When you stop teaching and start coaching

The title is deliberately provocative.
In reality, teaching already includes a coaching component: without a relationship, listening, and interaction with the student, teaching risks being reduced to simply passing on information.

Coaching is the human, living and vital component that brings teaching to its fullest expression and turns it into a complete growth process.

Let me give you an example using the human body:

The lesson is the structure. The program, techniques, and information are the bones.

Coaching is the muscles: what allows that structure to move, adapt, and function with the people in front of us.

Coaching is a broad field and requires continuous study and practice. However, if you want to start using a coaching approach, the first change I recommend is to shift the focus away from yourself, as the instructor, and away from the lesson, and place it on the class.

By staying tuned in to the class throughout the lesson, you will be able to give it exactly what it needs. This quality will also be reflected in your ability to quickly change and reorganize a lesson that is not going well and, with some experience, to provide quick corrections, feedback, or adaptations to an individual student who is struggling to keep up.

Three things to try in your next lesson

Coaching is a very practical tool.
Despite having a strong theoretical foundation, coaching reveals its true nature through concrete actions. Here are three ideas you can put into practice immediately to shift the paradigm from being centered on yourself and the lesson to being centered on the class.

1. Simplify the framework

There is no need to prepare a rigid sequence of things to do one after another. A simple structure, with a few key points, allows you to keep the lesson more easily in the background and free up mental energy to observe the class.

2. Check where your attention goes

During the lesson, stop every now and then and ask yourself:

Am I thinking about the next thing I have to do? Or am I observing what is happening with the class?

Look at the energy of the group, who is struggling, who is ready for the next step, who is losing motivation. Try to follow the signals the group is giving you and reorganize the lesson around them, even if only through a small deviation.

3. Create small sandboxes

If changing your focus spontaneously is difficult, don’t try to transform the entire lesson all at once.

Take five or ten minutes. After explaining a technique, dedicate that time exclusively to listening to the class. Observe, gather information, and intervene according to what you see.

Then take control of the lesson again.

With practice, that space will gradually become more natural.

Coaching while teaching does not mean giving up control of the lesson.

It means using that control to feel what is needed, rather than assuming what is needed.

If you recognize yourself in these difficulties and want to explore your teaching approach further, contact me for an individual consultation about your development as an instructor.