Five Themes My Coaching Clients All Share
Most people don’t come to coaching in crisis.
They come because a question has been pacing around their head for a while and recently started bumping into furniture.
On paper, things look fine. Sometimes better than fine. The work is respectable. The trajectory is defensible. From the outside it reads like progress. From the inside it feels like constantly adjusting yourself to fit a shape you agreed to years ago.
When you listen long enough, the same themes keep surfacing. Not as clean patterns. More like familiar pressure points.
Clarity that feels expensive
Almost everyone says they want clarity. What they usually mean is relief from having to choose. They’re surrounded by viable options, which sounds like a privilege until every option carries the weight of future regret. When you’ve built a reputation for being thoughtful and capable, choosing wrong starts to feel reckless. So people stay in analysis. They call it being strategic. Mostly it’s fear with better vocabulary.
An identity gap they don’t quite name
This doesn’t show up as a dramatic identity crisis. It’s quieter. Being known for work that no longer feels representative. Being praised for strengths you’re not sure you want to keep monetizing. There’s often a low-grade resentment there, aimed nowhere in particular. People hesitate to say it out loud because it sounds ungrateful, even when it’s accurate.
A story that no longer works
Accomplished people are often terrible narrators of their own lives. They list roles instead of decisions. They downplay wins, over-explain detours, and hide behind titles like they’re legal disclaimers. When asked what they do well, they give timelines instead of arguments. The doubt isn’t in the facts. It’s in the framing.
Confidence that isn’t about bravado
What’s missing is rarely confidence in the motivational-poster sense. It’s self-trust. The ability to make a call without polling an invisible committee of former bosses, peers, parents, and imagined future versions of themselves. Most people aren’t scared things won’t work out. They’re scared they won’t be able to stand behind their own reasoning if they don’t.
Breadth that stopped being protective
Range helps early. It keeps doors open. It makes you adaptable. Later, it becomes the thing people don’t know what to do with. Multifaceted professionals feel this sharply. They’ve done many things, learned quickly, shifted contexts. Now they’re told they’re impressive, but unfocused. Useful, but hard to place. The same trait that kept them safe starts to stall them.
Somewhere in the middle of these conversations, energy sneaks in as a tell. Not passion. Not purpose. Just noticing which problems sharpen you and which ones flatten you for the rest of the day. It’s inconvenient data. It often contradicts the plan that would sound smartest if you explained it at a dinner party.
Structure helps, but only because it removes hiding places. Frameworks force specificity. They make it harder to posture and harder to dismiss yourself. When someone has to articulate the actual problem they solve, something usually shifts. Not dramatically. Just enough to make pretending uncomfortable.
What I keep noticing is that people aren’t asking to be fixed. They’re asking to stop feeling internally split. To make decisions they can live inside, not just justify. To move without waiting for the story to become airtight first.
The sessions don’t end with clean answers. They usually end with sharper language and a slightly unsettling sense that something real has been named. That discomfort sticks around. It changes which conversations people avoid. Which ones they finally initiate.
Nothing resolves neatly after that. It just stops being theoretical.