Learning to Fall Forward

Reflections on Coachability

Earlier this year, I decided that I wanted to learn how to ride a unicycle.

Not because it would help my career. Not because it was practical. And certainly not because it was efficient. I wanted to learn it because it seemed hard, slightly absurd, and deeply outside my comfort zone. I wanted to learn because I like the challenge of learning.

Through a mutual connection, I became friends with someone who is a master unicyclist — the kind of rider who performs in parades, glides effortlessly through crowds, and makes something impossibly unstable look graceful and controlled. For those of you who know about RAGBRAI (a multiday cycling event across Iowa), well, he rode it several times on a unicycle. Somewhere along the way, I casually said, “I’d love to learn how to do that someday.”

Eventually, “someday” became “this year.”

Today was my first real lesson.

There was a fence at a tennis court involved. A lot of wobbling. Several controlled dismounts that were not nearly as controlled as I would have preferred. And one unmistakable realization:

Learning to ride a unicycle is an incredible lesson in what it means to be coachable.

Not in theory. In practice.

As an executive coach, I spend much of my time helping others navigate change, uncertainty, growth, and discomfort. But today, standing there with one foot on a pedal, a hand on the fence, and searching desperately for balance, I was reminded what it feels like to be on the receiving end of coaching — vulnerable, uncertain, eager to improve, and surprisingly aware of my own reactions.

I found myself paying attention not just to the mechanics of riding, but to the mechanics of learning.

What helped me improve? What made me resistant? What made feedback easier to absorb? What allowed me to keep going after failing repeatedly in very quick succession?

In coaching conversations, we often talk about whether someone is “coachable.” Leaders sometimes describe a high performer as coachable, or lament that another executive “just isn’t.” The word gets used so casually that we rarely stop to ask what it actually means.

Is coachability a personality trait? A mindset? A skill?

And are some people genuinely more coachable than others?

I think the answer is yes — but probably not in the way we often assume.

Coachability is less about natural humility or agreeableness and more about the capacity to remain open while uncomfortable.

That sounds simple. It isn’t.

When people enter coaching, they are often confronting situations that challenge how they see themselves. Maybe they are receiving difficult feedback. Maybe a role that once felt easy now feels overwhelming. Maybe the strategies that brought them success are no longer working.

In those moments, the instinct to protect ourselves is powerful. We rationalize. We explain. We defend. We intellectualize. Or sometimes we simply avoid.

What struck me during my unicycle lesson was how little progress was possible once I drifted into self-judgment. The moment my internal dialogue became, “You should already be better at this,” my body tightened and my learning slowed down. But when I became curious instead — What happens if I sit up straighter? Why did that attempt work better than the last one? — improvement returned almost immediately.

Curiosity may be one of the purest forms of coachability.

Not passive agreement. Not blind compliance. Curiosity.

The most coachable people I’ve worked with are not necessarily the most polished or the most naturally self-aware. Often, they are the people most willing to experiment. They can hold feedback without immediately turning it into either a defense case or a verdict on their worth.

They are willing to try something before fully believing in it.

That matters.

Because coaching is rarely about downloading information from one person to another. Most executives already possess enormous amounts of knowledge. The issue is usually not information scarcity. It is behavioral friction. Habitual patterns. Emotional reflexes. Competing priorities. Fear. Identity. Motivation.

Real coaching often asks people to practice differently before they fully feel differently. That can feel awkward. A little like climbing onto a unicycle for the first time.

Another thing I noticed today: being coachable required trust, but not perfection from the coach.

My instructor did not deliver some flawless motivational speech. He mostly observed, adjusted, encouraged, and simplified. Sometimes the feedback was technical. Sometimes it was just, “Relax your shoulders.” He actually said very little, but it was what I needed to hear. I employed active listening even as my body was struggling to maintain balance in multiple dimensions.

But what made the experience work was that I trusted he could see something I could not yet see myself.

That may be one of the quiet foundations of effective coaching relationships: the willingness to temporarily borrow someone else’s perspective while you develop your own capability.

Not surrendering agency. Expanding it.

I also realized how much energy it takes to stay engaged while being (temporarily) bad at something.

Adults do not get enough opportunities to be beginners.

Many high-performing professionals have spent decades building competence, expertise, and credibility. Their identities become intertwined with being capable. Coaching, at its best, sometimes asks them to re-enter the uncomfortable terrain of partial competence — where outcomes are uncertain and progress is uneven.

That is emotionally demanding work.

Which is why I increasingly think coachability is not a fixed trait. It is a practice.

People can become more coachable.

Not by becoming more compliant, but by strengthening certain capacities:

• The ability to tolerate discomfort without shutting down.
• The ability to separate feedback from identity.
• The ability to remain curious longer.
• The ability to experiment without demanding immediate mastery.
• And perhaps most importantly, the ability to stay present when progress feels embarrassingly slow.

By the end of the lesson, I was still nowhere near “riding” a unicycle in any recognizable sense. But I could feel the very early beginnings of balance. Tiny moments where the body started understanding something the mind alone could not teach it.

Coaching often works that way, too.

The biggest shifts are rarely dramatic in the moment. They begin as fleeting glimpses of a different way of operating — a different conversation, reaction, decision, or posture. Something unstable at first, but increasingly repeatable with practice.

And maybe that is the deeper lesson I carried home today.

Coachability is not about impressing the coach.

It is about developing a relationship with learning itself.

Coach’s Question:

Do you think of yourself as “very coachable”? If so, what behaviors or practices make others perceive you that way?