What Simplifying Coaching Reminded Me About Presence, Trust, and Doing Less
When I picked up Simplifying Coaching by Claire Pedrick, I didn’t expect to feel so seen.
The book is short. Spare. Unassuming. And yet, within a few pages, I found myself wanting to underline almost every sentence—not because it was saying something new, but because it was naming something essential.
This isn’t a book about technique or mastery as performance. It’s a quiet, steady invitation back to what matters most in coaching: presence, partnership, and creating space for the client to think.
In a recent episode of The Coaching Book Club Podcast, Ken McKellar and I explored this book together. What stayed with me wasn’t a framework or a model—it was a deep sense of relief.
Here’s what continues to resonate.
Doing Less Creates More Room for Thinking
One of the central ideas Claire Pedrick offers is deceptively simple:
the more we do as coaches, the less space the thinker has to think.
That line landed in my body.
Early in my coaching career, I believed my value lived in my activity—my questions, my insights, my ability to “help” the client move forward. Simplifying Coaching gently dismantled that belief. It reminded me that the client’s own meaning is always more powerful than anything I might try to construct for them.
My job isn’t to create meaning.
It’s to create space.
Claire writes that transformation happens when clients make their own meaning, not when we make it for them. That distinction has reshaped how I think about my role—not as someone who fills the session, but as someone who protects it.
ICF Core Competency 5: Maintains Presence
Because presence isn’t about being impressive—it’s about being available.
Mastery Isn’t Performance — It’s Trust
Another idea I keep returning to is this:
mastery in coaching looks simple from the outside.
Not because it lacks depth, but because it’s uncluttered.
Claire names something many coaches feel but rarely say out loud—the temptation to perform. To ask the perfect question. To prove our value. To “do coaching” in a visible way.
But mastery, she suggests, is unlearning.
Letting go of over-functioning.
Trusting the process.
Trusting the client.
One line from the book has stayed with me:
“Mastery is demonstrated when the coach evidences a complete curiosity undiluted by a need to perform.”
That’s a high bar—and a compassionate one.
ICF Core Competency 5: Maintains Presence
Because curiosity disappears the moment performance takes over.
Contracting as Partnership, Not Procedure
The heart of Simplifying Coaching may be its attention to contracting—not as a formality, but as an act of partnership.
Claire returns again and again to three deceptively simple questions:
What are we doing today?
How will we do it?
How will we know we’ve done it?
When we slow down enough to answer these together, something shifts. The session becomes shared territory rather than coach-led direction. Expectations settle. The thinker knows where they’re headed—and why.
Claire’s airplane analogy makes this memorable: if the client thinks they’re going to London and we quietly fly them to Munich, no amount of insight will make that feel satisfying.
Contracting isn’t control.
It’s alignment.
ICF Core Competency 3: Establishes and Maintains Agreements
Because clarity creates the conditions for movement.
Letting the Client Lead — Even Mid-Flight
One of my favorite reminders from the book is that exploring is the thinker’s job. Our role is to support the process—not steer the content.
Tools and models, Claire suggests, are a last resort—not a first move.
As a newer coach, I clung tightly to tools. They gave me something to hold onto when I didn’t yet trust the process—or myself. Reading this book helped me see that tools can be useful after trust is established, not instead of it.
The most powerful line in the book, for me, was this:
“The tool of greatest value in any conversation is the person you are with.”
It’s both grounding and challenging.
ICF Core Competency 7: Evokes Awareness
Because insight emerges when the client is leading the exploration.
Simplicity as Safety
There’s a section of the book that changed how I think about pacing.
Too many questions, too quickly, can overwhelm the nervous system. I’ve witnessed sessions where the intensity alone made me want to withdraw—not because the questions were bad, but because there was no space to land.
Claire quotes the poet Jorge Luis Borges:
“Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.”
That line reframed presence for me—not as passivity, but as discernment.
ICF Core Competency 4: Cultivates Trust and Safety
Because safety is often created by slowing down, not speeding up.
How I’m Using This in My Coaching Practice
Since reading Simplifying Coaching, I’ve been experimenting with:
Shortening my questions—and leaving more space afterward
Contracting more deliberately, and revisiting the agreement mid-session
Noticing when my urge to “help” is actually my own anxiety
Treating tools as invitations, not interventions
Trusting silence as a place where thinking happens
What I keep coming back to is this:
doing less isn’t disengagement—it’s confidence.
A Final Word
Simplifying Coaching reminded me that coaching is not about adding value through effort. It’s about believing—deeply—that the client is already whole, capable, and creative.
When we truly hold that belief, our work becomes quieter.
And paradoxically, more powerful.
If you’ve ever felt the pressure to perform in a coaching session, this book offers something rare: permission to stop trying so hard.
And if you’re listening closely, it offers something even better—relief.
I’d love to hear from you:
Where might simplifying create more space for thinking in your work?
