What the H*ll is Coaching?
Want to know something funny?
Before I worked with a coach, I didn't really get it.
I would hear the term “Life Coach” and cringe. Between us, I still kind of do.
I thought coaching was for people who needed someone to hype them up. Or for executives with corporate expense accounts. Or for people who couldn't figure things out on their own and needed someone to tell them what to do.
Humbly, I admit I was wrong. I had just never learned about it, much less given it a chance.
I want to clear a few things up first.
Coaching isn't therapy. Both can involve honest self-reflection, exploring patterns, and figuring out what's getting in the way. But therapy is clinical work. Therapists are licensed to diagnose and treat mental health conditions, and that training and scope is genuinely important. Coaching operates differently. It's not treatment. It's a thinking partnership focused on where you are, where you want to go, and what's been standing between the two.
If you're navigating something that feels like a mental health crisis, therapy is the right first call. Coaching works best alongside a reasonably stable foundation, not as a replacement for clinical support.
It's also not consulting. Consulting is typically a business-focused discipline. Their expertise works well for organizational problems and business strategy. Coaching operates in a completely different domain.
And it's not some self-proclaimed guru with limitless wisdom to bestow upon you. We all know the type.
So what is coaching?
The best way I can describe it is this:
It's a dedicated space to think clearly about your own life, with someone who is fully paying attention and has no agenda other than helping you see what you can't see from inside your own situation.
That sounds simple but it’s rarer than you'd think.
Most of the conversations we have about our lives, (with friends, partners, family), come loaded with the other person's perspective, their investment in a particular outcome, their own fears and projections. Even the most well-meaning people in your life can't be fully neutral about what you’re navigating.
A good coach can be.
And unlike what some people picture, coaching isn’t just have a conversation. Good coaching has real structure behind it. There are frameworks for understanding how people get stuck and what it actually takes to shift. There are tools for surfacing beliefs you didn’t know were running the show. There are methods for creating clarity that goes deeper than what most people reach on their own.
The conversation is the medium. But what’s happening inside it is more deliberate than it might look from the outside.
Honestly though, this description doesn’t really do coaching justice. It’s something much better understood through experience rather than being described through a blog post.
My experience being coached:
I started working with my own coach years ago. I was at a point where I knew something needed to change but I couldn't figure out what. I had good things going. Nothing was dramatically wrong. But I felt stuck in a way I couldn't quite name… like I was capable of more but couldn't access it.
Through all of my own work of trying to figuring things out, I kept noticing I was in a loop that wasn’t letting me work through anything in a real way. Because I was dedicated to moving forward in my life, I decided it was time to look outside of relying on my own tactics. I gave coaching a chance.
What surprised me most about the experience wasn't any single insight or breakthrough moment.
It was the questions.
Not advice disguised as questions. Not leading questions designed to push me toward a predetermined answer. Just honest, curious questions that helped me see my own situation more clearly than I could on my own.
At one point my coach asked me something so simple I almost laughed. And then I sat with it for a second. And something shifted.
I walked away from that conversation understanding something about myself that I'd been circling for months without landing on. And from that place, I was able to start taking action.
That's the work. Not magic. Not transformation through osmosis. Just the right question at the right time from someone who was actually paying attention.
Here's what I've noticed working with people now:
Most people already know more than they think they do.
They know something feels off. They have a sense of what they want, or at least what direction feels right. They've thought about this stuff more than they let on.
What they don't have is the space to think about it clearly. Without the noise of daily life. Without their own defenses getting in the way. Without someone else's agenda shaping the conversation.
Coaching creates that space.
Most people who feel stuck have been navigating the same thoughts, the same patterns, the same circular conversations with themselves for months or sometimes years. Having someone outside of it, someone who can see what you can't see from inside it, can compress that timeline significantly.
Not because the work is easy. Because you're finally doing it with someone who knows how to help you move.
Is coaching for everyone?
Honestly, no.
It works best for people who are self-aware enough to know something's off and honest enough to look at it directly. People who are ready to actually do something, not just talk about it indefinitely.
If you're in genuine mental health crisis, therapy is absolutely the right call. If you want someone to hand you a five-step business plan, consulting might serve you better. If you're not really ready to look at things in your life honestly, coaching will feel frustrating.
But if you're someone who has a quiet sense that there's a version of your life you haven't quite reached, and you're tired of trying to figure it out entirely on your own, it might be exactly what you need.
The thing that stuck with me most from working with my own coach wasn't anything he said.
It was realizing how long I'd been carrying certain thoughts, assumptions, and beliefs without ever really examining them. They'd just been running quietly in the background: shaping decisions, limiting options, narrowing what felt possible.
Bringing them into the light didn't require anything dramatic.
Just someone asking the right question.
One last thing worth noting about coaching:
There are a lot of different types of coaches out there. Executive coaches, health coaches, wellness coaches, performance coaches. The coaching world is wide.
My work sits in a specific place within it. I’m not interested in helping people climb the corporate ladder or reach a higher status so they can brag to their friends or feed an ego.
The work I do is about helping people figure out what they actually want, who they want to become, and what’s been standing in the way between them and that version of their life.
Finding a coach you genuinely resonate with matters more than finding the most credentialed one. If my approach sounds like what you’re looking for, great. If not, I’d still encourage you to find someone whose does.
Curious what coaching looks like in practice? A free intro call is the place to start.
I hope to chat soon.