Executive coaching in London
Most executive coaches are trained in weeks. Philippe Jacquet’s coaching draws on a background that took decades to build: Jungian analyst training (one of the most rigorous forms of psychological training in existence) combined with executive coaching qualifications from ESSEC Business School, one of Europe’s top-ten business schools by Financial Times ranking. The difference is not stylistic. It is structural.
The problems that bring senior leaders to coaching are rarely what they first appear to be. Underperformance has a psychological dimension. Burnout is not simply the product of overwork. Interpersonal conflict in leadership teams is almost always about something beneath the surface. A Jungian-trained coach works at that level, not just with what is happening, but with what is driving it.
Our executive coaching in London programme offers senior professionals (CEOs, founders, partners and senior leaders) a psychology-informed space to develop the depth of self-awareness that sustained high performance requires. As an ESSEC-trained executive coach and a Jungian analyst with 25 years of experience and more than 70,000 hours of sessions behind him, Philippe Jacquet combines counselling, psychotherapy, analysis and coaching, moving between them as the work requires. It is a breadth few, if any, leadership coaches in London can offer.
For chief executives, founders and board members who need more than coaching, see depth psychotherapy and analysis for senior leaders.
ESSEC rigour and Jungian creativity
Two qualities define this work, and they rarely come together. The first is rigour. ESSEC is one of Europe’s top business schools, and its executive-coaching training brings a disciplined understanding of organisations, strategy and performance, and clear thinking about the real pressures a leader faces. The second is creativity. Jungian analysis treats the imagination as a serious instrument rather than a distraction. It works with dreams, images, intuition and the symbolic life, because these are often where a leader finds answers that pure analysis cannot reach: a sense of timing, the capacity to see what is coming before it is obvious, the way out of a problem that looked closed.
Most coaching offers one or the other. The structured, goals-and-metrics approach has rigour but little depth. The looser, more intuitive approach has imagination but little discipline. This practice brings both: the rigour of a top business school, and the creativity and depth of Jungian analysis, applied to the same questions.
Why Jungian training changes what executive coaching can do
A standard executive coaching qualification involves weeks of training, sometimes a weekend programme, sometimes a three-month online course. It teaches models, frameworks, questioning techniques. These are useful tools. But they operate at the surface of what a person brings to their professional life.
Jungian analyst training is different in kind, not degree. It takes years (typically five to seven) and involves three things that standard coach training does not: intensive personal analysis (the analyst is themselves analysed, over years, by a senior practitioner); ongoing clinical supervision; and deep immersion in the theory and practice of depth psychology. The result is a practitioner who understands psychological structure, not just behaviour. Who can recognise the patterns beneath a problem, not just the problem itself.
When that depth of training is combined with ESSEC Business School executive coaching qualifications and 25 years of clinical experience, more than 70,000 hours of sessions, working with senior professionals, executives and high-net-worth individuals, what becomes possible in coaching is of a different order. The work addresses not just performance and strategy, but identity, motivation, the shadow side of leadership, and the psychological cost of sustained achievement, things that conventional coaching rarely touches.
What this coaching addresses
The full range of presentations that bring senior leaders to coaching: leadership identity and authority, the question of who you are as a leader and not only what you do; interpersonal dynamics and conflict in leadership teams; decision-making under sustained pressure; burnout and the recovery of motivation; transitions into new roles, after an exit, or into later career; the gap between external success and internal experience; and the patterns that repeat across different organisations and relationships, which are never really about the organisation.
The work is also available for individuals who are at a turning point, not in difficulty exactly, but at a moment where the next chapter is unclear, and where conventional coaching’s focus on goals and actions does not reach what is actually needed.
Confidentiality and discretion
Sessions at Harley Street W1 and Central London are conducted with the same absolute confidentiality as clinical psychotherapy. Nothing discussed is disclosed to any employer, board, investor or third party. For senior leaders whose personal and professional worlds overlap significantly, this is not a peripheral concern. It is the condition that makes the work possible.
Format, online sessions and locations
Sessions are available in person at Harley Street W1, Central London and Bermondsey SE1, and online by secure video link anywhere in the world. Online coaching is not a lesser option here. It is a full mode of the work, and for many senior leaders it is the only realistic one. For executives who travel constantly, who run international operations, or who are based outside London, it keeps the work continuous wherever they are that week, with a level of discretion an office visit cannot offer.
An initial consultation is the right first step: a private conversation about what has brought you here and what you are looking for, with no obligation beyond it.
For systemic and team coaching in organisations, Philippe Jacquet also founded Analytic Coaching, bringing the same ESSEC and Jungian approach to leadership teams and whole businesses.