While there are a lot of ways to talk about coaching in an executive context, I find that three are particularly helpful.

First is performance coaching. This type of coaching involves working on a skillset, like communication, without work on the person.

The other two focus on more fundamental personal changes.

Developmental coaching is what my coach Doug Silsbee focused on. The coach helps the client through predictable developmental stages, and their capacity to do certain things, like lead selflessly, automatically changes as they change and grow.

Transformational coaching is what some of my spiritual teachers do. It can help a person can make a sudden shift in how they see the world. This often leads to a paradox of feeling greater ease while having a greater impact. It can seem like magic when it happens.

The role of the coach, to me, is to sense the shift that is most available and helpful to the client at any given point.

If you want to become a better speaker, or to be better in front of your board, you might just need performance coaching.

But if you’re willing to do the work, if you see that better humans make better leaders, the personal journey is much more powerful.

And effective.

A lot of my friends and clients look at my coaching business and my career and say they see nothing but straight predictable lines. They see a 30-year corporate career and an easy transition into coaching CEOs and senior executives when my position was eliminated in 2016.

What they don’t see is that my first impulse was to go into consulting, and it took a good friend to remind me that I was passionate about coaching before I even considered trying to do it full time.

What they don’t see is two years of struggling with confidence about IF I could help someone, let alone WHO I could help and HOW to talk to them about it.

What they don’t see is the sleepless nights I spent thinking about my rapidly depleting savings and when (and how) I would have to find a “real” job.

What they don’t see is the hard conversations I had with my wife, my panic bubbling underneath the calm, confident exterior.

What they don’t see is the crippling fear I had that my business was going to completely dry up at the beginning of the pandemic.

What they don’t see is that even today I track how many months of savings I have.

Doing something new is terrifying. Most people don’t fail. They just don’t stick it out long enough.

Do you remember the Magic Eye illusions? If you look at the picture below, you may not see anything unusual at first. But if you focus beyond the picture, a deeper pattern emerges (if you see it, leave a comment).

It hit me recently that this is a lot like our experience of life. On the surface, it seems like life is “out there,” outside of us. That the circumstances of our lives create our experience, and determine our happiness.

But the only way we can experience life is internally. Our sense organs and brains constantly take inputs and create an experience. Each of us has our own experience, uniquely flavored by our prior experiences and our current feelings.

At the same time, I really don’t seem to be in control of the experience that shows up. Like the weather, it constantly changes. When I’m feeling bad, I have a bad experience. But if I wait, if I allow things to settle, I seem to have a default setting toward a better experience. And toward a deeper wisdom coming through.

There is something that is incredibly freeing about this. That we don’t have to figure everything out. That we have access to a deeper wisdom if we only allow space for it.

What can you let get better, just by leaving it alone?

My client had just been offered a C-Suite role. Her first.

And she found herself gripped by thoughts that she was not ready, that she did not deserve it.

That she was not enough.

This has been a constant theme in her life. It’s one of the things that drives her success. If you’re not enough, you never stop working.

But it’s exhausting.

“How do I stop thinking these thoughts?”

“I’m not sure anyone can control their thoughts. I still have that thought from time to time. Most leaders do.”

“Then what do I do?”

I have some bizarre thoughts from time to time. But most of them just pass on through. Some thoughts, though, seem more solid. More frequent. They bring a certain feeling, in my stomach or my throat.

They look real.

But we think we are our thoughts when we are the thinker.

The thinker is like the sky. Pure and open.

The sky is unaffected by the storms that pass through.

And if you see that you’re not your thoughts, you can feel the same way.

You feel whatever you happen to be thinking. And that’s always changing. But you’re not. Like the weather, if you don’t like your thinking, just wait and it will change.

Do you get stuck in your thinking? What if you stopped trying to stop?