I didn’t find coaching because I was looking for it. I found it at a group event, because someone happened to mention that she had finished her coach training. I followed up out of curiosity. She set up a meeting that turned into a coaching demo. I walked away knowing I wanted to continue.
The reason I wasn’t looking for coaching is simple. I didn’t have language for what I was experiencing.
What I Knew and What I Didn’t
I knew things were hard and I was tired in a way that rest wasn’t fixing. The cycles of optimism and burnout were wearing me down, and the question “is this hard or is it just me?” followed me into most weeks. None of that was hidden from me. I was aware of my experience. I just didn’t have a word for the overall shape of it.
I didn’t know that what I was feeling had a name. I didn’t know that other leaders held it too, in their own versions, shaped by their own businesses and roles. I didn’t know that there was a specific space designed to help people in my position work through it. Coaching wasn’t on my radar because the problem it addresses wasn’t on my radar as a problem. It was just how life felt when you ran a business.
I had no framework for the weight I was holding, so I had no way to search for a solution. You can’t Google something you don’t have words for. You can’t ask for help with an experience you haven’t been able to name, even to yourself.
The Experience Without the Language
Looking back, I can describe the experience with precision. The structural isolation of being the person everything ran through. The cognitive load that delegation didn’t touch. The one-directional flow of every relationship in my business, where I was always the one holding and nobody in the structure was positioned to hold me.
At the time, I didn’t have any of those words. What I had was a collection of feelings that didn’t quite fit the categories available to me. I wasn’t depressed or failing. The business was running and I was functioning. I was holding something heavy that I couldn’t put down or name, and I couldn’t find a way to address it because I didn’t know addressing it was an option.
I think this is where many founders and senior leaders are right now. They feel the weight and they know something is off, but they might describe it as stress or tiredness or just the reality of the role. What they don’t have is language specific enough to lead them toward the right kind of support. So they keep going, not because they’re resistant to help or too proud to ask, but because they genuinely don’t know that what they’re experiencing has a shape and that a space for it exists.
Why Language Matters So Much
The absence of language keeps people stuck in a particular way. When you can’t name what you’re experiencing, you can’t separate it from yourself. It just feels like life, like who you are or what leadership costs. You absorb it as normal because you have no framework that would let you see it as something distinct from you, something you could examine and work with rather than just endure.
The weight is real but shapeless, and shapeless things are impossible to address because you can’t hold them up and look at them. They sit in the background of everything, colouring your decisions and your energy without ever announcing themselves clearly enough to be dealt with.
When someone finally names it, the effect is immediate. I remember the first time I heard the phrase “leadership isolation” and felt something click into place. That was what I’d been living with. It had a name. Other people experienced it. There were ways to work with it. The naming didn’t solve anything on its own, but it made the experience visible enough to engage with, and that changed everything about how I related to it.
The Discovery Problem
This creates a practical challenge for the coaching industry and for leaders who would benefit from coaching. The people who need it most are often the least likely to find it, because they don’t have the vocabulary that would lead them to it.
Search engines require words, and referrals require someone who can say “this is what helped me with that specific thing you’re dealing with.” When the experience hasn’t been named, none of those pathways open up.
I found coaching through pure chance. A group event and a casual mention that I could easily have not followed up on. If that conversation hadn’t happened at that specific moment, I might have gone years longer living with what I was living with without knowing that something existed to help. That thought stays with me because I know there are leaders in that exact position right now, holding weight they can’t name and not looking for coaching because they don’t know coaching is what they’re looking for.
This is part of why I write about the loneliest parts of leadership as specifically as I do. Naming the experience is the first step toward making it possible for someone to recognise themselves in it. When a leader reads something that describes what they’ve been feeling and thinks “that’s exactly it,” a door opens that wasn’t there before. They now have language, and language gives them a way forward.
What Coaching Gave Me Once I Found It
When I started coaching, I discovered that I didn’t need more information or more advice. I needed a space where I could think clearly about what I already knew. The experience I’d been living with for years had answers inside it that I couldn’t access because I was too deep in the daily operation to step back and see them. Understanding what executive coaching actually is would have changed how quickly I found that space, which is part of why I think clarity about coaching matters so much.
My coach didn’t tell me what to do. She asked questions that helped me hear my own thinking. The solutions came from my experience running the school, my knowledge of my team, my understanding of what I was dealing with. I already had what I needed. I just hadn’t been able to reach it because everything was coming at me at once and there was no space in my life where the noise quieted down enough for me to think.
That experience is what I now hold for the leaders I work with. Many of them arrive the same way I did, not with a clear request for coaching, but with a weight they’ve never been able to name. The first thing that happens in our work together is that the experience gets language. Once it has language it has shape, and once it has shape it can be examined and worked with.
If something in this post describes your experience, if you’ve been holding something that you haven’t been able to name and haven’t known where to take, book a discovery session and let’s talk.