The ‘coach voice’: how to be yourself in coaching conversations
Last night I went to a live recording of Something Borrowed, hosted by poet Harry Baker.
His guest was poet and performer Georgie Jones and at one point he asked her a question that activated my work brain!
He asked about her style and if you’ve ever seen Georgie perform, you’ll know what he meant. She chats and tells stories. She’s funny and warm and very herself… and then, almost without you noticing, she’s in the poem. There’s no grand announcement. No deep breath and moving away from the mic and back again. No performance shift. You just suddenly realise, oh… here we are - she’s sharing her poem. Harry asked if that was deliberate and how it came to be like that for her.
Georgie said that when she first started, like most poets, she imitated other poets. She put on what she called a ‘poetry voice’. A version of what she thought poetry should sound like.
And then, over time, she said she learned to do something different and she stopped putting a voice on the poetry. Instead, she started to put her voice into the poetry.
I loved this so much I grabbed my notes app immediately.
Because it reminded me of something I see all the time in coaching.
The ‘coach voice’
When I’m working with new coaches, I often notice a shift happen in training sessions. We’ll be chatting beforehand and they sound completely like themselves. It’s natural and conversational - very human.
And then they begin to coach.
And suddenly… a kind of performance appears.
Their voice slows down.
It gets lower. Softer. There might be some slow nods, even a slight head tilt. A very deliberate pause before speaking. Ah, the ‘coach voice’ has appeared.
Now, let me be clear. If you are naturally slow, spacious, softly spoken, then that’s beautiful. That’s your voice and you shouldn’t change it.
But so often, it isn’t. I think it’s often a learned performance or posture of what coaching is supposed to look and sound like.
And the risk is that the moment performance enters the space, presence can leave it because you’re no longer fully with the client.
Instead, you’re managing how you sound, how you look and how you’re being perceived.
You’re acting the role of coach rather than being in the practice of coaching.
Putting your voice into the coaching
What Georgie said applies so directly here. I don’t think that you have to put a coaching voice on. I think you can put your voice into the coaching. You can speak exactly as you would in any thoughtful, attentive conversation.
You can laugh.
You can be animated.
You can be direct.
You can sound like yourself.
Coaching isn’t about performing neutrality - it’s about practising presence and that’s much easier to access when you’re not busy managing a persona. And clients don’t need you to sound like a coach - they need you to be with them and to meet them where they are.
When your face gives you away
There are, of course, other considerations. We do need awareness of what we bring into the space through our expressions, our reactions and our energy. How might any of these be colluding with our clients - what might enthusiastic nods be affirming to them?
Sometimes coaches worry about what they call their ‘poker face’ (or lack of one). We hear something surprising or confusing and our faces react before our professional brain catches up.
Maybe rather than trying to eliminate that entirely, perhaps transparency is best. Name it in your contracting - if you find it hard to maintain a perfectly neutral expression you might say:
‘My face can be quite animated - if you spot something and you’re not sure, ask me’. Or perhaps notice it yourself - ‘I’m noticing that I’m finding it hard to stay neutral - I imagine that could be quite painful, does that mean anything to you / what are you noticing in this moment?’
That helps to keep the space cleaner and can help potential collusion (or collision) turn into curiosity. And it models openness rather than perfection.
From imitation to integration
Every coach goes through a phase of imitation - I imagine it’s throughout their careers - we learn models, frameworks or question style. We like the way our supervisor or peer coaches ask questions as we listen to them and absorb their pacing and their language.
I think that’s normal and it’s how craft develops.
But the work, over time, is integration. Letting the coaching live inside your natural voice rather than sitting on top of it. This is what resonated with me when Georgie Jones said she moved from adding a ‘poetry voice’ to her own voice inside the poem.
When that happens, coaching becomes less performative and more relational. For me, it’s much less about sounding ‘right’ and more about being real.
Something practical
If you’re a coach reading this, here’s something to reflect on: When do you notice yourself putting on your coach voice? What changes in your tone, pace or posture when you begin coaching? And what might shift if you trusted your own voice a little more?
Because the truth is, your presence is far more powerful than your performance.
And I do believe that clients can feel the difference.