One of the greatest temptations in coaching is the moment we begin to think we’ve worked the client out.
Not in the ordinary sense of understanding what the client has said. Without some form of understanding, the conversation would be aimless and have no continuity.
What we mean here is the moment we start to feel we’ve got the client worked out. We hear a familiar pattern and think, “Ah, this is about confidence,” or “This is really about their relationship with authority.” We may not say it so bluntly, and we may dress it in careful coaching language, but somewhere inside us we think we know what’s going on for the client, and where the conversation needs to go.
And, of course, sometimes we might be partly right. That’s what makes it so tempting.
This doesn’t mean the coach is arrogant, or thinks they know all the answers. In fact, the temptation often comes from a genuine wish to be useful. We’ve trained in theories and models that help us make sense of things. We may have backgrounds in leadership, psychology, HR, therapy, education, organisational life, or personal development. Naturally, we bring all of that with us to the work we do with our clients. But we also bring our interpretations, our biases, and our sense of ‘knowing’.
The question is whether we can hold what we think we know, lightly enough that it doesn’t close down what the client is still discovering.
A culture that rewards answer
It can be hard to practise unknowing in a culture that rewards answers and certainty.
We live in a time of confident opinions, instant analysis, expert commentary, personality frameworks, diagnostic language, productivity methods, and algorithmic answers. Whatever we’re experiencing, there’s usually a model to explain it, a label to describe it, and a framework to move beyond it.
This has its benefits. Many people have found language for experiences that once felt confusing or isolating. Through the search for knowledge people can become more psychologically literate, more reflective, and more able to understand patterns in themselves and others. This is genuinely useful.
But something else happens when answer-giving becomes the dominant cultural reflex. We can begin to confuse noticing with understanding, explanation with transformation, and interpreting with knowing. We can become so accustomed to making sense of things quickly that we lose the capacity to stay with the uncertainty of what hasn’t yet become clear.
Coaching isn’t immune from this, and can easily absorb the same desire for certainty. A client brings uncertainty, and we want to clarify. A client brings pain, and we want to reframe. A client brings contradiction, and we want to resolve. A client brings a story, and we want to find the pattern beneath it.
None of these impulses are necessarily wrong. Coaching does involve clarification, reframing, recognition, awareness, and action. But when we move too quickly, we may rob the client of something essential: the chance to encounter, and sit with, their own experience before it’s translated or organised by someone else.
This is where the Unknowing Principle, one of our 12 Principles of Transformative Coaching, becomes one of the most valuable stances in coaching.
Unknowing as an act of humility
Unknowing can sound, at first, like a lack of expertise. It can sound as though the coach is passive or deliberately naive. But that misunderstands the principle. Unknowing isn’t the absence of knowledge, rather it’s the refusal to let our knowledge become a premature conclusion.
In the Animas 12 Principles, unknowing is described as more than simply withholding advice. It involves suspending the coach’s assumptions, beliefs, interpretations, and even their broader ideas about success, reality, identity, and what a good life should look like, so that the client’s own sense-making can come forward.
That’s a demanding stance because it asks us to notice not only the obvious ways we might advise, but also the subtle ways we shape the field. The question we choose, the word we emphasise, the pattern we reflect, the interpretation we share, all reveal something about what we think matters. Even when we’re being non-directive, we’re not neutral. We’re always bringing attention somewhere.
The unknowing coach is practising a form of humility about the limits of what they can know from the outside. They may notice something, but they don’t assume it’s the truth. They may offer a reflection, but they leave room for the client to reject it, refine it, or take it somewhere unexpected.
This is skill with restraint – the capacity to bring our experience lightly into the room without allowing it to dominate the client’s own discovery.
The client’s world is not our world
Clients often surprise us with the insights they discover. We think the conversation is about work, and slowly it becomes about belonging. We think the client wants to become more successful, and they discover they no longer want the life in which success matters so much. We think the obstacle is fear, and it turns out to be loyalty. We think the client is stuck because they don’t know what they want, and they realise they do know, but haven’t yet given themselves permission to want it.
These moments are humbling, and they should be, because they remind us that the client’s inner world is not necessarily the same as what appears on the surface.
The client may use words we recognise: confidence, purpose, burnout, boundaries, leadership, identity, imposter syndrome. But their meaning is always particular. Confidence might mean feeling able to speak in a meeting. It might mean being less dependent on approval. It might be connected to their sense of self worth.
If we assume too quickly that we know what the word means, we stop listening.
This is why unknowing sits so closely alongside the phenomenological spirit of transformative coaching: the willingness to stay with the client’s lived experience before interpreting it. The client isn’t bringing us a case study to interpret from the outside. They’re bringing us a world they live inside, and our role is to help them understand that world with more clarity, honesty, and freedom.
Our task is to accompany the client as they discover it more fully for themselves.
The ego of being helpful
There’s another layer to this that’s worth naming, because it’s more personal.
Knowing can feel good. It can make us feel competent. It can reassure us that we’re doing something useful. It can quiet the anxiety that arises when a session feels uncertain or when the client seems to be going in circles. It can protect us from the discomfort of wondering whether we’re doing a good job.
Many coaches will recognise this, if they’re honest. We want to serve the client, but we also want to feel like a good coach. We want the client to leave with clarity. We want to feel that our presence made a difference.
There’s nothing shameful about that. It’s human. But it can become problematic when our need to be useful starts to shape the client’s process.
Sometimes the client needs clarity, action, or challenge. But sometimes they need a space in which clarity hasn’t yet arrived. They need to hear themselves not making sense. They need to feel the tension between two truths. They need to say the same thing three times until the fourth version reveals something different. They need not to be hurried.
A coach who is too attached to being useful may struggle to allow this emergence.
Unknowing asks something quite countercultural of us here. It asks us to trust that not all value is immediately visible. It asks us to tolerate ambiguity without rushing to tidy it. It asks us to let the client have their own pace of discovery, even when we can see a possible route before they can.
This doesn’t mean withholding everything. There are times when a reflection, challenge, or hypothesis is exactly what serves the client. But even then, the intention matters. Are we offering something for the client to consider, or are we trying to get them to see what we see?
There’s a world of difference between the two.
Advice can hide inside questions
Coaches are often taught not to give advice. That’s a useful starting point, but it’s not enough.
Advice can hide inside a question.
A coach might ask, “Have you considered setting a clearer boundary?” or “What would happen if you stopped taking responsibility for them?” or “How could you reframe that more positively?” or “What would your future self tell you to do?”
None of these are inherently bad questions. In the right moment, any of them might be useful. But they can also smuggle in an assumption about what the client should do, or what direction growth should take.
It can be useful to examine the intention underneath the phrasing. Am I genuinely curious? Am I trying to relieve my own discomfort? Am I inviting the client’s discovery, or am I guiding them towards mine?
Unknowing and the courage to challenge
Unknowing doesn’t mean never challenging the client. Nor does it mean treating every client belief as equally useful or beyond question.
A coach can be unknowing and still be robust. In fact, unknowing may make challenge cleaner. When we’re less attached to being right, our challenges can become more exploratory. We’re not confronting the client with our certainty; we’re inviting them to examine something that may matter.
This kind of challenge respects the client’s autonomy. It doesn’t collapse into passivity, but it also doesn’t impose. It’s a more mature form of coaching presence in which the coach is neither absent nor dominating. They’re participating in the inquiry with care, humility, and enough confidence to offer what they notice without needing the client to accept it.
This is where unknowing connects naturally with collaboration. The coach brings themselves, but not as the authority on the client’s life. They bring observations, intuition, knowledge, and challenge, but they remain willing to be corrected by the client’s experience.
Why this matters now
This principle has always mattered, but it may matter especially now.
We’re surrounded by increasingly confident forms of knowing. Social media rewards certainty. Algorithms serve us more of what we already believe. Psychological language travels quickly, often detached from its original context. AI can produce instant interpretations in seconds. Even personal development can become a search for the fastest explanation and the most efficient route to implement change.
In that climate, coaching offers something unusual. It creates a space in which the client can slow down enough to examine the answers they’ve inherited, absorbed, performed, resisted, or mistaken for truth.
That’s a different kind of work. It may not always produce a neat insight in the first twenty minutes, or deliver a lightbulb moment or a paradigm shift. But it honours something essential about human change: that people are more likely to transform when they participate in the discovery of meaning, rather than having meaning handed to them.
Perhaps that’s where real coaching begins. Not in the absence of knowledge, but in the disciplined choice not to let our knowledge arrive before the client has had the chance to meet themselves.
