Coaching is great because tutoring is great
I’ve been reflecting more lately on where my passion for coaching comes from. I realized the other day that I view coaching as a type of tutoring, and this drives a lot of my interest in it, because being in tutoring relationships— on both sides— has consistently been unusually valuable for my education and personal growth, and unusually delightful as a present-moment experience. So through coaching, I aim not only to bring as much of that value and delight as possible to my clients, but also to get more of it myself.
When you compare tutoring to coaching, key similarities show up right away:
Both are unusually customizable to specific individual needs.
In both cases, the one-on-one contact (as opposed to a workgroup or classroom environment) removes social distractions; encourages frankness and vulnerability; and creates an emotionally effective, because personal-feeling, commitment to “do one’s homework”.
A good coach, like a good tutor, should set up maximally egalitarian relationships with clients, even those who start with much less knowledge and experience than the coach or tutor. A conversation that feels like it’s between peers, and where both parties expect to teach and learn, is the most intellectually fertile and engaging kind.
Coaching, like tutoring, should be a multiplier rather than a substitute for autodidacticism. That is, it should give the client foundational knowledge and tools that they can then use to learn more effectively on their own. Outside-session learning is both made possible by the practices and prerequisites laid down during the sessions, and amplified by the feedback and refinement that sessions can provide.
So the relevant experience that informs my coaching really starts with the music lessons I took from early elementary-school age, and the tutors in math and history that I was lucky enough to have in upper elementary and middle school. In adulthood I’ve continued music lessons and added composition tutoring to enable my avocation as a classical composer, as well as personal training sessions to create a sustainable fitness routine. All this builds my empathy with my clients and helps me understand what a good rhythm of coaching progress can look like. Even my experiences getting psychotherapy are relevant: more than one prospective client has said in an intro session, “so, you’re like a therapist for engineering managers, then?”
And on the other side of the relationship, besides all the 1-1s with reports from my years as a manager, I can draw on my time answering student questions in office hours when I was a teaching assistant in graduate school, as well as the Zoom-based math and CS tutoring I’ve done from time to time. Most recently, I’ve informally tutored my son in math and history in an attempt to pass on the delight— and, yes, the privilege— I got from that; and I try to gently supervise his music practice sessions to start him off with better learning discipline than I frankly ever had.
There’s now a lot of data on the “unreasonable” effectiveness of tutoring that I am confident applies to coaching as well. Education researchers have long known it as the Bloom two sigma problem, where the effect sizes observed from intensive 1-1 tutoring sessions are far larger than those from most other educational interventions. More recently, some commentators have suggested that 19th- and 20th-century geniuses— people of extraordinary intellectual capacity and creative productivity— were disproportionately educated by “aristocratic tutoring” methods.
If you’re excited by the prospect of unreasonably effective coaching, why not set up an intro chat to see if my services might be a fit for you? Just go to calendly.com/nweininger and put something on my ce
