The Coaches' Chronicle is a monthly feature spotlighting one coach, one philosophy, and one meaningful conversation.
The Coaches’ Chronicle is a recognition-driven editorial platform devoted to highlighting coaches and leaders who are sharing their work with depth, integrity, and heart.
Each month, we feature one coach and go deep into their philosophy, lived experience, and the work they are here to do in the world. No noise. No filler. Just a conversation worth your full attention.
Michael Bungay Stanier,
Unweird Coaching for the World
The Coaches' Chronicle Special Feature: March 2026
Feature Interview
March 2026
By Jonathan Carroll - Founder, The Coaches' Chronicle | Feature Interview
Michael Bungay Stanier needs little introduction among coaches, leaders, and consultants. The author of The Coaching Habit, a book that has sold over a million copies and continues to shape how people think about coaching a full decade after publication. Michael has dedicated his career to what he calls "unweirding" coaching for everyday people. From parents to managers, teachers to therapists, his mission is to put coaching tools into the hands of anyone trying to bring out the best in someone else.
In this interview for The Coaches' Chronicle, Michael reflects on the early experiences that shaped his path, the deeper gift coaching can offer beyond problem-solving, why curiosity is harder than it sounds, the real threat AI poses to coaches, how to build (and sometimes end) working relationships, what makes a goal truly worthy, and the one piece of advice every new coach needs to hear. This is a conversation rich with wisdom, candor, and practical insight for anyone committed to coaching at a higher level.
The Interview
Origins: What Set Michael on This Path
Jonathan: Most people tuning in probably already have a sense of who you are, but we want to go deep and help coaches become better coaches. You've positively influenced how many leaders think about coaching worldwide. What moment or realization early on created the desire to go in the direction you have?
Michael: I'd point to two moments that have been really significant for me. The first was when I was 17 or 18 and I signed up for something called Youthline in Australia, a youth crisis telephone counseling line. I volunteered there for three or four years. It was the first time I was trained to ask a question, be quiet, and listen to an answer. It was also the first time I realized someone's first answer is not necessarily the whole answer, or the deepest answer. There's often more there.
It came out of endless conversations with my teenage friends about the angst of teenage life, of which there's a lot. I was pretty good at being present and listening, but I had no idea what I was doing or whether it was helpful. That training planted a significant seed for what would turn into showing up as a coach.
The second moment was about 20 years later. I'd left Australia, moved to England, then to Boston, then to Toronto. I set up my own business out of necessity because I got fired and I was increasingly unemployable. I don't like having bosses. I had an inclination that coaching was going to be something. I built up a coaching practice and then realized it wasn't as fulfilling as I thought, which was bizarre because I felt like I'd spent 20 years leading up to that moment.
Then I got involved in learning and development and training, and I got asked to build a coaching program. A coaching school came in to work with one of the big banks in Canada. They basically did life coach training for managers without changing anything. I thought, this is terrible training for managers. Some mechanics are similar, but everything else is different. That was a key moment. I realized I really believe in coaching as a technology, I dislike the way it's being brought into the world, and I have an opinion about how it could be done differently and better. That's the catalyst for The Coaching Habit and for Box of Crayons. I'm on a quest to unweird coaching for normal people.
The Coaching Habit — Ten Years On
How Michael's Understanding of Coaching Has Evolved
Jonathan: Many people know you from The Coaching Habit. Looking back now, how has your understanding of coaching evolved since writing that book?
Michael: The older you get, the more you try to make things simpler. A few things are cool about The Coaching Habit. One is it's still being bought and read 10 years after I published it, which is a miracle. I like that it strips being more coach-like down to a few key things. Here's how to ask a question. Here are seven good questions. In the new 10-year edition coming out, there's a new chapter on the being of coaching.
If I've learned one thing, it's the deeper impact coaching can provide. On one hand, coaching helps you sort stuff out and solve problems. What's the challenge? What's the real challenge? How do you generate better ideas? How do you move to action? That's the mechanics: new insight, new action, different outcome. But the deeper gift coaching offers is that it allows people to feel seen, heard, and encouraged.
"When I think back on coaches I've had, I don't really remember all the stuff they helped me with. What I remember is feeling seen, feeling heard, feeling encouraged."
That puts an onus on the coach. How do I show up so my anxiety to prove my value by fixing things doesn't get in the way of being present and helping someone feel seen and heard and encouraged?
Curiosity and the Advice Monster
Why Staying Curious Is Harder Than It Sounds
Jonathan: You often talk about curiosity as a leadership superpower. Why is staying curious so difficult for people at times?
Michael: We've been trained for a long time to value having the answer. It starts early. The teacher asks, "Who knows?" and everybody wants their hand up. Then we're tested and scored. The working world asks, "What do you know? What can you do? What problem can you solve?" So we build a deeply embedded belief that proving your worth means having the answers.
Beneath that is status. We maintain our status by having the answers, by being the rescuer, by maintaining control. I did a TEDx talk about taming your advice monster. I talk about the advice monsters: know-it, tell-it, save-it, control-it. These ego states get in the way of curiosity because curiosity says: I may not have the answer, and even if I do, I'm going to let you figure it out. I'm going to give you agency and autonomy and competence. I'm giving up some control. Coaching sounds easy. Ask a few questions. But you're dismantling some status in an act of service to someone else.
Jonathan: What does taming the advice monster actually look like in practice?
Michael: The definition I give of coaching is behavioral and simple: can you stay curious a little bit longer, and can you rush to action and advice-giving a little bit more slowly? When I started teaching coaching, a lot of definitions felt too theoretical or too abstract. This one is simple and difficult. Stay curious a little bit longer. Rush to advice more slowly.
It helps to know which advice monster is your particular trigger. Is it: if I don't have the answers, I failed? Is it: if I don't save people, I failed? Is it: if I don't control and make everything predictable and risk-free, I failed? Then so much of it is learned practice. Not speaking. Doctors interrupt patients very quickly, something like 17 seconds on average. Humans love to interrupt. So the shift is moving away from "my job is to tell people what to do" and slowing down that reactive move to advice.
Technology and the Future
AI, Coaching, and the Human Advantage
Jonathan: How do you see AI changing the way we formulate questions and harvest answers?
Michael: That's not a trivial question, and the answer changes about every 48 hours as new developments happen. Twenty years ago I created a book that worked like a flip book. People bring a challenge, open to one of the combinations, and each section has questions that make you think differently and move you into action. I knew even then that parts of coaching are mechanical. If you can hold space for a process, people can do the work themselves.
I really understood that when I taught coaching in different countries and coached people in languages I didn't speak. I'd ask a question in English, they'd answer in Finnish or Norwegian, and I'd keep moving them through the process. Coaching is often holding space and moving people through a process with intensity and wholeheartedness.
AI can do some of that really well. There's an existential threat for coaches who rely on learned processes. If AI can learn those processes, it can ask good questions. It can remember more than you. It can pull historical data. It can do things that will trump you. So what do you do as a coach that AI can't do? It may come back to people feeling seen and heard and encouraged. I'm going to guess that for a while at least, that will feel like a more human offering than an AI offering.
Working Relationships
Building, and Sometimes Ending, Working Relationships

Jonathan: Your work on building the best possible relationship is powerful. What's one shift that transforms a working relationship quickly?
Michael: The insight is that the quality of your working relationships has an outsized impact on happiness at work and success at work. That's true whether you're internal with a team, or a coach building relationships with clients and a small team. Most of us know it's true but do nothing about it. We hope to get lucky. I want to tip the odds in people's favor.

I learned a lot from Peter Block. The key action is having a conversation about how you work together before you start working together. Coaches often do pre-contracting, but it rarely gets into more profound questions: here's how I bring my best, how will you bring your best, what is your best, what is my best, how do we work together, and what do we do when things go off the rails? In my book I call it a keystone conversation. Five core questions to set up your working relationship in the best possible way, avoid what's annoying, and amplify what's great.
Jonathan: Things often go wrong at some point. Sometimes you try these things and it still won't work out. What should leaders do when a relationship just isn't working despite best efforts?
Michael: It depends on the context. Here's the order of priorities I'd consider. First: what is good enough? I'm not striving for every relationship to be perfect. I'm trying to make it the best possible version of that relationship. It might not be great, but it might be the best we can get. So start with: what's good enough, and are we close to that?
If it's not close to good enough, then: can I separate myself from the relationship? Terminate it, resign, fire someone, wrap up the contract. End it while maintaining dignity for both sides. If you're stuck and it's not close to good enough and you can't change it, then: how do I minimize the impact of this working relationship on my work and my life?
Then you might ask: what needs to be true for this to be 10% better? I carry scars from failed relationships. One of my modes is to over-invest in trying to make a relationship work when the other person isn't interested. Every choice has prizes and punishments. An upside and a downside. An outcome and a cost. Sometimes you decide the relationship will be a festering sore for a while because you've weighed the options and the best thing is to tolerate it for a bit longer.
Goals and Ambition
Worthy Goals, Personal Projects, and Staying Challenged
Jonathan: You write about worthy goals. How can someone recognize when they're pursuing a worthy goal versus just staying busy?
Michael: This is helpful for coaches, and there's a lot of goal-setting content out there. As coaches, we can get transactional about driving clients toward goals. Most people suffer from an abundance of things to do. In How to Begin, the worthy goal concept is about one or two big rocks. How do you decide what to say yes to?
A worthy goal has three parts: it needs to be thrilling, important, and daunting. Thrilling: does this light you up? Does it excite you? This matters because many of us inherit goals and obligations we're not truly excited about. As a coach, a powerful move is asking: do I really care about this? You need internal motivation to keep going.
Important: how do you give more to the world than you take? This is about contribution beyond your own enjoyment. Thrilling and important are internal drive and external pull. Both help when times get hard.
Daunting: this keeps you learning and growing. We unlock our greatness by working on hard things. Daunting means taking on something just beyond your grasp. It can be helpful to dream at 10x, not 2x. At 2x you do the same stuff a bit better. At 10x you have to rethink what it looks like and how you do it.
Jonathan: What are some worthy goals you're personally working toward right now?
Michael: The way I tend to run my life is project-based. I got an idea from Kevin Kelly, who founded Wired, about a "death clock." You work out, statistically, when you might die based on actuary tables. I did it 10 years ago and it said I've got about 15 to 20 years left. Kevin Kelly also says you've got roughly one big project every five years.
I combine that with purpose. I articulate my purpose as: how do I infect a billion people with the possibility virus. For me it's about getting tools and mindsets into people's hands so they make braver choices in how they show up in the world.
This year I'm focused on The Coaching Habit because the 10-year edition is coming out at the end of March 2026 and we want to have some fun with it. We're also going to focus on parents, particularly parents of kids with adolescent brains, roughly ages 10 to 25. We're thinking: how does The Coaching Habit become a really good parenting book?
I also have a project called Change Signal about how change happens in organizations. But I'm at a crossroads. I'm not sure it still passes the thrilling, important, daunting test. I'm wrestling with sunk cost. I've invested time and money and effort, so I feel pulled to keep going. But if you wouldn't start it now, you should stop doing it now. One of my challenges is figuring out how to stop doing a project I started that hasn't worked.
Jonathan: How do you stay challenged after achieving so much?
Michael: First, I figure out the work I'm best at. I'm best at writing and teaching. I'm good at taking complicated stuff and making it more accessible and simpler for people. That's how I try to make the world better, as a teacher.
The other thing I'm thinking about is: how do I be a good elder? In some ways I've already won. Late 50s, successful author, just enough fame that mostly nobody knows who I am, but once a month someone says something nice. So it's less interesting what I'm ambitious for, and more: what's my role of service now? An elder steps out of the spotlight and becomes an encouraging voice from the side so others step onto the stage. I'm sitting with the tension. I still have more to teach, and there's an obligation that comes with reputation. But how do I exit gracefully and play a slightly different role?
Practical Takeaways
Starting Tomorrow: Advice for New and Aspiring Coaches
Jonathan: If someone wanted to become more coach-like starting tomorrow, what's the simplest path or habit to begin with?
Michael: At a mindset level, reframe how you see the world. Instead of "How do I tell people what to do, manage them, lead them, parent them?" it becomes "How do I help them feel seen and heard and encouraged?" What game are you playing? What does success look like?
Then choose whether to subtract or add. Subtract: notice how quickly you leap in with advice, guidance, opinions, suggestions. Notice how quickly you move to helping as your default response, and slow that down. Add: find a question and practice. There are seven in The Coaching Habit, but there are lots of good questions. Pick a person, pick a moment, pick a question, and start practicing in a small way.
Jonathan: What are you seeing in organizations right now that gives you hope?
Michael: There's a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty in organizations right now, and anxiety about the world of work because AI makes everything feel insecure. What's hopeful is what we've been talking about. The greatest gift we bring is helping people feel seen, heard, and encouraged. As people speed up work and become more productive and efficient (the promise of AI), what do they do with the rest of that time? They can increase their capacity to hold space for change and hold space for human connection.
Jonathan: If you could give one piece of advice to a new coach entering the industry today, what would it be?
Michael: Get good at marketing and sales. There are lots of excellent coaches struggling because they hope they don't have to market or sell themselves. And there are a few not-great coaches doing pretty well because they've figured out marketing and sales. If you're entering the market as a coach, you need to understand what it means to run a business. Businesses need to market and sell. Figure out what actually works. There's a bunch of fake marketing that feels like marketing, but if it doesn't bring clients or prospects, it doesn't work. Social media doesn't work for most people most of the time. There's no point being a great coach if you're not a savvy marketer.
Closing
The Invitation
Michael Bungay Stanier reminds us that coaching, at its best, is not about having the right answers. It's about helping people feel seen, heard, and encouraged. Whether you're a seasoned coach, an emerging leader, or a consultant looking to deepen your impact, his invitation is the same: stay curious a little bit longer, rush to advice a little more slowly, and never underestimate the power of a good question asked with wholeheartedness.
With the 10-year edition of The Coaching Habit releasing in March 2026, there has never been a better time to revisit Michael's work or discover it for the first time. To explore his books, resources, and latest projects, visit mbs.works. Your coaching, and the people you serve, will be better for it.
Published in The Coaches' Chronicle, March 2026. Interview conducted by Jonathan Carroll.
Watch the full interview with Michael Bungay Stanier and Jonathan Carroll below (50 min).
Jonathan Carroll, Founder
The Coaches’ Chronicle
Jonathan Carroll is devoted to elevating the art and profession of coaching through depth, mastery, and conscious impact. As the Founder of The Coaches’ Chronicle, he curates conversations that invite reflection, integrity, and a more mature expression of leadership within the coaching industry.
Through his work as a coach, author, facilitator, and strategic partner, Jonathan supports conscious leaders who feel called into greater alignment, coherence, and purpose. His approach emphasizes presence over performance, wisdom over tactics, and the long view of meaningful, sustainable expansion.
Jonathan’s work is rooted in energetic alignment, intuitive leadership, and an ongoing exploration of infinite possibility. He is particularly drawn to the intersection of time honoured mysteries and modern day mastery, where inner development and real-world leadership meet.
He is also the founder of The Dragonfly Club™, a global community and experiential ecosystem offering private alliances and immersive retreats for visionary leaders at pivotal moments of evolution. Across all his work, Jonathan creates space for clarity, refinement, and a more grounded expression of what it means to lead in our modern world. Click on Jonathan's photo to connect with him on LinkedIn.

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The Coaches’ Chronicle was created as a place to slow down and remember what truly matters in this work. It is our hope that you will share links to these articles and interviews with your colleagues and clients alike.
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