Is Leadership Coaching Right for You? A Guide for Every Kind of Leader

Photo taken in Rouen, France

If you clicked on this post, some part of you is already asking a leadership question. Maybe you're leading a team through change. Maybe you're navigating the very real weight of an executive role. Maybe you're leading yourself through a hard transition, or you've been called a leader by other people for years and have never quite believed it. Wherever you're starting from, this post is for you — because I think about leadership broadly and inclusively, and there are a lot of different windows into this work.

What Leadership Coaching Actually Is

At its core, leadership coaching is a dedicated, structured partnership designed to help you grow — not by handing you advice from the outside, but by helping you access the clarity, capacity, and self-knowledge you already carry. A good coach isn't there to tell you who to be or how to do your work; they're there to ask targeted questions and hold space for you as you figure things out, helping you to do so with more intention and less noise.

Coaching is different from mentorship (where someone more senior offers advice and support, often through a pay-it-forward ethos) and it is different from therapy (which tends to focus on healing the past and can involve diagnoses). It is also different from consulting (which I also offer - but that focuses on offering specific strategies, road maps, content, research and models). Coaching, on the other hand, focuses on supporting your professional and personal growth by helping you to identify and realize your goals through greater self-awareness, removing roadblocks, and creating clear action plans.

A Brief Word on Somatic Leadership Coaching

You may have noticed that my practice is rooted in something a little different from a lot of traditional executive coaching: somatic work. In plain terms, somatic simply means "of the body." Somatic coaching starts from the premise that your body isn't separate from your leadership — it's often ahead of it. Your nervous system knows you're overextended before your calendar admits it. Your shoulders know a decision doesn't sit right before your logic can explain why.

Traditional leadership development tends to stay in the realm of cognition — new frameworks, new mental models, new language. Those things matter. But insight alone often isn't enough to create lasting change, especially under pressure, because most of our reactive patterns (the overworking, the people-pleasing, the shutting down in conflict) live in the body as much as the mind. Somatic coaching brings in practices like breathwork, grounding, movement, and nervous-system awareness so that change isn't just something you understand intellectually — it's something your whole self can actually live out, especially in the moments that matter most. This is a growing area of interest across the coaching field, as more leaders and organizations recognize that regulation and presence are foundational, not optional, leadership skills.

I think of it a bit like the windows in the old building shown above. The lower windows are open, lit, and easy to see into — that's a lot of what traditional coaching offers: a clear, well-lit room, a straightforward way in. Somatic coaching is more like the windows upstairs — the stained glass ones. The room was always there. The light was always there. But suddenly you're seeing it through color and texture you didn't know existed, and the same space looks and feels entirely different. It doesn't invent a new room, rather it gives you access to the fullness and complexity that was there all along.

Now, About That Word "Leader"

Here's where I want to slow down, because this is the piece of my work I care about greatly.

When most people hear "leadership coaching," they picture a corner office. A title. A direct-report chart. And yes — I do work with senior and executive-level leaders, and I bring decades of personal leadership experience to that work. If you're navigating the very real weight of institutional decision-making, organizational change, or the isolation that can come with seniority, I know that terrain, and I can meet you there.

But I want to be honest with you about something: that is only one part of who I mean when I say "leader." My doctoral work focused on leadership studies, and it is an area I have spent a lot of time thinking about.

I think about leadership expansively — because I believe it is expansive. So here's who else I mean when I talk about leaders:

• Emerging and up-and-coming leaders — people stepping into leadership roles for the first time, or building the skills and confidence to get there.

• People who are leaders in ways they haven't fully claimed yet — the person others already turn to, defer to, or rely on, who hasn't quite let that identity land as true for them.

• People with a genuinely conflicted relationship to the word "leader" — maybe you've been told you're a leader but it doesn't feel like you. Maybe you want to grow into that identity but something in you resists it, doubts it, or feels like it doesn't belong to you. That tension is real, and it's worth exploring rather than pushing past.

• Burnt-out leaders — people who have been leading, often well, for a long time, and have lost the thread of why it used to feel meaningful. If you're technically still leading but you feel hollowed out inside the role, this work is deeply for you.

• People leading through personal transition — a divorce, a diagnosis, a move, a reinvention, a loss. Leading yourself through a hard chapter is leadership. It counts.

• Parents and caregivers — because leading a family, especially through the daily improvisation of raising children or caring for others, asks for exactly the same capacities as leading a team: presence, regulation, decision-making under uncertainty, and the willingness to keep showing up.

Essentially: if you are shaping outcomes for yourself and/or other people, holding responsibility for a group's wellbeing, guiding yourself through something hard, or standing at the edge of becoming someone new — you are doing leadership work, whether or not you've ever used that word for yourself.

My Mission, in Plain Language

My work exists to support leaders — in all the ways I just described — in bringing more somatic awareness, creativity, play, and mindfulness into their personal and professional lives, so that they can lead from a place of authentic connection and alignment, rather than burnout and disconnection.

That's it. That's the whole thing I'm building toward with every client, every session, every somatic practice I bring into the room.

A Note on Identity & Context

I also want to name that identity and context matter deeply in how any of us experience leadership, pressure, and belonging. Who you are, the systems you move through, and the power dynamics you navigate all shape what leadership feels like in your body and your life. My approach honors those intersecting identities rather than pretending we're all starting from the same place, and I bring a justice-oriented lens to how I show up as a coach and facilitator. That said, this work is not exclusive — it's for anyone ready to do it, from wherever you're starting.

So — Is this Right for You?

If any part of this post made something in you exhale, nod, or quietly say "that's me," that's usually a good sign. Somatic leadership coaching tends to be right for people who sense there's a more grounded, connected, aligned, and sustainable way to lead (or to live), and who are ready for change.

You don't need to have it figured out before you reach out. You just need to be curious enough to find out. I've been told that curiosity one of my strengths. I can help it become one of yours too.

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