Why Coaching Anyone Doesn’t Require Experience - But Mentoring Does

This is the second in a series of blogs exploring how we naturally help people make change. If you haven’t read the first piece yet, start here: How You Help People Make Change

I often say during our coach training that I can coach anyone. Even an astronaut preparing to fly to the moon!

And yes, that claim usually raises a few eyebrows and I understand why. The assumption most people carry is that to help someone well, you need to understand their world. You need experience. You need to have been there.

But here’s what I’ve noticed: most people who call themselves coaches are actually mentoring. They’re drawing on their own experience, sharing what worked for them, offering the answers they wish someone had given them earlier.

That’s not a bad thing. But it isn’t coaching. And the two are different enough that it’s worth being clear about which you’re doing and why.

What coaching actually requires

If I’m coaching someone, I don’t need to know anything about their field. I don’t need to have done what they do, navigated what they’re navigating, or experienced what they’re experiencing.

What I do need is to have done the work on myself. Both as a human being — having the self-awareness and the willingness to look honestly at my own patterns — and as a coach, through training, supervision and being coached myself. Coaching from a place of genuine self-awareness is a very different thing from coaching on autopilot.

The content of the conversation belongs to the person I’m working with. Their situation, their expertise in their own life, their answers. I bring the process.

And this is where experience can actually get in the way.

When you know a field well, the pull towards giving the answer is strong. You can see what’s going on. You’ve navigated something similar. It feels almost unkind to hold back.

But when someone receives an answer rather than finding one, it stays yours. They may agree with it, even act on it for a while. But they don’t own it in the way they own something they arrived at themselves.

A coach’s job is to resist that pull. To ask rather than tell. To trust that the person in front of them has more than they’re currently seeing in themselves. That takes discipline and it’s a harder discipline than most people expect.

What mentoring actually requires

Mentoring works differently. If someone asks me to mentor them, I need to have done it myself.

I mentor coaches. I mentor leaders. And I do that from a place of real experience — I’ve built a coaching practice, navigated what leadership actually involves, made mistakes and worked out how to move forward from them. That’s what I’m bringing into a mentoring relationship. The mentee benefits from a path that’s already been walked.

But experience isn’t automatically useful. That’s the thing most mentors don’t immediately realise.

A mentor who always leads with their own story and assumes their experience is relevant, may steer the mentee towards the choices they would make, and in doing so they may actually be limiting the person they’re trying to help. They’re giving them their map, not helping them build their own.

None of this makes mentoring less valuable. A good mentor at the right moment can change someone’s trajectory in a way that coaching alone never would. It’s just that experience, offered without self-awareness, can limit as easily as it can liberate.

The best mentors I know hold their experience lightly. They share the story behind the lesson rather than just the lesson. They ask what the mentee already knows before sharing what they know.

In other words, the best mentors use coaching skills.

Where it gets complicated

Most helping relationships don’t sit neatly in one category. A good mentor asks before they tell. A good coach might occasionally share something from their own experience when it genuinely serves the other person.

The key isn’t to stay fixed in one approach. It’s to know which one you’re using and why — and to notice when it might be time to switch.

What we see consistently at North Point Academy is people who mentor well discovering that adding coaching skills changes the quality of their conversations. Not because mentoring is wrong, but because knowing when to hold the answer back — when to ask instead of offer — is one of the most valuable things any mentor can develop.

When knowledge is given, it informs. When it’s discovered, it sticks.

Why this matters

If you work with people in any capacity, as a manager, a trainer, an advisor, a leader — you’re probably doing some version of both, whether you use those words or not.

The question worth sitting with is: when you help someone, are you drawing on your own experience because it’s what they need — or because it’s what feels most natural to you?

Those are different reasons. And the difference shows up in the conversation.

Which are you?

Our free assessment, How You Help People Make Change, helps you find your natural helper archetype in under five minutes. You’ll discover whether you tend towards coaching, mentoring, consulting or a more therapeutic style, and what that means for how you show up with others.

Take the quiz: myimpactprofile.scoreapp.com

Find out more about the Certificate in Professional Coaching at North Point Academy: uae.northpoint.ac/coach-training