Two women talking at a table — on the left, question marks surrounding the client; on the right, a stream of light turning them into ordered symbols (a map, a chart, a path) shared by the other woman — a symbol of moving from coaching questions to concrete knowledge | Balance BCC

Working method  · 

When a Coaching Session Must Become Mentoring

Coaching assumes the answer is already inside you — my role is to help you hear it. That works for most sessions. But not for all of them. Sometimes the problem you bring isn't an inner block at all. It's a gap in knowledge you simply don't have yet.

It happens less often than you might think, but it does happen. A client asks how to structure the team she has just started managing. Another asks how to price his services in a market he doesn't yet know. In neither case will a good coaching question surface the answer — because there isn't one waiting inside to be found. There is, instead, room for knowledge I can simply share.

Why coaching sometimes isn't enough

Coaching and mentoring differ on one very concrete assumption. In coaching, I assume you already have the resources, values and experience needed to find your own answer — my role is to ask the questions that help you reach it. In mentoring, I assume the opposite: that you don't have a good answer yet, simply because you haven't had the chance to gain it. My role then changes — from someone asking questions to someone sharing concrete knowledge and experience.

Neither approach is "better." They are simply answers to different situations. The problem starts when I stick to one method on principle — and try to coach out of you something that was never there to begin with.

Three situations where mentoring helps more than another question

A newly promoted manager asks how to talk to her team

At first glance this looks like a coaching topic: confidence, fear of judgement, anxiety about a new role. Sometimes it genuinely is — I wrote about this at length in the article on doubts after a promotion.

But sometimes, digging further, I hear something else: the client isn't afraid of the conversation with her team. She has simply never given feedback before, never planned priorities for other people, never worked out how to split responsibility without overloading anyone. That isn't a block. It's a missing toolset. And no number of good questions will add the tools that were never there.

Signal: the question starts with "how do I do this," not "why am I afraid to do this."

A client asks how to price their services

Someone starting their own business, or moving into freelance work, often arrives with a confidence question: "I'm not sure I have the right to charge that much." Sometimes that's true — and then coaching helps uncover where that lack of confidence comes from.

But sometimes the real issue is different: the client genuinely doesn't know the realities of their market — the going rates, how billing models work, what clients at their stage typically expect. That isn't a question of self-worth. It's a gap in information that can simply be filled in.

A client is stuck in a decision because hard facts are missing

Some difficult decisions are resolved by sorting through values and fears — that's the territory of my article on difficult decisions. But not all of them. Sometimes someone can't decide whether to accept a collaboration offer because they can't judge whether the contract terms are fair market practice. Sometimes they can't plan a career move because they don't know what hiring looks like in their field right now.

In that situation, another "how does this decision feel to you" question doesn't move things forward. What moves things forward is a concrete piece of information the client doesn't yet have.

We won't solve this with coaching alone — you need mentoring right now. Do you agree that I step out of the coaching role for a moment and become your mentor instead?

What this shift looks like in practice

I never change method quietly. When I notice that the questions I'm asking circle around something you simply haven't had a chance to know yet, I say so directly — in words close to the ones above. It isn't a formality. It's the moment I hand the decision back to you: do you want me to share knowledge here, or would you rather stay with questions?

Sometimes that shift lasts five minutes — I give you a concrete piece of information and we return to the coaching mode. Sometimes it takes up the rest of the session. Either way, the agreement we're working under stays clear: you know which role I'm in at any given moment, and you know you agreed to it.

When I stay with coaching, even when I'm tempted to advise

There's another side to this boundary too. It's easy to confuse "I don't know what to do" with "I don't know how to do it" — and those are two different problems. If you already have all the information you need and still can't decide, handing you a ready-made answer won't solve anything. It might even hurt, by taking away the sense that this decision is yours.

That's why shifting to mentoring isn't a default mode I happily fall back on when a session gets difficult. It's an exception I use deliberately — exactly when knowledge is missing, not when courage is.

How you know this might be the moment

A few signals worth noticing — in yourself, if you're the client, or in the conversation, if you're the one running sessions:

  • you have a specific question and you're looking for a substantive answer, not space to think,
  • you keep returning to the same topic session after session because you're missing knowledge, not courage,
  • your questions start with "how," not "why am I afraid,"
  • a coaching conversation leaves you with: "I need someone to show me this, not ask me again what I think about it."

If you'd like something more concrete than self-observation, take the short coaching-or-mentoring quiz — 5 questions, instant result.

Flexibility in method isn't a departure from principle. It's a responsibility toward you.

In short: the method should serve you, not the other way around

Coaching, mentoring and consulting aren't three competing schools you have to choose between once and for all. They're three different answers to three different situations — sometimes you need space to hear your own answer, and sometimes you need someone to simply tell you how it's done.

A good session doesn't cling to one method at all costs, just because that's how it was planned at the start. It holds on to you — and to what you actually need in that moment.

If a session calls for it, I'll say so directly — and I'll always ask before I change the role I'm working in with you.

Not sure whether you need coaching or something else?

At Balance BCC I work flexibly — sometimes that's a coaching conversation, sometimes mentoring, sometimes consulting. Always transparently, and always with your consent.

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