You Don’t Need to Fix Your Clients—You Need to Hold the Space

If you’ve ever sat in a coaching session and felt that tug in your chest—the one that says “just tell them what to do!”—you’re not alone. Especially if you’re coming from another provider background like therapy, nutrition, or medicine, it can feel counterintuitive to not offer your client solutions, education, or clear direction right away.

Coaching asks something different of us. It asks us to trust that the client holds wisdom. It asks us to pause our urge to fix. It asks us to resist filling every silence with strategy. And that is hard.

In fact, one of the most challenging things about learning to be a health coach—especially in a program like Nested where most students are licensed providers—is unlearning. Unlearning the instinct to lead with knowledge. Unlearning the idea that being “helpful” means offering insight or a plan. Unlearning the subtle ways we take over the session, even with the best of intentions.

And I’ll be honest—some of the hardest, most confronting (and most rewarding) continuing education I’ve ever taken was in coaching. Not because it wasn’t intellectually rigorous (it absolutely was), but because of what it required of me emotionally. It asked me to tolerate my own discomfort. To sit with my own distress. To witness my reflex to jump in and fix—and to gently choose not to. Again and again.

That kind of learning doesn’t just change your practice. It changes you.

Because when we stop trying to fix, we start to see. We notice more. We listen more deeply. We attune to the moments when a client’s own insight starts to surface—not because we delivered it, but because we created the safety and space for it to emerge.

And what emerges from that kind of space is often far more sustainable than any advice we could offer. When clients are invited to connect to their own wisdom, they build something they can trust—not just a to-do list, but a deeper sense of knowing. That’s the real goal of trauma-informed, nervous-system-aware coaching: not to direct the client toward our version of growth, but to walk with them while they uncover their own.

It’s slow work. And brave work. And at times, it will stretch your tolerance more than you expected.

But every time you resist the urge to rescue, every time you hold the silence a little longer, every time you witness a client make meaning in their own way—you're practicing something radical:

You’re trusting that they’re not broken.
You’re trusting that they don’t need fixing.
You’re trusting that space—not solutions—is what heals.

And that? That’s coaching.