What to look for in coaching?When you’re navigating an inflection point in your life, the quality of support matters. Coaching can be a powerful container for developing clarity, agency, and forward movement that’s genuinely your own.
At its best, coaching helps you orient within complexity — not just move from one known point to another, but make sense of what’s emerging and choose how to meet it.
While coaching approaches vary widely, the following qualities make a meaningful difference — especially in times of transition, challenge, or reorientation.
1. Attentive, Skilled Presence
A strong coach listens deeply, reflects what they hear, asks discerning questions, and helps you stay connected to what matters most to you — without overriding your own knowing.
2. Relevant Depth and Experience
Coaching is strengthened when a coach brings real understanding of the terrain you’re navigating — whether that’s leadership, health, organizational complexity, sustained responsibility, whatever you’re directly going through — and knows how change unfolds over time.
3. Lived Experience of Transition
There’s a qualitative difference when a coach has lived through what you’re navigating themselves. It shapes their capacity for nuance, patience, practical insight, empathy, and persistence.
4. Relational Fit
The relationship itself matters. When there’s genuine connection and trust, effort becomes less forced, and growth becomes more natural.
When the Stakes Are Higher
During periods of disruption, uncertainty, or significant change, additional qualities become especially important:
5. Embodied Presence
A coach who can stay grounded, patient, and attentive — especially when things are unclear — helps create space for deeper awareness and wiser choices.
6. Integrative Perspective
Life rarely changes in one domain at a time. Coaches with integrative capacities can help you navigate competing demands across work, health, relationships, purpose — seeing constraints as design parameters rather than limitations.
7. Respect for Your Pace and Path
Growth that lasts unfolds at a rhythm that’s responsive, not forced. Look for a coach who supports movement without rushing or pressure.
8. Commitment to Your Agency
The most effective coaching keeps your life, context, and sovereignty at the center — drawing on experience and insight without substituting someone else’s path for your own.
If you’re considering coaching, I encourage you to use these lenses — with me or anyone else. What matters most is finding the kind of support that helps you move forward in ways that honor who you are and what you are uniquely and specifically navigating.
When navigating big transitions...We all need support.
Confidantes.
Guides.
Co-conspirators.
Accompaniment.
People who help us…
hear ourselves more clearly,
sense into our next best actions,
navigate what’s difficult,
celebrate what’s unfolding,
and care well for ourselves along the way.
Here, you’ll find that kind of support —
for your whole human self:
your personal life,
your professional life,
your relationships,
your physical well-being.
For those dedicated on behalf of…
what is living,
what is emerging,
what is true, good, and beautiful,
what is still becoming —
in yourself, in others, and in the world.
For moments when you feel
overwhelmed, exhausted, done —
or brimming with new possibility.
For times of uncertainty,
when next steps aren’t yet clear —
or when everything seems to be moving at once.
In support of who you are becoming,
and what you are uniquely here to contribute.
Doing and being what is yours to do and be —
rooted in the knowing that you are already,
brilliantly, fractally whole.
