Coaching Partnership: Are You Handing Over the Wheel?

A coach’s role is to hand over the wheel—letting the client steer their own course.

Every coach has been there: you care so deeply about a client’s progress that, without realizing it, you start steering instead of partnering. You ask thoughtful questions, you chart a smart course… but you’re still the one with your hand on the wheel.

It happens quietly. Caring morphs into control. Guiding turns into deciding. The session shifts from co-creation to subtle direction—and the client’s ownership begins to slip away.

The ICF Core Competencies remind us that our role is never to captain the ship. Our role is to partner, to check in, to pause often enough to ask: Is this still the voyage you want to take?

How Coaches Check In—and Why It Matters

Handing over the wheel doesn’t stop once the client names a topic. True partnership means checking the course again and again as the session unfolds.

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