How coaching can strengthen your relationships

Relationship challenges aren't limited to romantic partnerships. As with couple relationships, all other kinds of relationships can falter, stall, and experience difficulties. These include relationships such as those between parents and their young or adult children, siblings, and friends. There are also many relationships in our professional and work lives. In this article, I discuss some ideas about how coaching can help relationships of all kinds.

Misunderstandings can occur across all the aforementioned kinds of relationships, and power dynamics within them are not necessarily unhealthy but can become so. When relationships become confusing, hurtful, or frustrating, many people don’t feel skilled or well-resourced to address disagreements or fallings-out.

What tends to happen afterwards is that people avoid or withdraw from the relationship, emotionally, physically, psychologically, or some combination of the three. This can continue for some time. While these methods can sometimes help cool down heightened emotions, when resuming these relationships is unavoidable, what transpires is that people don’t resume feeling any more skilled or resourced in creating and maintaining safe and healthy relationships than before.

The tendency might be to return with defences up and assumptions held that are not checked out. Very often, whatever caused the misunderstanding isn’t addressed or given the opportunity to be resolved. Not resolving can, at one end of the spectrum, create fertile ground for tense, difficult atmospheres, with faint, elusive hopes of avoiding misunderstandings again.

At the other end, the relationship develops into a cycle of disagreements and falling-outs. These kinds of relationships can be exhausting and depleting; they often contain large portions of resentment, hurt, and unresolved difficulties. 

Are there alternative ways of relating?

Some people might think that safe and healthy relationships are free of mistakes, difficult conversations or even conflict. Maybe that is possible at times, but there will often be times when issues or differences arise, and people find themselves at a loss as to how to either resolve issues or maintain the relationship, or both.

Safe and healthy relationships can be characterised by the ability to recognise that, when differences and disagreements arise, they can be acknowledged and handled.

They also involve the ability to use relational skills, including communication and assertiveness skills, to address these differences and resolve conflicts. Healthy relationships also involve respecting both yourself and the other person, while recognising and valuing your differences.

How coaching can help

A first appointment with a coach can help them begin learning about you and assessing your situation and goals, which will help them determine how many appointments you might need to achieve those goals.

Whilst most coaching appointments are attended individually, such as when receiving coaching to build confidence at work, there are times when coaching may involve two people. This is particularly common in relationship coaching, where a couple may attend sessions together.

What will work for you as an individual or couple coaching client is assessed in a collaborative and transparent way, allowing coaching sessions to be tailored to your needs and objectives. As those objectives are clarified, we simultaneously begin working towards them. Where helpful, blending coaching models that help to break down goals into realistic steps, time frames and measurable stages might be used.

Building confidence

Let's use an example. One client's objective may be to prepare for a first date they have already arranged. In this case, the focus may be on communication skills, including what to talk about, how to ask open questions, how to listen, and how to maintain a conversation, some of which we might identify and practise during coaching sessions.

Another person's objective may be to meet people and begin dating. Perhaps this includes distinguishing between preferred ways of meeting people, such as online or offline.

Either way, coaching can excel at helping clients evaluate current resources and skills, whilst identifying and developing new skills to achieve their individual objectives.

Improving communication

Take a slightly different example of someone who has learned that one way to get what they want and be heard is by shouting. Shouting can be the most needed form of communication in some situations; it can help express anger, fear or much-needed boundaries. However, whilst this form of communicating works to a degree, it will affect the overall quality, enjoyment, goodwill and trust in the relationship.

For both people in the relationship to be heard and considered, and to negotiate well, the hypothetical client's objectives in this example are to rely less on shouting as the primary way of communicating wants and needs, and to develop alternative ways of communicating. This is where coaching comes in.

Whether working with an individual or a couple, these examples illustrate how developing and expanding relationship skills can improve relationship quality.

Coaching recognises that humans are relational beings who both thrive and struggle in them. We can’t do without them, but sometimes we get stuck in unhelpful ways of relating and may need help in realising the supportive, healthier aspects of relationships.

As well as identifying some general and specific features of healthy relating and healthy conflict, coaching can help build confidence to try out new communication skills. Coaching can help you recognise underdeveloped skills and support you in developing new ones. The process keeps you, your goals, your strengths, and your potential at the centre of your coaching journey.