Reasons To End Your Coaching Relationship

There are a number of reasons to end your coaching relationship when both your interests and those of the coachee are taken into account. Once you have helped your coachee to reach the goals they had identified at the outset of the coaching process your current working relationship will naturally come to an end (see post coaching relationship) however there may also be times when you have to take responsibility for ending your relationship sooner than expected.

Reasons to end your coaching relationship include:

Your coachee is not responding to the help you are giving

You may find many times when your coachee doesn’t appear to respond immediately to their coaching sessions and as good coach you will naturally pick up on this and explore the underlying causes and address them. However there are times when you may feel that you have tried everything and they still appear not to be making progress, and you may conclude that someone else such as a therapist, counsellor a different coach may be able to better help them or they are simply not in a place to move forward at that point in time.

Insufficient Rapport between you

Just occasionally you may find, despite your hardest efforts, that you struggle to build up really good rapport between you and your coachee. Since excellent rapport is at the heart of coaching you will probably find that your coachee fails to open up to you or your coachee is less than responsive the coaching process. If this si the case it really doesn’t make sense to carry on.

The coaching contract has been broken

Perhaps your coaching contract has been broken in some ways which makes an equal two-way relationship too difficult to recreate. Sometimes you might find that your coachee has missed one too many sessions, turned up late without a good reason or has failed to pay you for your services. In these cases trust between you will start to be broken down and it will be difficult to maintain an open and positive relationship moving forward. Of course the key is to make it clear at the outset when you are ‘designing’ your coaching relationship, what is expected of each other and if at any time you feel the contract is being broken you need to address it at the earliest appropriate moment. However if the contract has been broken without good reason and you feel that the relationship can no longer exist on an equal basis then this is the time to call the relationship to an end.

Your own values and beliefs are being compromised

A good coach is one who is non-judgemental and can keep their own thoughts, prejudices and opinions out of the coaching conversation, afterall you are there to facilitate a conversation for the benefit of the coachee rather than direct or give advice, that may or may not be right for them. However there may be times when a coachee needs help in an area that is so fundamentally against your beliefs and principles that helping them move forward would be compromising your own values and integrity. For example a coach so fundamentally against abortion may really struggle to objectively struggle to help a woman wanting an abortion as they may see this as compromising their own integrity.

You are bound by legal obligations

Whilst you can agree that your sessions with your coachee remain confidential you also need to state at the outset that if your coachee reveals any sort of criminal activity that would necessitate reporting, then confidentiality would no longer be possible. If you find yourself in such a situation then this has to be the most clear cut of reasons to end your coaching relationship and do it immediately.