When Thinking Isn't Enough

Why coaching leans towards thinking

Executive coaching has traditionally leaned towards thinking, and for good reason.

Much of what experienced coaches have been trained to do involves thinking: reflection, questioning, perspective, insight, goal-setting, planning, strategy, action, and accountability.

None of that is controversial. It's a large part of what coaching is, and when a client has the capacity to reflect, think flexibly and make use of the coaching conversation, it can be extraordinarily effective.

Where it gets more interesting is when we assume that, because somebody can still think, then thinking must be the best place to begin.

A senior leader can still chair a meeting, make decisions, answer emails and give you an intelligent account of what's happening while operating under considerable physiological and emotional pressure.

But that doesn't tell you how much capacity they have available for the kind of reflection you're asking them to do.

Think about a client arriving after a difficult week. Their organisation has just announced another restructure. They've barely slept. They've been moving from meeting to meeting all day and spent the ten minutes before your session dealing with a problem that's blown up in their team.

They sit down, and you ask:

“What would you like to get from today?”

It's a perfectly good coaching question, and very often it's exactly the right one.

But there's another question worth asking yourself first:

What state is this person in right now?

If they're overwhelmed, shut down, or simply running very close to the edge, you may find that another clever question doesn't get you very far. It may be more useful to help them find a little more capacity first, and then return to the coaching work you already know how to do well.

There's nothing wrong with starting with thinking, provided thinking is accessible.

Why this matters even more now

I'm not going to argue that leaders today are uniquely stressed, that work used to be straightforward, or that the clients we coached fifteen years ago had easier lives.

We can't really prove any of that, and I'm not claiming the research shows it either.

But what we can see quite clearly is the environment in which many leaders are operating now.

And the client who turns up for their session brings the previous ten hours with them.

They bring the meeting they've just left, the argument they had yesterday, the restructure nobody can explain, the inbox they haven't cleared, and the decision they know they need to make but can’t seem to actually act on.

Sometimes they'll tell you all of that, but sometimes they won't.

Which is why I don't think the answer is simply to give coaches more techniques. Most experienced coaches already have plenty. Expertise is knowing when, why and how to use the ones you have.

What we need first is a better way of reading the client's state, and for that it helps to have a map.

The Performance Spectrum

The map I use for this is something I call the Performance Spectrum.

Before deciding what work to do with a client, it helps me answer a more basic question:

Where is my client right now?

The horizontal axis represents increasing pressure or stress. The vertical axis represents performance, running roughly from −5 at the bottom to +5 at the top.

At first, increasing pressure can support performance. It can give us energy, focus and momentum. Under the right conditions, we may move towards the top of the curve, into a highly focused state where we're performing at our best.

This matters because the aim isn't to remove all pressure from our clients’ lives or to regulate everyone into a state of calm.

But there comes a point where adding more pressure can stop helping.

As demand continues to increase, performance may start to decline on the other side of the curve. The person might still be functioning perfectly well, but they're having to work harder to do it. Their capacity for perspective may start to narrow. They can become less flexible, more reactive and perhaps more easily distracted or less able to recover when something goes wrong.

Keep going, and eventually the demands placed on the person can begin to exceed the capacity they currently have.

Performance can then fall through zero and into the negative part of the spectrum.

That's where the idea of the Window of Regulation becomes useful.

Underneath the model is the way the nervous system responds to pressure and arousal, but you don't need the physiology to use it. In simple terms, the window is the range within which someone can experience pressure while still having enough capacity available to work with it.

And that word “available” matters.

We're interested in how much of their capacity they can actually access in this particular moment, rather than how capable they are as a person.

This is why I call the Performance Spectrum a map rather than the territory.

The −5 to +5 scale isn't a scientifically validated measurement instrument, and I'm certainly not suggesting you can look at a client and decide they're at precisely −2.6. It's a practical coaching heuristic that helps us orient ourselves to the person we're coaching.

Because the relationship between pressure and performance isn't fixed.

Two executives can face similar organisational demands yet be in quite different places on the spectrum.

The organisational problem could be exactly the same, but the place I begin coaching them probably wouldn't be.

Given where this client is right now, where should I enter the work?

But before we get there, there's another part of reading a client's state that's worth looking at.

State and Story

So how do you know where a client is?

You can't know for certain, but you can get much better at noticing the information that's already available to you in session.

I've come to think about this through two things: the client's story and their state.

STORY

What is my client telling me?

This is the part we're already very good at listening to as coaches.

The client tells us what's happening. They describe the difficult relationship with their CEO, the restructure, the decision they can't make or the conversation they're avoiding.

None of that changes, but there's another source of information available at the same time.

STATE

What am I noticing in the person in front of me?

How are they actually showing up while they're telling you the story?

Perhaps they're speaking much faster than usual, jumping between subjects and finding it hard to stay with a question.

Or perhaps it's almost the opposite. Their energy seems unusually low, their voice is flatter, they're giving you very little detail, and something about the conversation feels harder to access.

None of these things tells you, on its own, what is happening.

We're not learning to look at somebody's posture or tone of voice and decide we know more about their experience than they do.

We're simply widening the information we're paying attention to.

And sometimes the interesting part is what happens when those two sources of information don't quite line up.

GAP

Where do the story and the state not quite match?

I had a client I'll call Alice who gave me a very good example of this.

Alice was a senior executive I'd been coaching for some time. She'd been through a difficult period at work involving somebody who had once been a close friend, and the situation had taken quite a toll on her.

Then things changed.

The other person was planning to leave the firm and, when Alice told me about it, her message was essentially that the problem had resolved itself.

She was fine, just tired.

If I'd listened only to the story, there wasn't much more to do.

But something about the way Alice was presenting didn't quite fit.

She offered almost no detail. When I asked how she felt about what had happened, she shut the subject down very quickly. I also noticed my own energy beginning to drop as we talked, something I've learned to pay attention to in my coaching.

It made me curious, and that gap felt worth noticing.

It's worth saying that the story isn't necessarily false, and the state isn't somehow revealing a hidden truth.

A client can genuinely tell you they're doing well while something about the way they're showing up makes you curious. Both things can be true.

Notice enough to become curious.

A repeatable way to work

Those decisions are harder when you're sitting opposite a client and making them in real time.

Over time, I needed a way to make this less intuitive and more repeatable, bringing together what we've looked at so far without turning a coaching session into a checklist.

That's what eventually became CORE.

CENTRE · ORIENT · REGULATE · ENGAGE

It's the process I use to put the pieces we've already covered into practice.

CORE isn't a script

There's an obvious danger with any framework like this.

You can start by trying to run the client through it.

I've Centred. Now I need to Orient. Now we Regulate. Now we Engage.

That's not how I use CORE.

A real coaching session is much messier than that.

You might orient to a client, begin working cognitively and then notice their state change when you reach a particular subject.

So you orient again.

You may regulate briefly, discover that an emotion becomes available and spend some time there.

Then you engage with what that means for a decision they need to make.

CORE gives me somewhere to come back to when that happens.

Regulation is something I use when the client's state calls for it, rather than something I impose because this is called Embodied Performance.

And Engage keeps the whole process connected to the reason we're there in the first place: meaningful change in the client's life and work.

What CORE gives me is a way of organising my attention so I can keep responding to the person in front of me.

And the more range we develop as coaches, the more important that judgement becomes.

Because being able to work across a wider range of client states also brings greater responsibility.

Greater range requires clearer boundaries

If we're going to increase the range of what we can work with as coaches, we also need to become clearer about the limits of that work.

So it's reasonable to ask: is this still coaching?

For me, the answer isn't determined simply by whether emotion or the body shows up in session.

Emotion has always been part of coaching sessions. So have stress, difficult relationships, fear, grief, anger and the rest of being human.

The more useful question is whether what the client is bringing is appropriate for coaching, and whether I have the competence to work with it.

Knowing when to pause or refer

Sometimes the right decision is to refer.

Referral isn't evidence that coaching has failed or that you've somehow reached the edge of being a good coach.

Range includes knowing where your range ends.

There are times when something about what I'm seeing makes me pause and question whether coaching remains the appropriate place for the work.

Perhaps the client's response seems difficult to understand in the context of what they're describing. Perhaps what is emerging appears to reach well beyond the situation they've brought to coaching. Perhaps we're repeatedly working with their state, but nothing seems to shift. Or perhaps I'm simply unsure whether I have the competence to work safely with what's appearing.

None of those observations tells me what's clinically happening.

They are reasons to slow down.

I might need to explore the situation further with the client, take the work to supervision, consider whether another professional should be involved or, in some circumstances, refer the client elsewhere.

And if I'm genuinely unsure whether something sits within my competence, uncertainty itself is a reason to pause rather than push further.

Sometimes the most professionally responsible thing you can do is recognise that somebody else is better placed to help.

Competence matters

Understanding a model isn't the same as being competent to use everything that sits underneath it.

You can learn to notice that a client appears to be outside their Window of Regulation without automatically being equipped to work deeply with whatever emerges.

And you can notice a Gap between State and Story without deciding that it's your job to uncover whatever you imagine is underneath it.

This is one reason I've been careful throughout this report to describe the Performance Spectrum as a map and Orient as forming a working hypothesis.

We're paying better attention, not diagnosing.

The methodology can help you see more.

Training, practice and supervision help you know what to do with what you see.

Contracting and supervision

Working across a wider range of client states makes good contracting more important, not less.

Clients need to understand the nature of the work they're entering into. And where an organisation is paying for the coaching, there needs to be clarity around confidentiality and what, if anything, goes back to the sponsor.

Then there's supervision.

If you're going to work with strong emotional material and a wider range of client states, you need somewhere appropriate to take your own questions about the work.

Judgement improves when it can be examined, even when nothing has gone wrong.

If you're working regularly with that kind of material, I'd also want supervision from somebody who is comfortable working with it themselves.

This isn't therapy

Embodied Performance isn't an attempt to turn executive coaches into therapists.

Nor is the distinction between coaching and therapy simply that coaches focus on goals while therapists focus on emotions. Real coaching has never been that tidy.

The boundary lies in the nature of the work, the client’s needs, and the practitioner’s competence.

Our role as coaches is not to diagnose mental-health conditions or treat clinical disorders.

Our job is to become better at working with the whole person who arrives for coaching, while recognising when what they need falls outside the work we're qualified to provide.

Greater range requires clearer boundaries.

Developing range means having more choices in how we respond, and enough judgement to know which of them are appropriate.