When Coaching Competencies Become an Inner Judge
For Coaches · 3 min read
A coach comes into supervision with a familiar question:
“Did I do it right?”
Sometimes it becomes more specific.
“Was that PCC-level coaching?”
“Did I ask the right question?”
“Should I have stayed with that moment longer?”
“Did I demonstrate the competencies clearly enough?”
Underneath these questions is often something deeply sincere: a commitment to becoming a better coach.
Competency frameworks matter. They give our profession a shared language, support ethical practice, and help us notice behaviours that may strengthen—or limit—our coaching.
But there can also be another side.
When learning quietly becomes self-monitoring
When we become very focused on demonstrating a competency, part of our attention may move away from the client and toward ourselves.
Instead of simply being present, another conversation begins internally:
Am I doing enough?
Was that question powerful enough?
Should I intervene now?
Does this sound like PCC coaching?
The framework that was intended to support our development can quietly become an evaluator sitting beside us in the coaching conversation.
And this creates an interesting paradox.
The more we try to demonstrate presence, the less present we may actually become.
A map—or a verdict?
Perhaps the issue is not the competency framework itself.
The more useful question may be:
What relationship are we developing with it?
Are we using the framework as a map that expands what we can notice?
Or as a verdict on whether we are a “good enough” coach?
Are we learning from it—or performing for it?
Is it increasing our range and choice?
Or narrowing our attention because we are trying to get coaching “right”?
These questions become particularly interesting in coaching supervision.
Supervision is not only a place to decide whether an intervention was correct or incorrect.
It gives us somewhere to become curious about the whole field.
What was happening for the client?
What was happening in me as the coach?
What was happening between us?
What might have been happening in the wider system?
What possibilities opened—and what might have quietly closed?
From demonstrating competencies to embodying them
There is an important difference between knowing a competency and gradually allowing it to become part of how we practise.
Early in our development, frameworks naturally require conscious attention.
We study.
We practise.
We review recordings.
We notice what we missed.
But over time, perhaps the intention is not to carry the competency checklist more efficiently into the coaching room.
Perhaps it is to internalise it deeply enough that we can eventually put the checklist down.
Then the competencies become less about behaviours we are trying to display and more about capacities we can draw upon.
Presence.
Curiosity.
Partnership.
Awareness.
Choice.
The framework remains important—but our relationship with it becomes more spacious.
Holding both structure and freedom
This is where I increasingly see coaching development as holding two things at once.
Structure and freedom.
Discipline and intuition.
Competence and humanity.
Learning and imperfection.
We do not need to reject standards in order to remain free.
And we do not need to become constrained by standards in order to learn from them.
Perhaps mature practice asks us to hold both.
The competency framework can then become less of a checklist telling us whether we are good enough—and more of a mirror helping us see what we could not yet see.
A reflection for your practice
When you think about your own coaching:
Does the competency framework expand your awareness—or does it sometimes make you more self-conscious?
And perhaps an even more interesting question:
What might change if you used the competencies primarily to reflect after the coaching conversation, rather than to judge yourself while you are inside it?