How Do You Know When You Need a Coach – The Honest Answer

Most of my clients who are leaders or founders did not set out looking for a coach. They were looking for something else: perhaps clarity on a decision, a way through a particular time in their lives, or someone to think with who could be completely objective with nothing to gain from the outcome. They either saw one of my bits of writing, a talk, through word of mouth or my social media presence and something struck a chord. Some had heard from someone they trusted that a coaching conversation had made a real difference. Others had seen the change in a colleague or peer and had been curious. The idea to get a coach came once they understood what conversation they really needed to move forwards with intention and progress with more happiness and focus in their future.

The thing most people wait for

Usually at some point, people hit a specific realisation. A sense that you are not thinking in the same way and the thinking strategies you normally use are not working. Possibly not being able to see the wood for the trees and needing clarity, quickly.

It might be a previous decision you keep going back to again and again. Or noticing that a week has flown, being busy and productive, yet somehow still not doing what you wanted it to achieve. Perhaps holding back in certain meetings or with people rather than saying what you actually think. Being productive yet something still feels off.

Stanford University surveyed 200 chief executives, board directors and senior executives and found that two-thirds do not receive any outside advice on their leadership skills, despite the fact that almost all of them would be receptive to suggestions from a coach. The gap between wanting that thinking space and seeking it is rarely about not seeing the value. It is because asking for help at this level carries a particular weight.

Research published in 2026 by Turas Leadership Consulting found that 63% of senior leaders say they would seek input more often if they did not think doing so would make them look weak. That figure tells you something important. The people most likely to benefit from a thinking partner are often the ones least likely to reach for one. They have self-awareness but the professional culture around them has made asking feel like an indicator of something being wrong.

Asking for help is usually a sign that things are going right and you are taking them seriously enough to want to think them through properly.

Four signs that a conversation would be useful

These are not diagnostic criteria but patterns I have noticed consistently in thirty years of working with founders, leaders and senior professionals.

You are the person everyone else thinks with, yet you have nobody to think with who will tell you the truth.

At a certain level of seniority, the dynamic changes. Your team needs things from you. Your board has expectations of you. Your peers are managing their own pressures. The genuine peer conversation, the one where you can say what you are actually thinking without it carrying consequences, becomes harder to find. This is one of the most common reasons people come to coaching, and one of the least talked about.

A decision keeps reopening.

You have made or almost made a decision but it keeps coming back. This is usually not about the decision itself but a sign that something underneath it has not been addressed. Perhaps a value that has not been named, a direction that has not been properly committed to, a personal cost that has not been fully reckoned with. A good thinking conversation surfaces what is actually there.

You are performing but not quite present in the moment.

You are where you are for a reason, with experience, a record and hard work. The work is getting done and is productive but there is a flatness to it that was not always there. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that more than half of leaders globally feel used up at the end of the day. What often sits underneath that is a dissonance between what you are spending your energy on and what you know actually matters. That gap widens over time, which is why it often takes an outside perspective to see it clearly.

Something important has changed and you have not quite caught up with it.

A new role or a significant transition or a business that has grown into something different from what you built. Perhaps becoming a parent or a relationship change. Maybe a period of loss that has altered the context you are operating in.

Research published in 2025 in the Journal of Vocational Behavior found that whether the trigger is a career change, a health challenge or a significant personal event, the underlying experience is consistently the same: the need to re-establish a coherent sense of who you are in the new context. The disruption does not have to be negative to have that effect. Research published in Annual Reviews on career and professional identity confirms that the question "who am I in this now" runs through every significant transition, whether its origin is professional or personal.

These moments ask something of you that harder work, better planning or more research does not quite answer. They ask you to think about who you are in this now. That is a different kind of conversation.

What about AI, can it do this instead?

I include this because it is a fair question in 2026, with many people asking coaching questions of AI, and it is worth answering directly.

AI can process information faster than any human. It can generate options, summarise research and offer frameworks. It is genuinely useful for a lot of things. What it cannot do is sit with you in the specific texture of your situation, within your context, or sense the thing you are not quite saying that requires further probing. It cannot open up blind spots, notice the value pulling against another value, or surface the real question underneath the one you asked.

This is where human nuance and critical thinking matter most. The ability to read what is actually in the room, to hold the tension between two things that are both true, to know when the presenting problem is not the real one — these are distinctly human capabilities. A peer-reviewed study published in PLOS ONE comparing AI and human coaching directly found that while AI coaching produced some measurable gains in structured goal-setting tasks, human coaching produced significantly stronger outcomes where the work involved identity, judgment and decisions that carried personal weight. The researchers concluded that the two serve different functions rather than the same one.

Research published in the European Business Review in 2026 found that as AI increasingly supports reflection and analysis, the role of the human coach moves toward helping people work through identity, responsibility and meaning in a world where many of the analytical functions have been taken over by technology. The human element becomes more important, not less.

The most useful thing a coach brings, and this is particularly true of a coach with genuine cross-sector experience across commercial, clinical and entrepreneurial environments, ahem, is a reading of your situation that is both accurate and entirely on your side. Genuinely in your corner, with enough experience of the rooms you are in to know what is actually being said.

What coaching actually is

A peer-reviewed editorial published in Frontiers in Psychology on identity work and coaching found that what people most often need in a period of change is a reflective space to work through who they are becoming and what they want to carry forward. That is a different kind of work from focusing purely on goal-setting or performance improvement, and it requires a different kind of conversation.

It is a genuine thinking partnership with someone who has no agenda for what you decide, whose only job is to help you think more clearly. It is not advice-giving and it is not someone telling you what to do.

A meta-analysis of 39 randomised controlled trial samples covering 2,528 participants, published in the Academy of Management Learning and Education, found a statistically significant effect of coaching across all leadership and personal outcomes. The mechanism behind those outcomes is consistent across the research: the quality of your thinking improves when you have the right conditions and the right person to think with.

That person matters. A systematic literature review published in Management Review Quarterly identified six factors that contribute to successful coaching outcomes, with coach characteristics and the relationship consistently ranking among the most significant. Thirty years working across advertising, clinical practice, board-level leadership and entrepreneurship gives a particular reading of what is actually happening in a situation, and what tends to be worth addressing first.

The case for investing in yourself

Most leaders will invest without hesitation in a tradesperson, a course, a piece of equipment or a tool that makes the business run better. The question worth sitting with is why the same logic does not extend to the person running it.

The ICF 2025 Global Coaching Study found an average return on investment of seven times the cost of coaching, with 86% of companies that measured ROI reporting they made back their initial investment. More tellingly, 99% of coaching clients described themselves as satisfied or very satisfied. These are not soft numbers. They reflect a growing recognition that clearer thinking, better decisions and a steadier sense of direction have measurable consequences — professionally and personally.

Clarity of thinking is a strategic advantage. When your own direction is clear, decisions are cleaner, energy goes where it actually matters, and the work you do reflects the best of what you can bring rather than a depleted version of it. That has consequences for your present performance, your future options and the quality of your experience of both. Investing in that is not an indulgence. It is arguably the most practical investment available to someone who leads other people or runs something that matters.

The honest answer

You probably need a conversation when the question you are sitting with is not one you can resolve by reading more, working harder or talking to someone with a stake in the outcome.

That conversation might lead to a single focused session. It might lead to something longer. What matters more than the format is finding someone who works with where you actually are, adapting to your specific circumstances rather than fitting you into a fixed structure, helping you identify what works for you, and staying with you through the different situations that come up rather than offering a one-size answer to a one-time problem.

People are not for fixing. I have to admit I get a physical shudder when I see that terminology used about human beings. People are experienced human beings working through real and often complex circumstances. The right coaching relationship reflects that and keeps reflecting it, for as long as it is genuinely useful.

If any of this resonates, a free discovery call is the place to start. A genuine conversation to see whether the work would be useful.

If it would, we can go from there. If it would not, I will tell you that too.

Book a discovery call or email penny@katherineashmore.com

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Sources

Stanford University / Miles Group: Survey of 200 chief executives and senior executives on leadership advice and coaching. Foundational study, most cited on this topic across 2024 and 2025 literature. https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/time-to-take-the-stigma-out-of-corporate-coaching-1.453549

Harris Poll / Turas Leadership Consulting: New Leadership Research, 63% of senior leaders fear appearing weak when seeking input, January 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-leadership-research-reveals-a-critical-disconnect-leaders-want-more-input-but-fear-the-cost-of-asking-for-it-302670968.html

DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025: More than half of leaders globally feel used up at the end of the day. https://www.ddi.com/blog/leadership-trends-2026

Brazier, C., Parmentier, M. and Masdonati, J.: Navigating Involuntary Career Changes — Emotional Dynamics During Work-Related Identity Loss and Recovery. Journal of Vocational Behavior, Sage, 2025. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08948453251394015

Annual Reviews: Career Transition and Professional Identity — Dynamic Processes, Multiple Selves and Nonlinear Trajectories, 2026. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-020924-071546

Szekely, V., Whiley, L., Pontes, H. and McDowall, A.: Tying leaders' identity work and coaching research together. Frontiers in Psychology, peer-reviewed, 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11683902/

Terblanche, N., Molyn, J., De Haan, E. and Nilsson, V.O.: Comparing artificial intelligence and human coaching goal attainment efficacy. PLOS ONE, peer-reviewed, 2022. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9212136/

De Haan, E. and Nilsson, V.O.: Meta-analysis of 39 randomised controlled trial samples, n=2,528. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2024. https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amle.2022.0107

Nahak, M. and Ellitan, L. et al: Determinants and trends of coaching effectiveness. Management Review Quarterly, Springer Nature, 2024. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11301-024-00428-x

European Business Review: Beyond Human Coaching, AI, Wisdom Traditions and the Future of Leadership, March 2026. https://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/beyond-the-human-coach-ai-wisdom-traditions-and-the-future-of-leadership/

ICF 2025 Global Coaching Study: Strategic Advantage and ROI. https://coachingfederation.org/blog/coaching-as-a-strategic-advantage-what-the-2025-global-coaching-study-reveals/