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ArticleApril 20, 2026

The Development No One Can See

Development happens in moments that are too granular, too distributed, and too embedded in the live experience of coaching to be reliably captured by reflection alone.

There's a moment most coaches know well. You're in a session and something shifts. You ask a question that lands differently than it would have six months ago, and you know it, even if you can't explain exactly why.

And then the session ends. And that moment disappears.

It doesn't make it into your notes. It doesn't inform how you approach the next client, at least not consciously. It evaporates, not because it wasn't real, but because nothing was there to catch it.

Donald Schön's 1983 work The Reflective Practitioner gave us language for two kinds of professional reflection: reflection-in-action, the real-time adjustment happening during the session itself, and reflection-on-action, the deliberate review that comes afterward. Coaches do both. But even the most conscientious reflection-on-action can only surface what we're able to articulate after the fact. The subtler developmental moments, the slight shift in timing, the question that came from somewhere new, the restraint that was earned rather than chosen, often don't survive the transition to language. They live in the session and nowhere else.

This isn't a criticism of how coaches work. Most coaches are genuinely thoughtful practitioners. The issue is structural. Development happens in moments that are too granular, too distributed, and too embedded in the live experience of coaching to be reliably captured by reflection alone.

And what can't be captured can't be tracked. What can't be tracked is hard to support.

Hattie and Timperley's landmark 2007 meta-analysis found feedback to be among the most powerful influences on professional and academic development, with a mean effect size of 0.79. But their central finding came with a condition: feedback only produces strong effects when it's frequent, specific, and connected to a clear goal. Generalized or infrequent feedback, the kind that might touch one moment in one session every few weeks, had dramatically weaker effects.

Ericsson's research on deliberate practice pushes this further. Expert performance across domains, from surgery to music to chess, isn't explained by time spent practicing. It's explained by the quality of that practice: immediate feedback, targeted repetition, and the opportunity to adjust based on what you're seeing. Without those conditions, you can put in enormous hours and still plateau. The same logic applies to coaching. A coach who receives sparse, disconnected feedback on their sessions is technically practicing, but not under the conditions research identifies as necessary for real skill acquisition.

There's another layer to this. A 2022 grounded theory study by Carden in the International Journal of Training and Development found that self-awareness was central to coach development, but that cultivating it required external input, not just internal reflection. The coaches in the study who developed most significantly weren't the ones who reflected hardest on their own. They were the ones who had structured, external feedback that showed them what they couldn't see from the inside.

That's the gap. Not that coaches don't reflect. Most do. The gap is that reflection alone isn't enough, and the systems around coaching development weren't built to provide the signal that makes the difference.

Coaching development doesn't need more paperwork. It doesn't need more self-assessment forms or longer supervision sessions. What it needs is infrastructure that connects what's happening across sessions, surfaces patterns over time, and gives coaches and the people supporting them something they can actually see.

Because you might know you're growing.

The question is whether you can see how.

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