Coaching Through Everything | Reflective Practice
Sometimes a path becomes visible only after you've been walking it for a while.
You look behind you and realize that what seemed like a series of unrelated turns has become a trail. You didn't map it in advance. You simply kept following what caught your attention until, eventually, you could see where it was leading.
That's more or less how the Coaching Through essays began.
I had written about coaching through burnout. Then grief. Career disappointment. Confidence. Different subjects, I thought. Different coaching conversations.
Except they weren't.
The more I wrote, the more I recognized something I had been encountering in the coaching room for years. Clients rarely arrive carrying neatly labeled coaching topics. They arrive carrying life.
A client comes wanting to make a career decision, and disappointment is sitting underneath it. Another wants to become more productive, but burnout has quietly changed the terms of the conversation. Someone wants to feel more confident after stepping into a bigger role, only to discover that the person they have become hasn't quite caught up with the position they now occupy.
And sometimes grief enters the room without ever appearing on the calendar.
After enough years of coaching, I've come to believe that just about everything eventually finds its way into the coaching room.
