Clare and Steve discuss coaching the person not the problem. Maybe it’s our patterns of learning through education and organisational working that leads to us as coaches trying to fix the problem, resolve the issue, help achieve the goal? But what might we be missing by not fully noticing the person in front of us - how they show up, their baseline state, what is meaningful for them, how we experience them etc. because we are drawn to the presenting issue and a desire to fix that? Is that a learned behaviour and are we overly focused on demonstrating value? To what extent are they as clients, and we as coaches, hiding behind, or waving to distract from, what really might be true or needed? What happens if we coach the person and what does that mean?

Claire Pedrick - the ‘wavy people’ - https://www.3dcoaching.com/blog/3d-ideas-934-it-only-takes-a-word/

(See also - “The Advice Trap” by Michael Bungay Stainer, who refers to them as ‘ghosts’ - the people who aren’t in the room) https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/more-coach-like-michael-bungay-stanier/