Coaching for Executive Stress and Burnout
Stress in senior roles is not simply a matter of volume — too much to do, too little time. The most corrosive executive stress tends to be structural: the stress that comes from being in a role that requires something you are not currently able to give, from carrying accountability without adequate authority, from sustaining a pace that was intended to be temporary but has become permanent, or from occupying a position whose demands are incompatible with who you actually are.
When stress reaches clinical levels — disrupted sleep, physical symptoms, a persistent inability to recover between demands — it has moved beyond what scheduling adjustments or resilience techniques will address. At that point, the stress is communicating something about the situation or about the person’s relationship to it that deserves a direct response.
The coaching approach to stress
Executive coaching for stress works at two levels simultaneously. The immediate level — what can be changed structurally to reduce the load, what boundaries are absent that need to be established, what is being taken on that need not be — and the deeper level — what is driving the difficulty in making those changes, what the stress pattern reveals about underlying beliefs about performance, worth, or what is permissible to refuse.
Dr Jacquet’s background as both an executive coach trained at ESSEC Business School and an integrative psychotherapist with 25 years of clinical practice makes this dual-level work coherent. The two levels are addressed within the same engagement rather than requiring the client to maintain separate professional and therapeutic relationships.
When it is approaching burnout
Burnout — the clinical state characterised by exhaustion, detachment, and a collapse of efficacy — is a frequent eventual destination of unaddressed executive stress. It tends to arrive after a period in which the signs were clear but the person was too deep in the demands to read them.
Coaching during or after burnout has a different quality to standard executive coaching. The work is partly recovery — establishing the conditions under which genuine restoration is possible — and partly diagnostic: understanding what led to the burnout, what needs to change about how the person is working and what they are taking on, and what structural and psychological changes would make a recurrence less likely. This work moves slowly and cannot be pressured into a predetermined timeline.
Online and in-person
Sessions are available at the Harley Street and Central London offices and via secure video. For clients at the more acute end of the stress spectrum, in-person sessions are often preferable during the initial phase of the work. Online coaching is used for ongoing engagements and works well once the initial assessment and framing are established.