Clients seeking a Professional Coach may think that someone ‘like them’ is the best type of coach. Yet the opposite may be true.
This means the client wants someone who has knowledge or experience in their industry. Or has been a CEO like them, a sales person, a lawyer, or whatever their expertise or position is. Or they may want someone from the same culture, country or background.
Yet the last person you often want to coach you is someone who is in the same industry as you are. Or has been in the same job that you’re in. Or has a similar life history. Such a coach can often hold the same biases and beliefs as their client, and it can be the ‘blind leading the blind,’ or more like the ‘expert leading the client.’
Granted, shared cultural background or identity can have it’s benefits. Yet even so, if the coach uses their personal experiences, the coach may miss being curious about their client unique perspective.
A self-aware coach can self-manage their beliefs and biases while coaching. Yet if the client knows the coach has certain experiences, they may acquiesce to the experiences of the coach. It takes a confident coach to continue to educate their client on how to use them best as a coach, until the client receives the benefits of the coach using their coaching skills masterfully.
If the coach quickly shares their knowledge and experiences, they may be short-changing their client. That’s because while we may seem ‘the same’ as our client, we are not, and never will be. How one person experiences life is not how another person experiences their life. That is one of the beautiful challenges of being human; we are all different in how we think, feel, act, react and respond. Yet we often seem to want to get advice from someone who is like us, yet isn’t us.
Why do coaches want to share their knowledge, experiences, and expertise?
The idea of hiring a coach who doesn’t have the same history as the client, often comes as a surprise to prospective clients. That’s because coaches aren’t always clear themselves on what they are offering, and feel their value lies in their knowledge and experiences.
There have been sport coaches long before coaching became a professional skill set of coaching competencies. Many consultants and experts have capitalized on the popularization of the concept of “Coach” beyond the sporting arena into personal and professional contexts. If you observe a sports coach in action, they are usually dictating and in control of what happens with players, and are in the position of power in the game. A sports coach makes decisions based on what they think, see, hear and determine is ‘best’ to do in any moment.Â
A coach with specific expertise and experiences may feel confident that their experiences will ‘add value’ to their client. Yet such a coach can easily fall into the trap of being the subject matter expert, and may limit their client to what the coach has experienced. Gravitating to what feels familiar for the coach, can be limiting options for the client. This is more of a consultant or mentor mindset than the mindset of a professionally skilled coach. It’s great to hire a consultant to give expert advice, or hire a mentor to share how they ‘did it.’ Yet neither of those roles is what a highly skilled coach offers.
What expertise sets a Professional Coach apart?
It’s understandable that people gravitate to those that seem similar to them, as familiarity brings a level of comfort. 
To allow clients to feel safe to more fully express themselves, a Professional Coach needs to be self-aware of what their Presence communicates, and ensure they are listening and responding from a judgment-free mindset.
Every coach is a human being who has beliefs about what they need to do to be valued, and to give value. Many coaches believe their value lies in sharing their experiences, their knowledge, and their expertise. Instead, a professionally trained coach can become an expert in the mastery of their coaching presence and their coaching skills. When our client connects to more of their self-knowledge, they often discover they have more options for how to move forward with whatever they are exploring in the coaching session.
The ICF Core Competencies are an excellent framework for continual development toward being a more masterful coach – which is a never-ended joyful journey from my personal experience. I always want to be learning and evolving as a person and as a coach, even though I’ve held the MCC credential for 20 years.
ICF has a specific competency for coach self-development being Competency #2: Embodies a Coaching Mindset. The definition of this competency is, “Develops and maintains a mindset that is open, curious, flexible and client-centered.”
Some of the sub-points clarify the mindset of a Professional Coach:
2.1: Acknowledges that clients are responsible for their own choices
2.4: Remains aware of and open to the influence of context and culture on self and others
2.6: Develops and maintains the ability to regulate one’s emotions
2.7: Mentally and emotionally prepares for [coaching] sessions
Being valued as a Professional Coach for expertise and mastery of Coaching Skills
Some of the most successful coaching outcomes from clients are where I’ve not had any industry or position experience. For example, I’ve worked with hundreds of engineers and technical experts in industries such as information technology, medical devices, construction, and online search. Yet I’ve never been an engineer or been employed in any of these industries.
Where does my ‘value’ lie? In my ability to craft customized and responsive discovery-oriented questions. And offer observations that an expert in the industry may not think to ask. A coach with similar experience as their client, may be limited in the scope of curious questions they ask, because their industry experience may limit them to asking about what they know.
Coaching competencies and skills a coach holds expertise in… 
…how to structure a coaching engagement, such as clearly separating the consulting phase from the coaching phase. For me, the consulting phase includes all the upfront work, such as contracting, clarifying what coaching is and isn’t, the use of assessments and personal interviews. This is where coach is leading the process.Â
…describing any overlap in the consulting and coaching phases. This often occurs when the coach supports the client to determine what is useful information from the assessments and interviews in the consulting phase, to include in their coaching development plan.
…educating their client to move to fully into the coaching phase. This includes coach ability to describe the structure of a coaching session. The coaching phase is where the client leads each session.
…visioning – clarifying what the client wants, and the gap from where the client is now to where they want to be.
…listening broadly and deeply to their ‘What’ (situation), and ‘Who’ (inner world of expansive and limiting beliefs, their strengths and values, and successful strategies they’ve used in the past)
…observing emotions present and inquiring further, which might further inform client awareness
…observing shifts in client energy, pace, tone and body language, which might further inform client awareness
…offering intuitions, without attachment to coach being right
…offering observations about what the client is communicating, including coach observations about themes or patterns in client way of expressing themselves
…inquiring using open-ended customized and responsive questions that allow the client to discover what they know and don’t know
…creating opportunities for the client to see themselves and their circumstances from different perspectives
…supporting the client to clarify their progress and learning in the session
…supporting the client to decide on actions and commitments
Questions for clients to ask prospective coaches
Here are some questions a client interviewing prospective coaches might want to ask. Most of these questions are also what the coach can use as a measure of their own level of coaching mastery:
- Where did you get your coach training (if they say ‘in the real world’ they are not trained in coaching skills. If they haven’t completed at least 60 hours of coach training, they are not likely to know what coaching skills are versus other skills they may have)
- What coaching credential do you hold? (Master Certified Coach (MCC, Professional Certified Coach (PCC), or Associate Certified Coach (ACC). These are ICF credentials, from most to least experienced.
- Have you ever had your own coach for at least consecutive 6 months? (if the coach says no, then the coach is not walking the talk, nor do they have the personal experience of the power of being coached)
- What are you doing to continually develop your coaching skills?
- What was your most successful coaching engagement, and why?
- What was your least successful coaching engagement, and why?
In closing…
A Professional Coach who is an expert in Coaching Presence and Coaching Skills, can be very effective working with any type of client they choose to. Such a coach is confident in conveying the value of coaching skills for the benefit of their client. And to support the client to discover how much wisdom they already have, yet might not have known they have without a skilled coach to ‘draw’ that wisdom out of them.
For more blog articles on ‘expertise’ of a coach, consider going to my blog page, right top in the “Search this website” function, and enter ‘expertise.’
Written by Carly Anderson (originally written in 2014, updated in 2025)
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