What 10 years of coaching consultations taught me about change

I was doing some branding work recently that involved reading nearly ten years of notes from initial coaching consultations.

Page after page, I found myself smiling at the record of my first conversations with clients, many of whom I went on to work with for months or, in some cases, on and off over the years.

What I noticed was how often our work took us somewhere quite different from the goals clients initially brought to coaching.

It made me think how the change we think we need is rarely the one we end up making.

Someone might come to coaching convinced they need to find a new job, only to discover that what really needs examining is their relationship with achievement. Another might arrive wanting to become more confident in a senior role and find that the most important work is learning to set boundaries.

A note for context: some of my work is in organisations and some in private practice, and the conversations in these notes are with private clients. Clients who decided to work with a coach because they wanted the freedom to work on what they choose, rather than on something their organisation is paying for and may be expecting a return on.

Many people who engage me privately find themselves at what I’d call a transition moment.

Often, it’s a promotion, a new job or a new career they want to make a great start in. Sometimes it’s a wake-up call, such as a health scare or a gradual build-up of dissatisfaction that can no longer be ignored, perhaps approaching burnout.

Sometimes an external event acts as a catalyst, ranging from an unexpected blow like redundancy to a long-awaited event like becoming a parent, which calls for a re-examination of our relationship with work.

But you don’t need a major reason to get a lot out of coaching. External events often prompt us to adapt, but our motivation and decision to prioritise ourselves is often a better predictor of coaching's effectiveness than what is happening around us.

What occurred to me was that although the work looked very different in each of those cases, much of it could sit under the umbrella of career coaching.

How funny, I thought, given that I would never voluntarily call myself a career coach.

Perhaps it's because the term conjures up a particular image: someone with a formula, who will help you prepare for a job search, polish your LinkedIn profile or practise for interviews. And while I occasionally support my clients with some of that, it's not where the heart of my work lies. Coaching is collaborative and exploratory, supportive but also challenging, and it can take us somewhere quite different from where we expected to go.

This left me wondering how I could help someone considering coaching understand what the work might actually involve.

So I decided to map it out.

I mapped out some common areas of coaching along two dimensions: whether someone wants to improve their current situation or pursue a different direction, and whether the work is primarily practical or deeper and reflective.

Here are a few reflections from this analysis.

1. Not every change requires a change of direction

A common misconception is that coaching is reserved for big changes, for example going through a career change. But that is often not true.

Sometimes a change has its place, but the desire for it can also be fuelled by wanting to run away rather than step towards something we really want. We all get seduced sometimes by the “I’ll be happy when…” fantasy: when I change jobs, move to a different sector, start a business.

Of course, with the pace of change around us, most of us will need to reinvent aspects of our working lives more than once over the coming decades. But that's a different point.

My point for today is that not everyone needs to reinvent their career in order to thrive. Sometimes a relatively small change in how we work, relate to others, act under pressure or understand what fulfils us can make an enormous difference to our experience of work. A desire for a big change can be a very useful starting point for exploration, though.

2. Knowing what to do isn't the same as being able to do it

When thinking about what they need, many of my clients reach for pragmatic action first. This can be about tips, practical solutions or the question of "what have others in my shoes done?".

In difficult moments, especially when we crave certainty, we may look for a fix, a path to follow, something that will restore a sense of control. And I understand that. I make sure there is something practical to take away from every session, but creating a plan or following someone else's path without addressing some important questions is not the way.

Some of the most consequential work happens at the level of identity, beliefs and psychological patterns. That doesn't mean we're doing therapy. We might need to examine your beliefs about success, take a closer look at your self-belief or explore your relationship with rest before that plan can take shape.

And this is where I see much of the value of coaching. Practical advice is readily available, whether in books, blog posts or increasingly through AI tools. But knowing what to do isn't enough. The challenge is often less about our ability to act and more about what we're prepared to experience in order to do so.

Without understanding what's driving our behaviour, we risk falling back into familiar patterns, however good the advice or the plan. It's the combination of practical action and psychological exploration that makes lasting change possible.

3. But introspection alone isn't enough to create insight

One of the myths about coaching that I passionately challenge is the idea that the client already has all the answers within them. I don't find that to be universally true.

Introspection has its limits. We can spend a long time examining our beliefs, motivations and aspirations, but sometimes we need to get out of our heads and experiment. Maybe you need to have a few exploratory conversations with people in different industries, try new ways of working or step into a few unfamiliar situations to learn more about yourself - it can challenge our assumptions and fundamentally change what we believe is possible.

Sometimes we don't know what we want because we haven't yet experienced enough of what might be possible.

4. What we need from coaching changes along the way

The value and content of coaching depend on where someone is on their journey.

Sometimes we need space to understand what we actually want, with a thinking partner who isn't invested in our choices. Sometimes it's about confidence. We may know what we want but struggle to trust our judgement, recognise our strengths or navigate uncertainty. And sometimes we need companionship and accountability through a process that is inherently uncertain.

Even when we have supportive friends or colleagues going through similar experiences, they may share our fears and assumptions. A coach can offer something different: someone who isn't caught up in the same uncertainty, has no stake in our decisions and can help us remain thoughtful as we navigate them.

5. The work rarely follows a straight line

For example, someone comes to coaching wanting to change jobs, initially focused on the practicalities of pursuing a different direction. As we explore their dissatisfaction, they discover that perfectionism is playing a part. This takes us into more psychological territory, where they realise that wherever they go, they will take that perfectionism with them. They begin questioning their definition of success, and ultimately decide to negotiate a different role with their existing employer, bringing us back to practical action, but this time focused on improving their current situation.

There's no prescribed journey through the matrix. Your coaching can move between practical questions, deeper exploration and different possibilities as your understanding evolves. Many goals will have a practical and a psychological side to them (e.g. - being good at saying no might include an exploration of identity as well as a practical formula for how to phrase it). It's depth and momentum together than create change that sticks.

There is a paradox in coaching. We tend to want to know what we need before we begin, yet it rarely works that way. Starting is the first step, taken without knowing where the exploration will lead, because each session brings new discoveries and new experiments. 

Having read through all those notes, I am sure of one thing: the initial goal is unlikely to remain unchanged.

As Professor David Clutterbuck, a pioneer of coaching and mentoring and author of more than 75 books, once put it, "if the goal never changed, I would be a pretty rubbish coach".

And I wholeheartedly agree. If my clients left coaching with exactly the same understanding of what they needed as when they arrived, I would have to question how much they had actually discovered about themselves.

So if you're thinking about booking that first consultation, all you need to do is share what's on your mind, however unformed it might be. We work out together what happens next. You won't be left to figure it out alone. And not knowing exactly what you need isn't a sign you're doing it wrong.

Quite the opposite.