Your Blind Spots Are Costing Your Clients More Than You Think

There's a coffee shop in Charlotte called Bitty & Bó's. Every single employee is neurodivergent. That's their hiring policy, by design.

When this came up in one of our recent mentorship sessions, the room got interesting fast. Some people's first instinct was to say, "That's beautiful." Someone, in jest, questioned, "Is that discriminatory against neurotypical applicants?" While this comment wasn’t serious, and we all believe that fostering an environment that provides opportunities to an underserved, silently suffering population was a phenomenal business model, it got me thinking.

Here's the question that stopped me cold in that conversation: if you have a hiring bias you don't know about, what kind of coaching bias do you have that you don't know about either?

I used to think that my years of experience meant I was past this. That I'd logged enough hours, read enough research, and made enough mistakes to have ironed out most of my blind spots. That was arrogance dressed up as expertise. The truth is that experience doesn't eliminate bias. It just makes it harder to see because it's buried under layers of confidence and pattern recognition that feel like wisdom.

Here's what actually happens: You get a new client. Within the first few minutes of that intake call, you've already started building a story about who they are, what they need, and what's holding them back. You're doing it unconsciously, pulling from every previous client who reminded you of this one. The problem isn't that pattern recognition exists. The problem is when you stop questioning it. You start listening to respond rather than listening to understand.

The questions you don't ask tell you more about your biases than the ones you do.

Think about your last ten intake calls.

• What assumptions did you walk in with?

• What were you already preparing to fix before the person finished their first sentence?

• What kinds of clients do you instinctively light up for, and which ones do you secretly dread?
  
  None of that is neutral. All of it shapes what your clients experience.

The coaches I've seen do this at the highest level have built a practice of interrogating their own assumptions before they start interrogating their clients' habits. Not in a performative, overthinking way. In a systematic way.

They've developed a set of questions they ask themselves during or after sessions, not about the client, but about their own reactions.

• Why did that response bother me?

• Why did I push harder in that moment than the data warranted?

• What am I not asking because I've already decided I know the answer?

This isn't about becoming a blank slate. You can't and shouldn't be. Your experience is valuable. But there's a difference between applying hard-won knowledge and letting it calcify into assumptions that close off better questions.

The Bitty & Bó's conversation was obviously a hyperbole, and that was kind of the point. But what it did was remind a room full of coaches that the moment we stop examining our own operating system is the moment we start serving ourselves more than our clients. Your biases aren't a character flaw. They're an operating system running in the background. The work is learning to audit it.

The coaches who do this consistently don't just get better outcomes for their clients. They get better questions. And better questions, done right, are the whole job.

Keep Raising the Bar,

Paul Oneid MS, MS, CSCS