Do I really meet my clients where they are? 

- the process of shaping my professional approach through supervision -

I often say this about my coaching style: "I meet my clients where they are." It sounds like a good coaching principle because it speaks about acceptance, about presence about respect for the client's reality. Plus it integrates my values – authenticity and connection.

Yet recently, I found myself questioning it and this happened due to something I had been struggling with in my practice.

I work with managers and specialists who sometimes come to a session looking for advice, for recipes, or even validation and evaluation.. They ask: "What would you do?"  "What do you think I should say?"  "Am I right to handle it this way?"  "Can you just tell me what you think?"

And sometimes I feel an inner tension because I don't want to turn coaching into advice-giving just because advice is what the client is asking for. At the same time, I don't want to display rigidity by saying, "It is not my role to give advice. Let's recap what coaching is and is not,". Neither approach feels like meeting the client where they are.

So I brought this tension to supervision and I left with two things that will shape my practice in the future.

The first was a question: Is contracting static, or is it dynamic? that made me reflect on how I see the coaching relationship.

Perhaps the contract isn't something we establish once at the beginning and then simply follow. And sometime the client do not come for contracting something, they came in search of answers and solutions.

So the contract is something we keep alive. Something we revisit when the needs are changing, when the context changes, when something unexpected emerges.

And then came the metaphor. - the supervisor talked about a client who is resourceless as someone trapped under an elephant.

And I immediately saw my own practice in that image: when a client is under the elephant, my instinct is to stay beside them but I don't lift the elephant. It's not my elephant so the client has to lift it.  If I lift it for them (aka giving advice and telling the client what to do), I may remove the burden for a moment, but I haven't helped them become free of it. The elephant will come back.

And then came a question that really challenged me: What if the client doesn't want to lift the elephant? This one was a really hard one, because my first thought was almost instinctive: why wouldn't someone want to lift an elephant off themselves?  And then I remembered some of my clients who were experiencing burnout. They came to coaching partly because they didn't want psychotherapy. For them, psychotherapy carried a meaning they didn't want to identify with. "That's for people who are damaged." Coaching felt different. More acceptable. More consistent with how they wanted to see themselves.

So what does it mean to "meet the client where they are" in that situation? Does it mean insisting that they lift the elephant? Does it mean refusing to work with them because I believe they need something else? Or does it mean staying beside them while being honest about what I can and cannot support?  With those particular clients, the work was no longer about pretending that coaching could lift the elephant. It became about preparing the mindset for lifting it.

So here I am with my elephant - "I meet my clients where they are."

Maybe meeting someone where they are is more than accepting their current position.

Maybe it doesn't mean giving them whatever they ask for, nor pushing them toward where I think they should be.

Maybe it means being curious enough to understand where they actually are.

Resourceful or resourceless?

Ready or not ready?

Looking for an answer—or looking for permission to trust their own answer?

And here are the resources I took from the supervision conversation

I meet the clients where they are by asking questions, and sometimes I might offer a different perspective; sometimes I might acknowledge that coaching isn't enough for what is happening, and sometimes it may simply be to stay beside the client until they are ready to look at the elephant.

I will close with the part of coaching I am still learning: even is it's not my elephant to lift yet I can help my client see it, and I can stay beside them while they evaluate (if they are resourceful or resourceless) and decide what they want to do about it.

And I'm deeply grateful to the supervisors of  EMCC Romania and EMCC Global for creating such a safe and challenging space to pause, question my practice, and see what I might otherwise have missed.