Sometimes coachees come to coaching with the idea that something is broken and needs to be fixed. In their eyes, the coach becomes the magician who is invited to either bring the magical question or the magical solution.

In such situations, the change the coachee is looking for is there to allow him to become who he should be or who he would like to be. People heard numerous times in their careers how others are successful, and search now for a way to become like these people. Or they’ve grown up with ideas of how one has to be and have since been trying to be like these people or want to become the exact opposite.

As they’ve tried to achieve this change for a while and find themselves helpless in achieving their goal, they seek a coach and hope that he will know. It’s a very simple setup for a relationship, one person knows and the other doesn’t.

While there will be many circumstances in which it may work, it shifts the responsibility for achieving the result to the coach. For the coachee it is an opportunity to unconsciously settle in the role of being helpless and wait until he will be saved. That is to be magically transformed into who they want to be.

But change doesn’t happen through trying. It happens through doing.

It starts by accepting who one is, how one acts, and what one knows. That awareness of self is what allows us to understand what is possible now and in this moment. At the same time it is the trust, that by acting and being fully present to it, a change can be created.

It may not change us and how we experience ourselves. However, whatever we did changed us.

It is a different way to describe what Yoda told Luke Skywalker: “NO. Try not. DO. Or do not. There is no Try”. Knowing that he hasn’t ever lifted a spaceship before doesn’t mean that Luke can’t do it. But it’s only once he has done it, that he becomes someone who can use the force to lift a spaceship.

Becoming a Jedi is the result of having used the force often enough. Of having worked on his potential to develop it.

There is no need to be a Jedi to become one. But wanting to become one requires being one. Which means to see the Jedi in oneself as well as to see how far one still is from being a Jedi.

In essence, it is working on it one step after the other.

In a coaching relationship, starting the work on change thus involves seeing how one has been changing until now to understand how change works for oneself.