Monday, September 29, 2025
Enhancing Professional Practice: Strategic Approaches to Taming the Advice Monster
Submitted by: Maggie Trenda, CESA 5 Curriculum Specialist and Systems Coach
For educational coaches across Wisconsin, continuous professional learning is paramount. The Wisconsin Coaching Competency Practice Profile underscores this commitment by identifying Knowledge Base Development as the fourth critical competency. This requires coaches to be ready and armed with a diverse array of coaching approaches to effectively support clients facing varied scenarios and needs. Many professionals entering the field of education and instructional coaching are driven by core values centered on service, problem-solving, and the desire to facilitate client success (whether the clients are students, teachers, or others). This often shows up as an impulse to act as a "fixer" or "helper". However, this valuable inclination frequently leads to an offering of solutions—a dynamic that Michael Bungay Stanier addresses in his book, The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever. Stanier recommends that coaches redirect their energy toward deep listening and diligently working to tame their advice monsters.
Understanding and Managing the Advice Monster
The advice monster is the part of us eager to interject ideas, suggestions, opinions, and direct advice. When engaged in a coaching conversation, the presence of the advice monster causes listening with the intent to respond – instead of listening for the sake of listening. When a client shares their challenges, the coach's follow-up may include validation or affirmation, but it often quickly shifts into sharing a personal anecdote ("that one time this same situation happened in our classroom/life") and detailing the steps the coach took. This advice-giving often sounds like, “In my experience…” or “Have you considered trying…?”
Advice-giving might work some of the time, but until we address the root of the issue, we risk solving the wrong problem. Even when we do happen to target the right problem, we may lack the necessary information and ultimately provide a mediocre solution.
Instead, the goal is to rein in that advice monster by staying curious and humble. How do we do this?
Strategic Moves for Effective Coaching
Achieving proficiency in taming the advice monster requires coaches to focus on two core professional strategies: active listening and targeted questioning.
Cultivating Deep Listening
The first crucial step involves dedicated listening practice. Elena Aguilar recommends that coaches initiate this development by engaging in Listening to Your Own Listening. This self-assessment helps coaches identify the nature of their current listening habits and recognize unproductive mental detours that occur while clients are speaking. The focus must remain on being fully present in the conversation and actively stepping away from the advice-giving impulse when listening takes the mind on an unproductive journey. Aguilar also offers Expansive Listening as a strategy for coaches ready to shift their practice. Mastery of these alternative ways of listening leads to more productive coaching conversations but demands extensive practice and diligence.
Mastering Effective Questioning
The second essential element involves refining the ability to ask the right questions. In his previous work, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More, and Change the Way You Lead Forever, Stanier detailed The Seven Essential Questions designed to help coaches dig beyond the surface level and identify the root cause of challenges.
When coaching, Stanier offers specific guidance on deploying these tools:
- Ask only one question at a time.
- Stick to questions starting with “What” and avoid questions starting with “Why.”’ Notably, six of the seven essential questions utilize the “What” structure.
Once in a coaching conversation, we ask a question and then we take what we’ve learned about listening and actually listen to the answer. This will help us frame our next question or our path forward.
Be curious and humble. Ask questions. Listen well… and tame that advice monster!
As Nancy Willard observed, “Answers are closed rooms; and questions are open doors that invite us in.”
Suggested Resources: