Love Without Agenda: Coaching as an Act of Care

An Unnamed Form of Care

I have come to believe that at its core, coaching is, in essence, love expressed through presence. That particular kind of care rarely gets named in this context. Maybe through fear of being articulated unprofessionally or misunderstood as an unethical.

When done well, coaching is not about improvement or performance. It is about attention. This attention, when offered without agenda, is one of the most practical forms of love we have. Not as a technique or a method, but as a way of meeting another human being exactly where they are.

A Story of Light

Let me explain. The coaching relationship may seem fundamentally transactional at first glance, but there is an old image that keeps returning to me.

There is a simple story taken from an old piece of folklore of a man who was walking home in the dark with a lantern when he noticed another who was lost, standing in the dark with nothing but a map and a compass. He walks up to him and asks, “Are you lost? Where is it you’re looking to go?” The man answers, “I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to decide where to go, but I haven’t been able to see my map in the dark.” So the man with the lantern offers to walk beside him throughout the night, holding the lantern so he can see his map and his compass. He does not walk ahead and stays close enough so the lost man can still see his map and just enough of the ground in front of him to take steps forward. He walks with him all night, and as the sun rises the man gifts him the lantern and says, “You didn’t need me tonight. All you needed was the light.”

What the Lantern Offers

The lantern does not choose the path. Nor does it shorten the journey or remove any uncertainty. But I think that what the man with the lantern is actually offering is his love. What he is actually saying is, “I will sit in the mud with you and shine a light on all the possibilities in your life. If you go the wrong way, I will still be here with the lantern, and in the morning when you no longer need me, I will return home.” This, to me, is what coaching looks like when stripped back to its essence.

Presence in a Culture of Speed

In a culture that rewards answers, certainty, and speed, this kind of presence can feel almost radical. We are taught, often unconsciously, that care means intervention. That to love someone is to protect them from discomfort, or to guide them quickly toward a better outcome. Yet most of us know, from lived experience, that the moments which shaped us most deeply were not the ones where someone told us what to do. They were the moments where someone stayed with us long enough for us to hear ourselves more clearly.

When Psychology Supports the Idea

Psychology has academically supported this for decades. Humanistic thinkers spoke of unconditional positive regard not as indulgence, but as a necessary condition for growth. People do not move toward change because they are managed or corrected. They move toward it when they feel safe enough to be honest. When their nervous system settles. When the internal pressure to perform or defend themselves softens just enough for something more truthful to emerge.

The Limits of Advice

This is why advice, even when well intentioned, so often misses the mark. Advice assumes distance and that the other person’s inner world can be understood quickly from the outside. Presence assumes the opposite. It begins with the humility of not knowing and trusts that the person sitting opposite you is not a problem to be solved, but a complex process unfolding in its own time.

Meeting, Not Managing

Philosophically, this distinction also really matters. Martin Buber described the significant difference between relating to another person as an object and meeting them as a subject. An I–It relationship treats the other as something to be changed. An I–Thou relationship meets them as they are, without reducing them to a goal or outcome. Coaching lives firmly in this second space, and I do not think this means passivity, detachment, or indifference.

The Discipline of Staying

To stay with another person without trying to steer them requires discipline. It requires restraint and the capacity to tolerate uncertainty, not only in them, but in yourself. To hold a lantern without turning it into a spotlight and trust that clarity emerges through relationship and not pressure means to love with no conditions attached.

A coach does not love by claiming wisdom. They love by resisting the urge to collapse complexity into certainty. They love by asking better questions rather than offering better answers, and by trusting that another person’s life is not theirs to manage.

Attention as Generosity

Simone Weil once wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. When you truly attend to someone, without using them to reinforce your own competence or certainty, something subtle but powerful happens. The person begins to listen to themselves differently. They notice patterns they had been speaking around. They hear the quiet truths that only surface when no one is trying to interrupt them with solutions.

What People Remember

This is not dramatic work. It is slow. It can look unremarkable from the outside. But it is often in these moments that people begin to reconnect with parts of themselves that had gone quiet under the pressure to perform or cope.

I have noticed that when people describe meaningful coaching experiences, they rarely talk about what they were told. They talk about how they felt, about not being rushed, and about their most abstract thoughts and feelings being taken seriously. They mention being met where they actually were, not where they thought they should be.

The Space That Allows Truth

That experience carries weight because it is so rare. We live in a world full of commentary, opinion, and instruction. What we lack are spaces where someone can bring the unfinished parts of themselves without being fixed or redirected too quickly. Coaching, or any relationship, when grounded in care, becomes one of those spaces. It is a place where uncertainty is allowed to exist long enough to teach us something.

The Heart of the Practice

This is why I resist defining coaching too narrowly. At its heart, it is not a performance tool or a productivity strategy, but it is also not only a relational practice. It is one that requires ethical boundaries, yes, but also a genuine regard that understands that autonomy matters and dignity is not optional.

To love in this way is not to guarantee outcomes, but to hold the lantern steady and walk beside rather than ahead, all whilst trusting that the person you are with is capable of finding their own way, even if it takes time.

In a world that is constantly asking us to move faster, do more, and know sooner, this kind of care is quietly subversive. Perhaps the most loving thing any relationship can offer is not direction, or to lead someone out of the dark, but to stay with them until their eyes adjust.

With meaning,

Isaac Davis