Inspect What You Expect

Have you ever finished a coaching session and wondered whether anything really happened? Your client may have appreciated the conversation, perhaps even thanked you for your time together, yet something in you feels unsettled. You’ve been working with this person for months, listening to familiar stories, recognizing patterns, and watching them return to places you thought they might have moved beyond. You care about them, you believe in the work, and still you find yourself wondering whether you’re making a difference.

I wonder how familiar that experience might be, particularly for coaches who have spent much of their professional lives being responsible for results. Perhaps you came to coaching after years of leading organizations, building businesses, or helping teams navigate difficult decisions. You learned to anticipate problems, recognize what was needed, and move things forward. Those capacities helped you succeed, and they may be part of what makes you a thoughtful and capable coach today. Yet the expectations that accompany them don’t necessarily disappear when we enter a different kind of relationship with another person.

Many years ago, when I was working in corporate America, I heard a saying that has stayed with me: Inspect what you expect. At the time, it made perfect sense. Expectations were part of how we organized our work, understood accountability, and measured progress. We established goals, paid attention to what was happening, and made adjustments when things weren’t going as planned.

What I didn’t understand then was how much of my own relationship with expectations had been shaped long before I entered the workplace. I grew up with ideas about what it meant to succeed, to be educated, to become financially secure, and to follow a path that would allow me to find my place in the world. Some of those expectations served me well, while others took much longer to recognize.

Jerry Colonna explores something similar in his book Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to Belong. He invites us to consider how our earliest experiences of belonging, including the expectations of our families and communities, continue to shape who we become. We learn what is valued, what brings approval, and sometimes what parts of ourselves are better left out of view. These ways of finding our place in the world can become so familiar that we hardly notice them.

I wonder how often they accompany us into our coaching relationships.

A coach may have spent years becoming someone who knows how to help, who remains composed when others are struggling, or who can recognize a problem and find a way through it. But what happens when a client isn’t ready to move forward, when a familiar story returns, or when the work begins to feel uncomfortable?

Perhaps you notice yourself wanting to offer another perspective, ask a more useful question, or help the client recognize something that seems obvious. There may be impatience, uncertainty, or a feeling that you aren’t being particularly helpful. Sometimes you notice it in your body before you’ve made sense of it: a tightening in your shoulders, a change in your breathing, or an impulse to fill a silence that has become difficult to tolerate.

In my work as a coaching supervisor, I am interested in these moments. They offer a way of becoming curious about what is happening in the relationship, including what the coach is experiencing while trying to understand the client.

Someone who repeatedly avoids conflict may have learned long ago that disagreement threatens belonging. Someone who intellectualizes their experience may have discovered that thinking was safer than feeling. What appears to be resistance may be protecting a relationship or an identity that has helped that person navigate the world.

And the coach may be protecting something as well. Perhaps a sense of competence, a wish to be helpful, or a deeply held belief about what it means to do good work.

Recognizing these patterns doesn’t necessarily mean we’re ready to explore what lies underneath them. Some of what we carry is connected to very early experiences of acceptance, disappointment, or losing our place with someone important to us. Building a relationship in which those feelings can be approached takes time, and neither the coach nor the client can know exactly when there will be enough trust to venture further.

That can be frustrating. Clients want to experience change, and coaches want to know their work matters. Yet some of the changes we hope to support involve ways of being that have taken a lifetime to develop. A client may be discovering whether disagreement can be tolerated, whether disappointment will lead to withdrawal, or whether they can bring something less polished into the conversation without losing the regard of the person sitting across from them. These moments may not look like progress, particularly when we’re expecting insight, action, or a change in behavior.

I find myself wondering how easily we can begin to measure a relationship by what appears to be happening rather than attending to what is developing between us.

I still hear that old saying, Inspect what you expect, although these days it invites me to consider something quite different from what I understood all those years ago. When a coach begins to question whether their client is making progress, I become curious about the expectations the coach may be carrying into the relationship. What have they come to believe about being useful, about doing good work, or about what change is supposed to look like? And how might those expectations be influencing what they’re able to see, hear, or tolerate in another person?

Perhaps there is something worth exploring in the space between what we hope will happen and what is actually unfolding.