Okay, so maybe this isn’t a coach’s biggest challenge, but it’s at least in the Top 10 for many of us: coaching a topic we know a lot about.

For new coaches, this might sound very counter-intuitive. After all, it seems like a far bigger challenge would come from coaching on a topic you know nothing about. It’s true that coaching on an unfamiliar topic has its own challenges (maybe we’ll cover that in a separate post). But too much knowledge can be far worse than not enough. Here are three reasons why:

• Reduced Listening. Since our brains are incredible pattern-matching machines, your coaching brain wants to match your client’s topic to what you already know, which reduces your natural openness and curiosity. It’s hard to listen when you’re busy matching what’s being said to what you already know. And your listening really gets reduced when your brain finds big bucket of knowledge to match with your client’s topic.
• Inferior Questions. When you know what has worked for you (or someone else), it’s hard to un-know this. Your storehouse of knowledge influences the type and quality of questions you hear. While you might avoid asking outright leading questions, your coaching questions risk being flavored by the solution you’ve already experienced.
• Lack of Presence. One of the most powerful things about coaching is the way a coach shows up — fully present with the client and responding holistically to what is happening right here, right now. If you know too much about the topic, it’s easy to get distracted by all the other clients who’ve dealt with this topic or by your own experience. You’ll not only lose focus, but you’ll lose the connection to the client.

So how does a coach meet this difficult challenge? One option is to only coach clients who have issues you know very little about, but this doesn’t seem like a very good solution since it limits your options for whom to coach and also makes marketing very difficult. Instead, try these suggestions:

• Take a big gulp of humility. When you first realize the topic is one that you know “a lot” about, try to remember that in the vast expanse of human experience, your knowledge is pretty limited. When you put yourself in your rightful place, you’ll keep your knowledge out of the client’s way.
• Leverage your knowledge for safety, not awareness. When you’re familiar with your client’s stuff, use this as an opportunity to help your client feel connected, safe, and hopeful. Instead of looking for a way to get what’s in your head into your client’s head, look for a way to let your experience put your client at ease. When a client learns that others have faced this same topic and have found a way forward, it can free them up to do their best thinking.
• Have a plan for sharing. Sometimes coaches need to share their knowledge with their clients. But we always do this with great intentionality – it’s a tactic we choose from time to time, not an automatic reaction we can’t help but do. Having a plan means you’ve thought ahead of time about when to share, how to share, and why to share. And a plan always has an eye toward keeping ownership of new awareness with the client.

What about you? When have your faced this challenge and how’d it go? What are you learning about handling this challenge as a coach? If this isn’t one of your biggest challenges, what is?