What Our Coaches
Actually Think

“What does it look like when a coach is filling silence with a question rather than genuinely responding to what the client communicated?”

That mostly happens when coaches are not yet comfortable with silence and are still pressured to come up with a question quickly after the client stops talking. There's this opinion that if I stop and sit quiet, the client might think I don't know what I'm doing and I'm not meeting my professional obligation. No - silence goes both ways. A good coach respects the client's silence, and they respect their own silence, because they understand that it's in the silence where thinking occurs on both sides. The coach should not be thinking about their response while the client is talking. That means the coach snaps out of their connection, snaps out of their full presence with the client, and does something that does not serve the client. So when the client stops talking, that's when the coach goes into the thinking pattern and takes as much time as they need to come up with a response to what the client has just communicated.