Listening Beyond the Words

Two sessions into my ILM7 coaching practice, and today something shifted.

In session one, nerves were doing a lot of the talking - mine as much as my client's. I could feel myself coaching the issue: the stated problem, the surface ask, the thing that had been named. It's a natural place to start. It's also, I'm learning, rarely where the real work lives.

Today was different.

My client - an experienced leader, three decades into a career built inside global organisations, now ensconced in independent consultancy - was talking about business development. On the surface: a fairly practical challenge. Getting in front of the right people, building a pipeline, doing the unglamorous work of finding clients.

But it wasn't the content that caught my attention. It was the language.

Chasing leads. Nudging people. Words that carry a faint apology in them - as if wanting the work, or asking for it, were slightly distasteful. And underneath that, almost in passing: a comment about whether other consultants might simply be better at this than they were.

That's when I stopped listening for the plan and started listening for what the plan was standing on.

The issue behind the issue

What was evident, and surfaced in pre-session self-analyses by the client, was that this was as much a question of identity as it was of business development. A shift from leading within an organisation to working alongside organisations changes more than a job title - it can quietly unsettle a sense of authority that used to come built-in.

The skills they reached for confidently - empathy, inclusivity, the ability to bring people with them, to delegate well - were all relational. Soft, in the language we too often use for things that are actually hard-won. But the harder-edged capabilities - strategic problem-solving, research rigour, the ability to persuade a room - barely got a mention. Not because they weren't there. Because, somewhere in the transition, they'd stopped being counted.

I asked a simple question: what would the organisations you're now working with - the ones who used to employ people like you - think if they saw how you talk about your own experience?

Silence. Then a shift.

A way forward, not just an answer

The value of that moment wasn't that I'd solved anything. It was that the real work became visible enough to do something with. Using GROW as the frame, we landed on something concrete: a commitment to put the thirty years - skills, outcomes, judgement earned the hard way - down on paper. Not as a CV exercise, but as evidence. The kind they'd trust if a client of theirs brought it to them.

Small, specific, and owned.

What I'm taking from this

There's a distinction I keep coming back to from the listening research underpinning this practice - the difference between listening for content and listening for what's underneath the content. Today was the first time I felt that distinction land in real time, rather than as a concept I understood in theory. The lightbulb wasn't a technique working. It was a way of paying attention finally becoming instinctive rather than effortful.

I suspect this is what people mean when they talk about coaching presence - not a set of tools, but a quality of attention that lets someone hear their own language back to themselves, and decide whether it's still telling the truth.

Two sessions in. Plenty still to learn. But today, for the first time, it felt less like performing coaching and more like doing it.

This is the first entry in an ongoing journal tracking my ILM7 coaching journey — the questions, the missteps, and the moments that reframe how I think about narrative, leadership, and change. Client details are anonymised and composited throughout.