When Coaching Stops Working: The Hidden Doorway of Supervision
By Liz Stewart
You’ve built your coaching practice on a foundation of experience, training, and deep listening. You’ve taken the masterclasses, read the books, refined your techniques, and worked with clients who have transformed in ways that affirm your path. And then, one day, you hit the bump.
A client arrives, a team dynamic unfolds, a situation presents itself—and nothing seems to work. The usual strategies fall flat. Your insights feel out of reach. Maybe you sense something in your body—tightness in your chest, a lingering unease after the session, or a feeling that you’ve somehow lost your footing.
What then?
The Limit of More Training
The first instinct for many coaches is to seek another training. Maybe there’s another certification, another framework, another tool that will help navigate this new complexity. But what if the answer isn’t in another class? What if the real work isn’t about learning more, but about deepening your own awareness?
One of the most overlooked aspects of coaching is how we, as coaches, bring ourselves into the work. The stuck moments, the unexpected discomfort, the dynamics that subtly unsettle us—these aren’t just client issues. They are invitations to turn toward what’s happening in us. To ask, What is this moment asking of me?
The Unseen Terrain of Coaching
Coaching asks us to hold space for others, but where do we hold space for ourselves? Where do we go when something feels off in a session, when our usual approach isn’t landing, when a client dynamic lingers in our thoughts long after the session ends?
It’s easy to assume the answer lies in improving our technique. But sometimes, the deeper shift comes not from doing more, but from listening differently—to our clients, to the space between us, and to ourselves.
The Body as a Guide
Coaching isn’t just about what’s happening in the mind; it’s about sensing, listening, and being attuned. When something isn’t working in a session, the body often knows before the mind catches up.
Subtle cues—a tight jaw, a shallow breath, the way you lean in or pull back—are all signals. Are you trying too hard? Holding back? Carrying something unspoken from a previous session? These somatic markers provide a map. The question is, are you willing to follow it?
Beyond Technique: A Return to Relationship
Coaching is never a solitary act. Even when we sit one-on-one with a client, even when we reflect alone after a session, we are always in relationship—with our clients, with our past experiences, with the very essence of our own becoming.
We are also in relationship with the unseen—the space between words, the weight of silence, the resonance of what is left unsaid. We are shaped by our interactions, by the ways we are met and mirrored, by the moments that remind us we are not, and have never been, separate.
Even in solitude, we are in connection—with the trees on a walk, with the breath that rises and falls, with the echoes of conversations that linger in our minds. And yet, when something feels stuck in our coaching, the impulse can be to retreat, to solve it alone, to assume we should know how to handle it.
But what if support isn’t about fixing? What if it’s about having a space where the relationship itself—between coach and client, between the conscious and unconscious, between what we know and what is waiting to be discovered—can become the guide?
A Question to Sit With
When you have a quiet moment—whether it’s through journaling, taking a walk, or simply sitting in stillness—consider this:
What part of me resists being seen, even in my own reflections?
Let that question sit with you. Not as something to solve, but as something to feel. Because the real work of coaching isn’t just about what we know—it’s about how willing we are to be known, to ourselves and in the presence of another.
