Cathy Liska How do quiet moments enhance coaching? Offering time and space for digestion gives a client the chance to comprehend a new awareness or develop a new connection to present challenges being focused upon.
- Sometimes a coach steps into a coaching relationship in which the client is stressed and disconnected. As a client speaks and focuses the agenda, it is the coach’s job to create space for the client. This can sometimes mean powerful moments of quiet.
- Perhaps after a question is extended from the coach, the client wants time to consider the question before stating an answer.
- Sometimes knowing that it is okay to take a moment gives clients the opportunity to decompress, and reconnect to the agenda.
Silence can be a fabulous tool for those places when a client feels stuck. Helpful silence 
includes time for taking in acknowledgements and brainstorming.
Questions that offer client’s space before replying:
- Sitting with it for a moment, tell me your ideas.
- Taking a moment to consider, how will this look?
- Give yourself time to be with this, what else?
- Think about what the next layer looks like.
- Reflect on some different perspectives.
The more comfortable a coach becomes with these created spaces, the more a client gains from them. As rapport and trust build, the coaching relationship itself offers vehicle to use as a reliable reflection of what is going on within the client.
