves.

Can we stay with what is actually here?

Working with emergence asks us to notice what is happening now rather than searching for what we expect to find. It might be a shift in energy, a word repeated several times, a pause that lasts a little longer, an emotion that suddenly appears, or something said almost in passing that somehow feels significant.

Instead of immediately deciding what it means, we can become curious about it. This requires presence and often courage, because we don't necessarily know where following that thread will take us. And perhaps we don't need to.

For leaders, this might mean entering a conversation without already deciding what another person needs to understand. For coaches, it might mean resisting the temptation to formulate the next powerful question while the client is still speaking.

For facilitators and team coaches, it can mean having a well-considered plan while being willing to change it because something more important has just entered the room.

Andra describes this particularly powerfully in relation to teams. We can have a structure, an intention and an outcome while recognising that the path cannot always be predetermined. As she reminds us, “A team is a living system.” And perhaps that is the balance: we prepare deeply while remaining available to what emerges.

Who we are enters the room too

Andra draws upon a powerful phrase attributed to the late Edna Murdoch: “Who you are is how you coach.” Perhaps we could extend that. Who we are is how we lead, how we listen and how we respond when we don't know. It influences how comfortable we are with silence and uncertainty, how quickly we step in to rescue, solve or advise, and how willing we are to trust another person's capacity to find their own way.

Our development, therefore, can never be solely about becoming more skilful at what we do. It is also about becoming increasingly aware of who we are being.

Andra describes the self as an instrument in the helping professions and sees developing that instrument as an ongoing responsibility. Given the complexity of the world in which we work, she suggests we need to continually “tune our violin, or polish the mirror to be really fit for purpose.”

An instrument isn't tuned once and a mirror doesn't remain clear forever. Our beliefs, assumptions, experiences and preferences continually enter the spaces in which we work. Our responsibility is to become aware of them and recognise when they are serving the conversation and when they might be getting in its way.

Mastery isn't a destination

The longer we do this work, the more there is to discover about people, systems, complexity and ourselves. Andra speaks about continually challenging “your beliefs of the moment” and what we think we know, reminding us that other perspectives and angles are always available.

Perhaps this is one of the paradoxes of mastery. The more deeply we develop, the less attached we become to being the one who knows. We can trust ourselves enough not to demonstrate everything we know, trust the people we work with enough not to do their thinking for them, and trust the conversation enough to allow something to emerge that neither of us could have predicted.

As Andra says, “You don't declare trust, you allow it to set in… Trust is a process.” And developing our mastery is a process too. We practise, reflect, receive feedback, seek supervision, notice ourselves and remain curious. And sometimes, we have the courage to let go of knowing long enough to discover what is actually here.

Wrapping up and as you reflect on your own coaching or leadership practice:

• Where might your experience be supporting you – and where might it sometimes be getting in the way?
• How comfortable are you when you genuinely don't know where a conversation is going?
• What might become possible if you listened for what was emerging rather than what you expected to hear?

Be Empowered

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If this reflection resonates with you, you may enjoy listening to the full conversation with Andra Morosi on the Empower World Coaching and Leadership Podcast with Jeanine Bailey, Co-Founder of Empower World. You can listen to the full episode here:

YouTube: https://go.empower-world.com/YT-Podcast-EP-263

Direct Link: https://go.empower-world.com/Podcast-EP-263

Spotify: https://go.empower-world.com/SP-Podcast-EP-263

iTunes: https://go.empower-world.com/IT-Podcast-EP-263

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