Coaching Happens
Coaching has been extensively defined through competence: skills, models, professional standards, ethical awareness, relational capacity and observable behaviours. These are necessary, but they do not exhaust what coaching is when it is lived. Coaching is not simply something that is. Coaching happens. It happens when a trained coach and a well-informed coachee voluntarily enter the structured relationship of a coaching session. They enter the space they co-create. The session does not exist as an experience in advance; it remains unknown until it is lived and completed.
The Co-Created Space of Between
Coaching is experienced within what we call intersubjectivity. The space between coach and coachee is co-created not only through what they say and share, implicitly or explicitly, but through what they think, feel and experience during the session. Two distinct subjectivities remain present, each with its own history and world of meaning, while participating in a relationship that neither can construct alone.
Within this experience, two parallel and interconnected dimensions emerge: the shared, public world of the relationship and the inner, private world of individual experience. By public, I mean the common symbolic and professional world of coaching — its roles, ethics, values, language, expectations and boundaries. What happens within this shared world, however, is lived and interpreted internally by each participant. The experience is relationally constructed and subjectively interpreted.
Between and Within
The significant movements of coaching — insight, awareness, recognition and shifts in meaning — take place within the individual, but they are generated through exchange in the shared space. What is experienced internally then returns to the relationship and becomes part of what happens next.
Coaching therefore moves from the between to the within, and from two separate withins back to the between. This polarity between the individual and the intersubjective is part of the generative movement of the session. It produces energy, meaning and the possibility of substantive change.
The unspoken belongs to this movement as well: what happens while words are being exchanged, what is sensed before it is articulated, the hesitations, emotional shifts, contradictions and movements that form part of the lived experience of the relationship.
To work within this movement, however, it is not enough to know that it exists. The coach must gradually become capable of recognising it, entering it and remaining within it while it unfolds. This is where depth begins to require more than knowledge.
Depth, Initiation and Apprenticeship
Depth requires initiation, and initiation requires apprenticeship.
By initiation, I mean entry into a domain that cannot be acquired merely as information or knowledge. Knowing that this intersubjective world exists is not the same as being able to inhabit it. Apprenticeship is the process through which this depth becomes lived: through participation, experience, reflection, introspection and sustained exposure to actual human encounter.
A coach who uses this space as a field of intervention therefore requires more than technical competence. I am not proposing another competency model here, but pointing to capacities that support work at this depth: presence, abstract thinking, emotional steadiness, reflective and introspective capacity in real time, social intelligence, empathy, cognitive control and the capacity for connection. Their significance lies not in their separate measurement, but in how they enable the coach to perceive what is happening while it is happening and to participate consciously in the relational process through which meaning is produced.
Beyond Competence
This is what I mean by coaching beyond competence. Not coaching without competence, and not a dismissal of professional standards, but coaching understood as a lived human experience that cannot be reduced to measurable skills, techniques or models.
Some dimensions of coaching can be taught, demonstrated and assessed. Others require initiation, apprenticeship and depth.
Perhaps this is where human nature makes its most distinctive contribution to coaching in the age of AI. AI may achieve extraordinary levels of technical competence. The human contribution lies in entering and inhabiting this lived intersubjective world — in participating in the movement between the shared and the private, the between and the within, through which meaning and substantive shifts become possible.