Communication scientist and coaching expert Haesun Moon will deliver a keynote address at the 2026 Learning Forward Annual Conference in Dallas, Texas. Her talk, “The Habit of Better,” will draw on her books Coaching A-Zand Foundations of Brief Coaching, her research on microanalysis of dialogue patterns, and her experience coaching professionals around the world. Moon teaches brief coaching at the University of Toronto and serves as executive director at the Canadian Centre for Brief Coaching and as a faculty member at the Institute of Coaching (Harvard Medical School affiliate).

 What is the focus of your communication research?

I started with microanalysis of face-to-face dialogue. I’d take recorded conversations and code them frame by frame, about 30 frames per second, and describe exactly what I see and hear. Do that across a huge amount of footage, and patterns start to emerge in how people actually communicate with each other.

What we find is that many of the behaviors we assume signal active listening and empathy are really just fancy myths we carry around. Things like constant eye contact, for instance, are not actually what happens in real conversation. When people are processing information, the speaker and listener will meet each other’s eyes (called gaze window) some of the time, but the speaker will look away to think, return for a moment, then drift off again.

We study the visible and audible utterances too, and they tell us that communication isn’t a two-step; it’s integrated. My so-called body language isn’t separate from my verbal language. For example, when I just said the word “integrated,” I interlocked my fingers because we’re talking on video and the gesture assists the meaning. The other person then signals they’ve understood: a nod, a sound, some other small sign. In communication science, we call this calibrating or common grounding. That calibration and mutual understanding accumulate over time, within and across conversations.

How do you apply this research to coaching?

This understanding of how co-constructed conversations work is the basis for what I call the “dialogic” nature of coaching. It is not diagnostic as I am not assessing a need or a problem, and it isn’t dialectic as I’m not weighing opposing viewpoints to resolve them. It’s about attending to what is heard and seen in the conversation.

Ask coaches what matters most in coaching, and some will say powerful questioning. I think we’ve oversold questioning as an intervention. Questions can be invasive! Instead of questioning, I focus on attending. Attending includes the word tend. So when you listen to someone, what are you tending? What are you growing? What are you nurturing in this conversation? Are you nurturing fears, worries, regrets they have — or are you nurturing their hopes and dreams? Are you nurturing the competence they forgot they have? How you listen will co-author the other person’s narrative, their reality. That’s a huge job. But you can do it, even in five to seven minutes.

One hallmark of a dialogic conversation is preserving and building on the client’s own language. For example, I once coached a university student who was a bit older than her peers — a mature student in my university’s terminology. In our first meeting she said, “I’m a mature student. I spent seven years working as a project manager in engineering and I just feel like I’m so behind now. The other students are used to being in school and they’re way faster than me.” We kept working on her language around identity, capability, and agency over the sessions that followed. By the third session, she came back and said, “I’m a mature student and I’ve been a project manager for seven years, so I know how to plan ahead. I don’t know how other students miss assignments. Put it in your calendar, right? I just feel so mature compared to other people here.” The word mature had taken on an entirely different meaning, and it reflected a different way of thinking about herself.

Another hallmark is attending to what the client says they want and centering our curiosity around their sense of purpose, possibilities, and progress. That’s what I’d call empathy. Empathy isn’t just acknowledging “I can see it’s been difficult for you.” Yes, you listen to their fears and struggles. But you respond to those very differently than you respond to their hopes and dreams. Empathy means focusing on what clearly matters to them and working with them to find out about all the efforts they’ve made so far and are willing to make to protect what they care about. That shows up visibly and audibly.

When you work in schools, do you find this dialogic approach to be surprising to educators?

They do find it surprising, because we are all trained to be excellent problem solvers. In schools the agenda is usually set, and many of us, educators included, have been systematically conditioned to fix problems. Take rating scales, for example. If you ask someone to rate themselves from one to 10 and they say six, most teachers immediately want to know, “How do we get you to a seven?” We think that’s helpful. But it’s actually a deficit-based inquiry, because by definition the gap between their six and their ideal 10 is everything they don’t have yet.

Shift to an asset-based, or strengths-based, inquiry and the whole conversation changes. Now the question becomes, “Wow! How did you already get to a six? What’s different now from when you were at a four?”

We rarely pause to ask about the effort it took to get to that point. We’re good at imagining a better future, but we should also look at a better past: how we travelled from there to here. Imagine asking teachers, “I know there were things that you really struggled with in the first three years and got better at. What were some of them?” And then, “How did you get better at those? And what else do you want to get better at?”

This approach sounds like it could be useful with students, too.

It is. Sometimes I sit in on class observations, and the kids all assume I’m there to evaluate them. Instead, I tell them what I noticed: how one of them picked up a pencil for another student, or how a child with ADHD sat still for a full 18 minutes. This isn’t evaluation; it’s valuation. It’s noticing what they are getting better at so we can build on it.

Then, maybe at lunchtime, I’ll ask, “Of everything that’s happened today, what did you like so much that you want to make sure it happens again tomorrow?” The kids are surprised, but they know exactly what they want to see, and we post it all on a big board. Every single time I do this, I feel the difference between making someone feel valued and making them feel evaluated.

How did you develop the dialogic coaching approach and what traditions does it draw on?

My undergrad education included neuroscience and clinical psychology, and from there I went into supporting people with developmental disabilities and their families. I wasn’t thinking about coaching, but we were using very coaching-like processes such as strengths-based conversations and appreciative inquiry. I became fascinated by how to equip and train new staff members, so I enrolled in a master of adult education program.

One day I walked into a new class I thought was about organizational development. I was late and the professor was talking about conversing and empathy. I loved everything he was saying, but I couldn’t work out what any of it had to do with organizational development. It turned out I’d been in the wrong class the whole time! It was part of the counseling psychology program, and I immediately knew I had to pursue it.

That’s where I found solution-focused brief therapy, which emerged in the 1970s and ‘80s as a response to traditions like psychoanalysis that focused on problems and could take years to trace them to their source. One of the field’s founders, Insoo Kim Berg, focused instead on what clients were already doing in the direction of what they wanted and building on assets. At first, her colleagues worried that her clients were dropping out of therapy; then they realized those clients were simply getting better far faster.

I kept the name (brief therapy) in my own work because I’m mindful of the lineage I am honoring. That’s why I call my practice brief coaching. Many of my clients see me only four or six times, and then perhaps reach out again years later when they are working on something new. But being brief was never the goal. It’s a side effect of an approach that works very effectively.

What do you want people to know about your keynote before they come?

This is my wish for everyone who walks into any keynote I give: that they go home and have better conversations with people they love. I want their nests to be built from the threads of those better conversations. Every thread we bring into a conversation can be one small strand of better. That’s the fabric of our relationships.

Download pdf here.