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Face to face or telephone coaching - which works best?

I believe that the highest quality coaching work is done face to face – because so much information and meaning passes between individuals through non-verbal cues and body language. Well documented research has suggested that as much as 70% of the real meaning in communication comes from non-verbal sources.
Gestures, stance, finger pointing, facial expressions, proximity, smiling, scowling, laughing, crying, eye movements, eyebrows, use of hands, handshaking all play a part in communicating messages between humans.
The sorts of body language and the messages lying behind it that I have found to convey crucial information to me in coaching sessions include the following:-
 Facial expressions that convey pain, pleasure or uncertainty.
 Eye movements suggesting deceit or discomfort.
 Gestures indicating anger or frustration.
 Arm signals displaying defensiveness or self-protection.
 Handshaking implying dominance, control or submissiveness.

One telephone coach with whom I have discussed these two very different approaches to coaching tells me that he can sense when a person is moving about or shifting their stance as he listens to them speaking on the telephone – but surely this is no substitute for the reality of using your eyes to see the messages that these body movements convey!?

Gender is another interesting aspect of this coaching work because MRI scans of female brains show that women have far greater capacity for communicating with and evaluating people than do men. For example women have 14-16 areas of the brain that they use to sense, assess and evaluate the messages transmitted by other people as opposed to the 4-6 areas of the brain used by men. Taken in isolation this data would suggest that women would invariably make much better coaches than men but of course the whole coaching process and the skills required to be highly effective are much more complicated than this one characteristic alone might imply.