Learning the Steps Well Enough to Forget Them

Before I started my coach training, I worked in critical care nursing. In the ICU, you learn protocols the way dancers learn choreography: slowly, repetitively, until your hands know what to do before your mind catches up. Drug calculation sequences. Ventilator adjustments. The specific order of a rapid deterioration response. You drill them until they are automatic, because when someone is crashing in front of you, you cannot stop to consult the manual.

But here is what nobody tells you about protocols: following them perfectly is not the same as being present.

The best nurses I worked alongside were not necessarily the fastest or the most technically precise. They were the ones who could hold a protocol in one hand and a person's fear in the other, at the same time. They knew the steps so thoroughly that they could afford to look up from their feet and actually see the patient in front of them.

I did not have a word for that quality then. Now, partway through my coaching certification, I think I do.

The Problem With Knowing the Moves

One of the most disorienting things about early coaching training is discovering how much you already know, and how little that helps you in the session.

You can memorise the competencies. You can practise powerful questions until they come naturally. You can read extensively about active listening, about solution-focused approaches, about the difference between coaching and advice-giving. And then a client says something that changes the whole conversation, and you catch yourself flipping through an internal index of "the right thing to ask next" while the moment passes.

The competencies are not the coaching. They are what makes coaching possible.

What you actually bring into the room is something harder to name. It is the capacity to stay genuinely present with a person, to follow where they are going rather than where you expected them to go. Knowing the moves is necessary. It is just not sufficient.

The Dance Floor Is Not the Studio

Every dancer who performs with any freedom has first spent hours in a studio drilling sequences they will never execute exactly as rehearsed. The studio work is not about replication. It is about internalisation. You practise a pivot until it lives in your body, so that when the music takes an unexpected turn, your feet know what to do without asking your brain for permission.

Coaching training works the same way.

The powerful questions, the frameworks, the structured approaches you learn during certification. And all of this is studio work. You internalise it not so you can execute it mechanically in sessions, but so that you can forget it at the right moment and stay with the client instead.

Because the moment you start thinking about your next question, you have stopped listening to this one.

There is a real difference between knowing the steps and actually dancing. In the studio, you are the choreographer. On the floor, you are a partner. And the fundamental rule of partner dancing is that you do not decide the music. The client brings the music. Your job is to move with it.

Preparing to Be Spontaneous

People sometimes ask how you prepare for that kind of presence, and the question sounds almost paradoxical at first. Spontaneity is not something you plan for.

But you can do something more useful: you can reduce the things that pull you out of the room.

You prepare by doing the technical work so thoroughly that you stop needing it consciously. You debrief every session, not to grade your performance but to notice the moments when you were genuinely present and the moments when you went somewhere else in your head. You get coached yourself (usually more than you think you need). You sit with silence and learn to be uncomfortable with it, so that when silence opens up in a session, your instinct is not to fill it.

The solution-focused frame that underpins the Erickson approach helped me understand something I had been circling around for a while: presence is not just an attitude, it is a methodology. When you genuinely trust that the client holds their own answers, your orientation in the room changes. You stop monitoring yourself as the expert who might be asked something and start listening as a person who is genuinely curious about where this conversation wants to go.

That shift changes everything. Not because it produces better questions (though it often does), but because the client feels the difference between being accompanied and being managed.

The most useful sessions I have been part of (as a coachee and, more recently, as a coach in training) were not the ones with the best structure. They were the ones where the choreography emerged. Where neither person was quite sure how they got to where they ended up, but the destination felt real. Where the conversation went somewhere the client needed to go, not somewhere the framework pointed.

That is what becomes possible when the steps are finally learned well enough to let go of.

About João

João Oliveira is a Project Manager at a leadership development and executive coaching firm based in Saudi Arabia, currently completing the Erickson Art and Science of Coaching programme and working toward ICF ACC certification. His background spans Critical Care Nursing and Nursing Education, and his work sits at the intersection of clinical presence, leadership, and coaching. He is based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.