What is professional coaching?
The short answer: a relationship designed to make you better at the hardest parts of your job.
If you're a senior leader considering coaching for the first time — or reconsidering it after a less-than-impressive experience — what follows is an honest account of what coaching is, what it isn't, and what to look for in a coach worth your time and investment.
A client-driven partnership.
Coaching is a client-driven partnership. The coach doesn't tell you what to do. The coach helps you think more clearly, see more honestly, and act more deliberately than you could on your own.
The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires clients to maximize their personal and professional potential. In practice, that means three things:
Setting Goals
Creating Outcomes
Managing Personal Change
Goals that reflect what you actually want — not just what looks good on paper. Outcomes through your own insight and strategy, not someone else's playbook. Change that sticks, because you own it.
At the senior level, the stakes are different. The decisions are harder, the feedback is scarcer, and the cost of blind spots is higher. That's precisely where coaching matters most.
What a good coach actually does.
Discovers, clarifies, and aligns.
Before any strategy, a coach helps you get clear on what you actually want to achieve — not what you think you should want, or what the board expects. That clarity changes everything that follows.
Encourages self-discovery.
The most useful insights in coaching don't come from the coach — they come from you. A skilled coach asks the questions that help you see what you've been too close, too busy, or too certain to notice.
Elicits your own solutions.
You are the expert on your context, your organization, and your life. A coach's job is not to hand you answers but to create the conditions where your own best thinking can emerge.
Holds you accountable.
Not in a punitive way — in the way that matters. A coach helps you make commitments that are real, track them honestly, and understand what gets in the way when they don't happen.
Worth being clear about.
Conflating coaching with other services leads to frustration on both sides. Here's how coaching differs from the most common alternatives.
Therapy
Therapy focuses on mental health, emotional healing, and the past. Coaching focuses on goals, growth, and the future. These are complementary, not interchangeable. Many of my clients work with both a therapist and a coach — for good reason.
Consulting
A consultant analyzes your situation and tells you what to do. A coach helps you develop your own capacity to analyze, decide, and lead — which serves you long after the engagement ends.
Mentoring
A mentor draws on their own experience to guide someone earlier in their career. A coach doesn't need to have done your job to help you do it better. The methodology is different — and deliberately so.
Training
Training imparts specific skills through structured curriculum. Coaching is not a curriculum. It's a responsive, personalized process that goes where you need to go.
Understanding these distinctions matters because it shapes what you bring to the work — and what you can reasonably expect to get out of it.
What the research shows.
According to the ICF, senior leaders and organizations invest in coaching for reasons that are both personal and organizational.
What those numbers don't capture is the less quantifiable return — the leader who stops reacting and starts responding. The executive who finally has a thinking partner who isn't on the payroll. The founder who learns to lead the company they've actually built, not the one they imagined.
That's what coaching at its best looks like.
Not all coaching is the same.
At Virago Coaching, my work lives at the intersection of leadership and executive coaching — with a particular focus on the inner dimensions of leadership that formal training rarely touches.
For senior leaders whose decisions shape organizations.
More strategic, more confidential, and more focused on presence, impact, and the particular loneliness that comes with operating at the top. My work here often incorporates 360-degree feedback, the Enneagram, and other assessment tools to build a clear and honest picture of how you lead.
For leaders navigating new levels of complexity.
Develops the core capacities that make leaders effective: communication, emotional intelligence, decision-making, conflict navigation, and the ability to inspire people who don't have to follow you. Most valuable for leaders moving into new levels of responsibility or facing significant organizational change.
When the leadership team is the client.
Extends the work beyond the individual. We work on the dynamics, assumptions, and patterns that shape how the group functions — not just how its members perform individually. Particularly effective when a team is navigating significant change, conflict, or a shift in strategic direction.
What to look for and what to ask.
The ICF maintains a free, searchable database of credentialed coaches at credentialedcoachfinder.com. Regardless of where you find a coach, interview at least three, ask for references, and trust your read on the relationship — chemistry matters more than most people admit.
What to expect from any legitimate coaching engagement:
Questions worth asking any coach you're considering:
- What is your coaching training and how long have you been practicing?
- What credential do you hold, and through which body?
- Who do you work with most — what level, what industries?
- What is your coaching philosophy?
- What assessments are you certified to use?
- Can you share specific examples of client outcomes?
- What does a typical engagement look like with you?
The answers will tell you a lot. So will the way they're given.
What I bring to the work.
I hold a Master Certified Coach (MCC) credential from the International Coaching Federation — the highest credential the ICF awards, held by fewer than 4% of credentialed coaches globally. I trained through the Co-Active Training Institute and have been working with leaders across industries for over two decades.
What I bring that goes beyond credentials: a genuine belief that the most important leadership development happens from the inside out. I work with the Enneagram as a primary lens — not as a typing exercise, but as a sophisticated map of motivation, blind spots, and growth. And I bring an unflinching commitment to honest, direct partnership.
Ready to explore what coaching can do?
Book a complimentary exploratory session. No commitment, no sales pitch — just an honest conversation about whether this is the right fit.
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