Reflection
The Coach and the Analyst: Why Executive Coaching Barely Scratches the Surface
The people who come to me for executive coaching in London, from the City, from Canary Wharf, from the funds and firms of Mayfair and St James’s, are, almost without exception, high-functioning. They have a very strong thinking function: analysis, strategy, symbolisation, the capacity to hold a complex situation in the mind and work it. It is what got them the role. It is also, very often, the only instrument in the orchestra that has ever been developed.
I trained as an executive coach at ESSEC, one of the best business coaching trainings there is, and I want to say something honest about my own profession: conventional executive coaching, on its own, is a patch on a wound. It barely scratches the surface. It takes the function that is already over-developed, the thinking, and polishes it a little more: better goals, better frameworks, better communication strategies. For a person whose whole difficulty is that they have been running their entire life through one function, this is not development. It is more of the same, delivered by a friendly professional.
A mentor is not a coach
There is a second confusion in this market, and it is worth naming plainly. Many people who were successful in business become coaches, and clients are drawn to them by a simple, understandable thought: he was so successful, so charismatic, surely he can teach me how to be that. But achievement is not the ability to transmit. A charismatic man cannot teach you charisma, any more than a naturally thin nutritionist who has never struggled with food can teach someone with an eating disorder how to eat. They have the result without ever having had the problem, and it is the problem, worked through, that produces the skill of teaching.
Mentoring has tremendous value, but it is a different thing. Take a mentor for his experience: someone who has already crossed the terrain can help you pass its hurdles, spot the traps, open the doors. That is what he genuinely has to give. But do not expect him to develop specific capacities in you, the charisma, the presence, the judgment, because knowing how to have something is not the same as knowing how to grow it in another person. Developing capacities is the coach’s craft, and it is a trained one. The honest arrangement is both, each for what they actually offer: the mentor for the road, the coach for the instrument.
The four functions, and the one-instrument orchestra
Jung described four functions through which every human being takes in the world and responds to it: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Nothing esoteric; simply the four channels a person has. In the executives I see, the thinking function is magnificent and the others are, to varying degrees, asleep. Feeling has been suppressed as unprofessional. Sensation, the body, the hands, the creative capacity, has been parked since university. Intuition is used constantly but trusted only when it can be dressed up afterwards as analysis.
The cost of this is not only personal, the desert I have written about elsewhere, the life poured into one channel. The cost is also professional, and this is the part conventional coaching misses. A thinking function that has to do the work of all four functions is not a strong function. It is an overloaded one. It is flooded by unregulated emotion it has no way to process, so decisions made under pressure are worse than they should be. It compensates for absent intuition with more and more analysis, which is slower and, past a certain complexity, less accurate. The very instrument the executive relies on is degraded by the silence of the other three.
Jungian executive coaching: analysis in the service of performance
This is why I put Jungian analysis at the service of executive coaching. Not instead of coaching: in the service of it. The frame is still performance, leadership, the demands of the role. But the work goes to where the actual limits are. The attention this work rests on, this observing and listening to oneself listening, is a trained one; I describe where it comes from in Chiron, Hermes and the work of analysis.
Regulate the feeling function, help a person feel what they feel instead of managing it, and the thinking function is suddenly freer and more efficient: it is no longer spending half its capacity suppressing what is trying to be felt. Wake sensation and the creative capacity that lives in it, and options appear where there was only the same analysis repeated harder. And develop the intuitive function, and something changes at the level where it matters most.
Intuition is not new age. In the City, it is forecasting.
I want to be precise about intuition, because the word sounds soft, and nothing could be further from the truth. In many jobs, especially in finance and business, what we call intuition is forecasting: a synthesis of thinking about the situation, a feeling about it, and an impression, a sense, of where it is going. The trader’s nose. The chairman’s sense that a deal is wrong before anyone can say why. Pattern recognition running ahead of what can yet be articulated.
Executives already live by this faculty; they simply call it judgment, and they trust it only in others. At the level where everyone is equally clever, where analysis is a commodity because every rival has the same data and the same consultants, judgment is precisely what separates people. Developing the intuitive function is not mysticism. It is sharpening the single most commercially valuable capacity a senior person has.
The person who comes through the coaching door
There is one more thing to say, and it is the quiet truth of this work. A number of the people who arrive for executive coaching need something deeper, and somewhere they know it. The coaching door is simply the door they can allow themselves to walk through: performance is a legitimate reason to seek help, where struggle is not. Behind the presenting question, the promotion, the board dynamics, the next chapter, there is often the other material: the functioning alcoholic holding himself together with a job title, the desert behind the success, the imposter behind the image. I have written about each of them, because they are so often the same person.
This is where holding both trainings in one practitioner becomes the point rather than a biographical detail. Because I am an ESSEC-trained executive coach and a Jungian analyst with twenty-five years of clinical practice at Harley Street, the work can go wherever it actually needs to go, without referral, without changing rooms, without the person having to admit to anything more than wanting to perform at their best. Sometimes it stays coaching. Often it becomes something deeper, at the pace the person allows. Either way, it is the whole instrument that gets developed, not the one string that was already tuned.
That is the difference between a patch and a treatment: one covers the wound, the other closes it. And it is the difference, in the end, between an executive who performs despite themselves, and one who leads from the whole of who they are. Sessions are held at Harley Street, and online worldwide; the coaching practice also has its own site, Analytic Coaching.
