Why Openness Distinguishes Coaches Who Continue to Develop
Coaching is a discipline built on the coach's ability to see the client's situation clearly and to facilitate the thinking that the client cannot access alone. Both of these functions depend on openness to experience. The coach who approaches each client with genuine curiosity about what is true for this specific person, in this specific situation, rather than mapping the client onto the patterns from previous clients, develops the individual perspective that effective coaching requires. The coach who is intellectually open to the emerging research on coaching effectiveness, to feedback about their own coaching practice, and to models of human development that challenge their current framework continues to grow as a practitioner. The coach whose openness is low tends to apply the framework that worked with previous clients to the current one, which produces coaching that fits some clients well and others poorly.
The professional coaching literature, including the competency frameworks developed by the International Coaching Federation and the research on coaching effectiveness reviewed by Erik de Haan and colleagues, consistently identifies the coach's quality of presence, the capacity to be fully attentive to the client rather than managing the coaching interaction through a fixed framework, as one of the most important determinants of coaching outcome. Quality of presence is a behavioural expression of openness: the genuinely curious, non-presumptive engagement with what is true for this client in this moment, rather than what the coach expected to find based on prior experience.
The Six Facets of Openness in Coaching Work
The NEO-PI structure of openness into six facets clarifies which aspects of the trait matter most in coaching contexts.
Fantasy. The capacity for imagination supports the coach's ability to construct with the client a vivid picture of the future state they are working toward, to simulate how different choices might play out, and to hold multiple possible interpretations of the client's situation simultaneously before selecting the one that most usefully serves the client's development. Coaches high in fantasy bring a generative quality to the coaching conversation that clients often experience as the most valuable part of the engagement.
Aesthetics. Sensitivity to pattern and quality shapes the coach's attention to the texture of the coaching conversation: what is being said, what is being avoided, what the client's language reveals about their internal model of the situation. Coaches high in aesthetics notice the linguistic and tonal signals that reveal what the client is not explicitly articulating, which produces the precise, resonant observation that opens new lines of client reflection.
Feelings. Receptivity to emotional experience is foundational to coaching effectiveness. The client's emotional state is both the most important data in many coaching conversations and the most easily missed by coaches who are attending primarily to the content of what the client says. Coaches high in feelings detect the emotional tone underlying the client's narrative, notice when the client's affect changes, and bring the emotional dimension of the client's situation into the coaching conversation with precision.
Actions. Willingness to experiment with new coaching approaches supports the coach's continued professional development. The coach who tries a new questioning framework, a somatic approach they have been trained in but rarely use, or a different structure for a session where the usual structure is not serving the client, is gathering the experience that expands their coaching repertoire. Coaches low in actions tend to use the approaches they know regardless of whether a different approach would serve the client better.
Ideas. Intellectual curiosity about the theoretical frameworks informing coaching, the psychology of human development and change, and the adjacent disciplines (organisational psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of action) that increasingly inform coaching practice, supports the coach's continued intellectual engagement with their work. Coaches high in ideas bring a richness of conceptual resource to the coaching conversation that coaches who have not continued to develop their intellectual foundation cannot access.
Values. Willingness to question established coaching orthodoxies supports the coach's ability to notice when a standard coaching approach is not serving a particular client, when the ethical dimensions of a coaching engagement require more careful examination, and when the field itself needs critique and development. Coaches high in values contribute to the evolution of coaching as a professional discipline, not just to the development of individual clients.
The Coaching Work That Openness Specifically Supports
Contracting with new clients is the most direct application. The openness that allows the coach to approach a new client relationship without presuming what the client needs, to be genuinely surprised by what the client's actual development focus turns out to be, and to co-create a coaching relationship that serves the client's real situation rather than the situation the coach anticipated, produces coaching that fits the client from the first session rather than after several sessions of adjustment.
Supervision and continuous development are the second. The coach who engages seriously with supervision, who brings genuine uncertainty about their own coaching practice rather than presenting successful cases for validation, and who is open to discovering aspects of their coaching that could be more effective, grows continuously. The coach who uses supervision as a confirmation process and has stopped being genuinely curious about their own development plateaus.
Working with clients unlike themselves is the third. The most stretching coaching engagements involve clients whose context, challenges, and ways of making meaning are substantially different from the coach's own experience. Openness is what allows the coach to enter these engagements with genuine curiosity rather than premature interpretation based on surface-level pattern matching to their own experience.
The Long-Term Compound
Openness compounds across a coaching career through the cumulative development of the coach's conceptual resources, their ability to adapt to diverse clients, and their continued intellectual engagement with the practice. The coach who grows continuously across a career develops a depth and range of coaching effectiveness that the coach who stopped developing at their initial competence level cannot access. Across a long coaching practice, this difference produces substantially different client outcomes and professional reputations.
If you want a calibration on your Big Five profile, particularly your openness score and the underlying facet pattern, take the Big Five assessment to see your openness alongside the other four traits, with diagnostic feedback on which facets (fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, values) are your particular strengths and which would benefit from deliberate development across your coaching career.