Your coaching client keeps veering off topic. How can you steer them back on course?

Active listening involves listening attentively, without judgment or criticism, and perceiving the emotions behind the speaker's words. By asking pertinent and focused questions, the coachee feels truly heard and becomes aware when they are straying off topic. Even if this isn't the case, active listening enables us to better redirect the conversation, ensuring that the dialogue remains aligned with the intended subject.

To enhance your active listening skills, practice reading between the lines. Pay attention to non-verbal cues such as tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. When you notice a shift in their demeanor, there's something important they're trying to convey. Reflect back what the client said. Use phrases like, "It sounds like you're feeling..." or "What I'm hearing is that..." to show you're fully engaged and trying to understand their perspective. This validates their emotions and encourages them to share more openly. Instead of yes-or-no questions, ask "Can you tell me more about that?" or "How did that make you feel?" The client may provide more context and detail, so you gain a richer understanding of their situation.

To maintain the thread, it is important to establish the objective of the coaching process, and the objective of each session. This allows the client to stay more focused, and allows the coach to keep the conversation moving toward goals.

By asking specific and targeted questions, you can help bring the conversation back to the main topic and encourage your client to focus on the key issues they need to address. For example, if your client starts discussing a unrelated topic, you can gently redirect the conversation by asking, "How does this relate to the goals we have set for our coaching sessions?" This will prompt your client to reflect on the relevance of their thoughts and guide them back to the main focus of the session.

Each session has a goal, which must be achieved to leave the client in a resourceful state. And each session has a duration. Therefore, keeping the coachee aware of the time window available to address the topics of the session can be an important technique for reorienting the conversation when the client begins to wander.

It's a good idea to let your client know before a session that you may need to redirect them if they get to far off topic. You may be able to come up with a signal or something that let's them know it's time to refocus.

What might appear to be 'off topic' could actually be the 'real' topic of concern for the client, and then again it might not. The coach's role isn't necessarily to steer the topic back to the one that was originally agreed to be the one for the session (if such contracting took place), but to check in with the client if there is something else they need to explore and what value and insights they want to obtain from this different avenue. It's not about being wed to a topic, but the session being in aid of useful new thinking for the client.