For parents and students · Launch League blog
The 70/30 Rule in Coaching: What It Means for Your Growth
By Nick Gonzalez, founder, U.S. Air Force veteranPublished
The short answer
The 70/30 rule says the person being coached should do about 70% of the talking and the coach about 30%, mostly questions, reflections and summaries. It's a rule of thumb, not a research finding. The principle behind it is sound: coaching standards stress active listening and client choice, because the person who does the thinking owns the decision.
The sliding 70/30
Don't judge one session by the ratio; judge the trend. With a teenager the coach may talk more in the first session, because a 15-year-old doesn't yet have words for what they want. By the last session the teenager should be doing most of the talking. If the share never moves, the coach is doing the thinking for them.
What the 70/30 rule in coaching says
The idea is simple. In a coaching conversation, the person being coached talks for roughly 70% of the time: explaining what's going on, thinking out loud, weighing options, deciding. The coach uses the other 30% for questions, short reflections ('so what I'm hearing is...') and summaries.
You'll see variations: 80/20, or splits that break the coach's share into listening, questions and the occasional opinion. They all point at the same thing. If the coach is doing most of the talking, it has stopped being coaching and become a lecture, however good the lecture is.
Is the 70/30 rule backed by research?
Not that I can find, and I looked. The number circulates in coaching courses and blogs without a study behind it. Nobody has shown that 70/30 beats 60/40, and I wouldn't trust anyone who claimed a precise ratio was proven.
What does exist is a professional standard describing the skills behind it. The International Coaching Federation's core competencies define active listening as focusing on what the client is and is not saying, reflecting or summarizing to check understanding, and noticing when there's more to what the client is communicating. They describe evoking awareness through powerful questioning, silence, metaphor or analogy. And they say a coach should acknowledge that clients are responsible for their own choices and should promote client autonomy.
So the honest version is this: 70/30 is a handy way to remember a principle that coaching standards do take seriously. Treat the number loosely and the principle firmly.
Why the person talking is the person learning
I coached high school basketball for close to 15 years. The players who could explain a play back to me, in their own words, ran it in a game. The ones I'd explained it to, however clearly, often didn't. Same at work: the new supervisors who talked through how they'd handle a problem handled it; the ones I told what to do came back with the next problem.
Career decisions work the same way. A teenager who says out loud 'I think I'd hate a desk, because every job I've liked had me moving' has learned something about themselves. A teenager who is told 'you seem like a hands-on person' has received an opinion, and teenagers are very good at ignoring adult opinions.
The sliding 70/30: why teenagers are different
Most writing on the 70/30 rule assumes an adult client who arrives with a problem and the words to describe it. Many teenagers arrive with neither. Ask a 15-year-old what they want from their career and the honest answer is often silence.
So early on a good coach may talk more than 30%: offering examples, describing jobs the teenager has never heard of, asking easier questions to get things moving. That's fine. What matters is the direction. By the middle sessions the teenager should be talking more than the coach, and by the end they should be explaining their own plan while the coach mostly listens. If session six sounds like session one, with the adult doing the talking, something has gone wrong.
When the coach should talk more
The rule has sensible exceptions. A coach should speak up, briefly and clearly, when the client needs information rather than a question: how an apprenticeship actually works, what a job pays, what a program requires to get in. Asking a teenager 'what do you think the entry requirements are?' when they can't possibly know wastes their time.
A coach should also speak up with an honest observation. The ICF standards include sharing observations, insights and feelings, without attachment, that could create new learning for the client. 'Every time you talk about the hospital you sit up straighter' is worth saying. The 'without attachment' part matters: offer it, then let the client decide what it means.
How to check the ratio yourself
You don't need to sit in or record anything. A few questions after a session tell you most of it:
- Ask your teenager: who talked more today, you or the coach?
- Ask: what question did the coach ask that made you think?
- Ask: what did you decide, and what are you doing before next time?
- Notice whether your teenager can explain the plan in their own words, or repeats phrases that sound like an adult's.
- Try it at home: in your next conversation about the future, ask three questions in a row before giving a single piece of advice.
What this looks like in the Future Ready Sprint
The sessions are built so your teenager does more of the talking each week, and the plan at the end is written in their words, not mine. Where they need facts, about pay, routes or programs in Ohio, I give them straight and point to the source.
Questions
Quick answers
- Does the 70/30 rule apply to tutoring?
- Not in the same way. A tutor is teaching content the student doesn't know yet, so the tutor often talks more, especially when introducing something new. Good tutors still ask the student to explain the work back, which is the same principle in a different job.
- Is 80/20 better than 70/30?
- Neither has been shown to be better. Both are rules of thumb pointing the same way: the client does most of the talking. The useful question isn't the exact split but whether the client's share is growing.
- What if my teenager barely talks in sessions?
- That's common at the start and not a sign the coaching is failing. A good coach will use easier questions, examples and silence to get things moving. If your teenager is still mostly silent by the midpoint, talk to the coach about a different approach.
- Can parents use the 70/30 rule at home?
- Yes, and it's the most useful thing in this post for most families. In your next conversation about the future, aim to ask more than you tell. You'll hear more, and your teenager will feel the decision is theirs.
- Does a coach ever just give advice?
- Sometimes, and they should say when they're doing it. Facts about routes, pay or requirements are information, not coaching, and a coach should give them plainly. The decision about what to do with those facts stays with the client.
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Sources: International Coaching Federation: Updated ICF Core Competencies (released 2019, in effect from 2021) · International Coaching Federation: Core competencies overview. Coaching is not therapy, medical, legal or financial advice.