Balance Is a Verb: Coaching the Moves That Matter to Help Your Clients Find Perspective
- Cindy Hosea
- Apr 12
- 6 min read
Forget the steady rhythm of a bicycle—balance in co-active coaching is more like riding a skateboard through a half-pipe of emotional decisions.
You’ve got no handles to grip. No gears to shift. Just you, your stance, and the constant recalibration between momentum and gravity. One foot controls direction, the other keeps you steady—or tries to.
Skateboarders know this: balance isn’t found in stillness. It’s found in movement. It’s dynamic. Messy. Loud. There’s a whole lot of falling before there’s any flow. And that’s what makes it such a gorgeous metaphor for the Co-Active balance principle in coaching.
When your client’s life feels like a concrete jungle of obligations, risks, and unknowns, your job is to help them lean in—not freeze up. Just like on a skateboard, sometimes the path forward looks like a little push… and sometimes it looks like learning how to fall and get back up without deciding you’re “bad at this.”
You're not teaching them to avoid the half-pipe—you’re helping them learn how to ride it.
In Co-Active coaching, balance isn’t about achieving a Zen-like state of total stillness. It’s about motion, adjustment, and finding your footing even when the terrain is shifting under you. This principle is a way to guide your clients when they feel stuck between overwhelm and inertia.
This article is your deep dive into what balance really means in a coaching context—how to spot it, how to use it, and how to help clients tap into new perspectives when they’re locked into tunnel vision. Oh, and we’ll be doing it all with metaphors, real-life coaching scenarios, and practical strategies that don’t sound like they came from a dusty textbook. 🛹