Power of Silence

When a client commits to coaching, it is a significant step towards self-care. Of the client making herself her #1 priority. Of hitting the pause button on the busyness of everyday life, the strenuous balancing of different roles.

As a coach, I need to honour and align with that pause. And my tool to do that is silence. When I first started my coaching journey, I was most struck by the power of questions - in their ability to trigger insights, connect the client to their own resourcefulness and create opportunities to transform beliefs. But for a question to achieve its full potency, what is even more critical is how I hold the silence – after a question, through the client’s responses and before the next question. For me the imagery is throwing a smooth pebble into a lake and sitting back witnessing the ripples moving the outermost edges. Why ruin that moment by bombarding that lake with more pebbles?

In our crowded, noisy worlds, early on we are conditioned to talk, talk, talk in order to be seen, to feel significant. I am aware of how I personally feel slightly off-balance in silence, kept in suspense of what meaning making is happening, what is going to emerge. And I also am aware how each time I simply breathe and lean into the silence, I get to witness the power of exploration to its fullest. To me the silence, the pause then is not just a tool, but a sacred offering to the space that needs to get co-created in the coaching conversation.