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, 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.
If you have worked with coaches before
By this point in a career you have almost certainly worked with a coach. Probably several. Some will have been good, and you will have taken something real from them.
So the question is not whether coaching works. You already know what it does, and you know where it stops.
What is offered here is deliberately different, and it is worth being precise about how.
Most coaching moves across breadth. The presentation, the difficult colleague, the board relationship, the succession question, the next role. Each is addressed, sensibly and competently, and then the engagement ends.
This works the other way. It takes one thing, whatever you actually bring, and follows it as far down as it goes. Because the pattern that appears in the board relationship is generally the same pattern that appears with your children, and in the company before this one, and in the thing you have never been able to delegate. Handle the instance and it returns wearing a different costume. Understand the pattern and a dozen apparently separate problems turn out to be one problem.
That asks something different of you, and it is slower at the beginning. It is also considerably more durable, because nothing has to be managed once it has actually changed.
It has a second aim that most coaching does not attempt: to put you back in contact with your own inner life, and with what remains unused in you. Not the professional self, which is by now highly developed and performs extremely well. The part underneath it, which has usually received nothing for twenty years, and which is where whatever potential you have left actually lives.
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, 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.
Creativity, and thinking outside the frame
Senior leaders are trained, relentlessly, in convergent thinking. Analyse the options, weigh the evidence, narrow to the right answer, decide. Thirty years of that produces excellent judgement, and it also quietly starves the opposite faculty: the generative one, which produces options that were not on the list.
Yet what is actually demanded at the top is precisely that second thing. Seeing what is not there yet. Reframing a problem so it stops being unsolvable. Recognising that everyone in the room is answering the wrong question. No amount of further analysis develops this, because analysis is the other muscle.
Creativity is developed by working in a medium where there is no correct answer. That is what training as an art psychotherapist brings to this work, and it is the reason image has a place in coaching senior people.
It has nothing to do with artistic ability. An image made in twenty minutes, without a plan, cannot be optimised, cannot be scored, and has no key performance indicator attached. For someone who has spent three decades being measured, that is genuinely unfamiliar ground, and it is exactly where a different kind of thinking becomes available. A problem that has been turned over in conversation for months looks different once it has been put into an image instead of a sentence. Options appear that talking would not have produced.
There is a second effect worth naming. Because the image is not planned, it contains things the person did not intend to put there. That is usually the first genuinely new material in the room, and it is frequently more interesting than anything either of us had prepared.
None of this is a technique borrowed from elsewhere. Jung worked with image throughout his life, and image sits inside analytical psychology rather than beside it. What is unusual is only its presence in a coaching context: almost all executive coaching happens entirely in language, which confines it to what the client can already put into words.
A different kind of practitioner
Most executive coaching operates at the level of behaviour. It asks what you are doing, how it is landing, and what you might do differently. That is genuinely useful, and for a large number of problems it is sufficient.
It stops working when the difficulty is not behavioural. When a chief executive cannot delegate, the problem is rarely technique. When a founder sabotages the thing they built as it starts to succeed, no framework explains it. When someone is drinking more than they will admit, a coach without clinical training will usually not recognise what they are looking at, and will coach around it for a year.
Executive coaches are not Jungian analysts. The two do not overlap, and the reason is structural rather than accidental. Becoming an analyst requires years of one’s own analysis and supervised clinical training through an accredited institute, and nobody undertakes a decade of that in order to coach executives. A coaching certification, by contrast, can be completed in months and requires no clinical training whatsoever. The overlap is therefore close to empty, and not because anyone has been careless.
So what follows is not one coach being marginally better credentialled than another. It is a different kind of practitioner: business-school training at ESSEC, so the commercial reality of the role is understood without translation; twenty-five years of clinical practice and a Doctorate of Professional Practice, so what is clinical is recognised as clinical; Jungian analysis, so the material below the presenting problem is workable; art psychotherapy, so the work is not confined to what can be spoken; and more than twenty years of EMDR practice, for the trauma that sometimes turns out to be underneath the performance problem.
The practical consequence is that the work does not have to stop at a boundary. If what began as a coaching question turns out to be a depression, a trauma, or a dependency, it can be addressed rather than referred onward, and it is recognised early rather than after a year of productive-sounding conversation.
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.
Beyond that, and this is where the scope differs from most coaching, the work does not stop at a boundary.
Stress, and what sustained pressure actually does. Not time management. What happens to sleep, to concentration, to temper, to the body, when a person has been running at capacity for years and has stopped noticing that this is unusual.
Burnout, including the version that does not look like burnout: still functioning, still delivering, and entirely absent from your own life.
Drinking, and the other things that quietly got out of hand. Alcohol, cocaine, gambling, prescription medication, the compulsive patterns that senior people conceal with great skill and considerable resources. This is a core clinical specialism here rather than an adjacent interest, and it is the clearest example of where ordinary coaching cannot follow: a coach without clinical training will usually not recognise it, and will work around it for a year.
What the career has cost the people around you. This is the subject most often arrived at last and most often the real one. A marriage that became logistics. Children who know your reputation better than they know you. The recognition, somewhere around fifty five, that the people you did it for are the people you were never there for. It is rarely the presenting problem and it is frequently the thing underneath it.
And what is still unused. Not what is wrong with you. What has never been given any room: the capacities, interests and parts of a personality that were set aside at twenty five because they were not useful to the climb, and which are still there.
Because all of this sits with one practitioner, nothing has to be handed on at the point where it becomes clinical. If a coaching question turns out to be a depression, a dependency or a trauma, it is recognised early and worked with, rather than referred elsewhere after a year of productive-sounding conversation.
How it starts
There is no free introductory call, and the reason is worth stating.
A short unpaid conversation is a sales meeting. Both people behave accordingly: one is being assessed, the other is being persuasive, and almost nothing is learned about whether the work will help, because nothing real has happened.
The first session is the assessment. It is a full session at the usual fee, and it is genuine work rather than a preamble to it. You will get an accurate sense of how the work goes and whether you want to continue, and you will take something away from it either way. If this is not the right practice for what you need, you will be told so and pointed somewhere better suited.
There is no obligation beyond that single session, and no package to commit to.
Confidentiality and discretion
Sessions at Harley Street W1 and Central London are conducted with the same strict 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.
Where anger and reactivity under pressure are the presenting issue, see anger, and what it is protecting.
Read Dr Jacquet’s essay on what depth adds to coaching: The Coach and the Analyst.
On what it is actually like to hold the chair, read The Loneliness of the CEO: the fears at the top, the P&L as a verdict, and where to put what the role does not allow you to say.
For senior people, the pressure at this stage is often not the role but the question underneath it: see the midlife crisis.