(This article was originally posted on The Voice Nook on Substack.)

Hi friends!

It’s a new year and already so much has been happening. Normally, I might use the first email of the year to set a fresh container — but if you don’t mind, I’d love to jump straight into something I’ve been sitting with lately.

One of the main tenets of professional coaching is that the client has complete authority over themselves.

A coach’s job is not to tell the client who to be or what to do.

Rather, a coach’s job is to help the client develop their own understanding of who they are, who they want to be, and then choose the tools, skills and practices they feel will support them best.

The most important reason for this is that the coach doesn’t have the client’s lived experience.

The coach only has a teeny tiny window into the life of the client, as shared by the client. The coach, therefore, could not possibly know what the client needs to do, because the coach does not have the full picture.

This concept did not, of course, originate within the modern coaching profession.

The field of epistemology, or “the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge” has roots going all the way back to the days of Plato and Aristotle. The word itself comes from the Greek epistēmē (knowledge) + logos (study).

Within epistemology is the concept of epistemic humility, which “refers to a posture of scientific observation rooted in the recognition that…knowledge of the world is always interpreted, structured, and filtered by the observer.”

(I’m intentionally using Wikipedia as my source here, as it embodies the very principle of epistemic humility — knowledge shaped by many observers, always open to revision.)

In a coaching relationship, the client is the observer of the conditions of their own life and the coach is the observer of the client. As you can imagine, it would be impossible within the practical limitations of a coaching relationship for both parties to share the same understanding of the client’s experience of any given situation.

In a coaching relationship, authority necessarily resides with the client, while the coach provides perspectives, tools, reflections, ideas for inquiry, and practices to help guide the client to their own truth as only they can know it.

Sometimes, clients say, ‘please just tell me what to do!’
Sometimes, coaches just want to tell clients what to do.

And we leave a lot of space for grace as both parties show up in the fullness of their human condition. 🙂

But baking this concept of epistemic humility (or whatever it’s called in modern professional coach training) into the coaching experience is one of the most meaningful tools for personal transformation.

It invites the client to develop the courage to share openly and vulnerably about their personal experiences and to be seen for who they are and through the lens of their own views, beliefs and understanding of the world.

It allows the client to develop a practice of deep self-trust, which often requires bravely shedding, reframing, or completely razing and rebuilding their views, beliefs, and behaviors.

At the same time, it requires the coach to remain open, curious and nonjudgemental. It requires the coach to continuously check and recheck their own beliefs, views, biases, understandings, adaptive patterns, relational behaviors, communication approach, tools, ego, and so much more.

Truthfully, it can get reeeeally really sticky sometimes.

That’s why boundaries, expectations and agreements that honor and respect the needs of both the client and the coach are set at the beginning of the engagement. This is to ensure a safe and strong container within which the client can explore, evolve and unfold into their personal truth with the careful facilitation of the coach.

It is the genuine care taken to lovingly witness the other person that is the most transformative element of coaching.

People who seek coaching are usually following the path of self-improvement in their search to fulfill one of a few universal human needs: safety, dignity and belonging.

Underneath situation-specific questions such as: how do I speak up more clearly in a meeting are deeper questions such as:

Am I good enough?
How do I trust myself?
How do I know it’s ok to be me?
How do I be more authentic?
How do I know it’s my turn to speak?

In theory, meeting these human needs effectively works best when each person in a relationship shows up with epistemic humility, ready to treat each other as a full person, a respected knower and observer.

Yet, in reality this is incredibly difficult to practice because we live in a complex society wherein:

• Definitions of safety, dignity and belonging vary widely

• Resources continuously become more consolidated in the hands of a few

• Those in positions of power deploy manipulative strategies to drive agendas

Owning our voice necessarily always starts with the self. Developing an understanding of who we are and expanding our capacity for self-trust and self-love. Practicing respecting and believing in ourselves as knowers and observers.

But our relationship with our self-trust doesn’t evolve in a vacuum. It is shaped by whether others treat us as credible knowers of our own experiences.

We are taught to distrust ourselves.

We are taught that certain people or groups are more credible knowers or observers and others are not.

In order to feel truly comfortable in your own life and experience of the world, building self-trust also includes taking a closer look at who sets these roles and how each of us upholds them in our own lives, knowingly or unknowingly.

Some things have been bothering me for a very long time that I haven’t been able to crack the code on…and that I couldn’t even name until last week when I accidentally stumbled into these epistemological terms, are:

• What to do when you’ve built self-trust, but a person or group of people are just determined to dismiss or ignore you anyway.

• What to do when you are a credible observer and knower but you are not believed.

• What to do when so few people operate with respect and epistemic humility and situations easily escalate into confrontation or devolve into chaos.

• How to build and maintain self-trust when outside forces continuously and intentionally try to chip away at you.

• How to come together to care for each other’s needs when definitions of safety, dignity and belonging vary broadly.

• How to model and embody care, nourishment and mutual thriving while living within systems built on dominance.

I suspect that if you’ve made your way to this mailing list, then you’ve had an experience with one or more of these.

All of this touches upon another term I learned last week: epistemic injustice.

I want to be extra careful here because there are a lot of loud voices in the world right now putting on grand ideological performances — and the word injustice itself can immediately swing one’s mind one direction or another. So I ask you, the reader, to bring some extra epistemic humility to the rest of this post on behalf of this observer (me) in the spirit of developing mutual understanding of individual and collective experiences.

To my mind, in order to genuinely understand why things like self-trust, believability, authenticity, communication, collaboration and leadership can seem so easy for some and so difficult for others, we need to understand where each of us sits within the wider structures of power, authority and social organization.

The reality is, we are all caught up in systems that are much bigger than all of us, but include and are reinforced by all of us.

There are many people within these systems that benefit from our distrust of our own capacity as observers and knowers…and benefit just as much from our distrust of others, as well.

I genuinely believe that we do not need to give our power away like this in such magnitude.

I genuinely believe that when we do, it keeps us living within cycles of limitation and harm.

I also genuinely believe that when we have the courage to explore self-trust and build pathways to trusting others, we will find that our definitions of safety, dignity and belonging are more similar than we realize.

And even if they are very, very different, leading with epistemic humility allows us to understand why that person’s definition is important to them, and may help them understand why our definition is important to us. And then maybe we can find a bridge between the two.

I’m not suggesting that this is simple or straightforward or without nuance or complexity. I’m not suggesting that it is a tool for every situation. I’m not suggesting that it will always work.

I am suggesting that when we deny our own credibility as an observer and a knower of our own experience — and deny other people’s credibility as observers and knowers of theirs — we limit access to safety, dignity and belonging for everyone.

I’m saying that building trust and respect for ourselves and others is a practice that is always available to all of us — whether or not we choose it.

In my experience, when we do choose to do this work in our own lives, not only do we experience the benefits personally, but others become aware of the possibility to do it in theirs and have a model for how to approach it.

Change needs to start somewhere.

If you’re reading this, I hope you know that you are already part of that change.

I’d love to hear if any of this resonates with you. If you reply to this post, your message comes directly to me and iremains completely private. Feel free to leave a public comment, or just keep following along as I continue to explore these questions and concepts in my work this year.

If you’d like support navigating any of this in your own life, you can learn more about my coaching here, or book a discovery call here.

Sending you all my love as we make our way into this new year. ❤️