Almost every coach you could hire, whatever their title, owes their job to a tennis lesson.
In the 1970s, a Harvard tennis captain named Timothy Gallwey noticed that what held his students back wasn’t their grip or their footwork. It was the voice in their heads: the second-guessing, the over-instruction, the anxious commentary that tightened them up. Quiet that voice, he found, and the body already knew how to play. He called it the inner game, and wrote it down in a book that has since sold more than a million copies.
Over the years, that one observation slowly grew into the entire coaching industry. It also quietly split in two, and which half you end up hiring matters far more than the price tag or the word in front of “coaching.”
If you’re weighing executive coaching against life coaching, most of what you’ll read sorts them by who buys them: executive coaching for senior leaders, life coaching for everyone else. That’s a difference of price and packaging, but not of substance.
The split that actually matters is the one that opened up after Gallwey. One kind of coaching became about getting you somewhere faster. The other became about whether it’s somewhere you want to go. Executive and performance coaching mostly do the former. The coaching I do is the latter.
Two things that share a word
Executive coaching usually means performance coaching aimed at senior people; life coaching is broader, concerned with the shape of your life rather than your output at work. Plenty of coaches do versions of both. And from the outside, a performance coaching session and the kind I do can look identical. Two people talking. One asking questions, one thinking out loud.
They diverge because of what business did with the inner game next.
If you could coach the inner game of tennis, why not the inner game of work? A British racing champion turned coach, Sir John Whitmore, studied with Gallwey, coined the term “performance coaching,” and popularized the GROW model that still runs most executive coaching today. (He came up through the same human potential movement and Esalen Institute that shaped the work I’ll describe in a minute. We started in the same place.)
Here is where it forks.
Pointed first at sport and then at business, the inner game got organized around the target: the win, the number, the quarterly goal. The work narrowed to closing the distance between where you are and where the target is. Faster, leaner, more focused. What began as “free the person” slowly became “optimize the performer.”
That optimization is what performance coaching does, and it does it well. If your goal is actually fixed, if you need to hit the revenue number, lead the team better, or stop putting off the thing you already know you have to do, a good performance coach is exactly right. It’s a serious discipline, it’s helped a lot of people, and I’d point someone toward it without hesitation.
It just isn’t what I do.
The turn I didn’t take
The coaching I practice kept the original orientation rather than the optimizing one, and deepened it through Buddhism. I’m a Buddhist monk as well as a coach, and the two sit closer together than most people expect.
It helps to put three approaches side by side, because they often get muddled together.
- Therapy tends to begin from a wound: something was damaged and needs healing.
- Performance coaching begins from a gap: there’s a target, and a distance to close.
- The coaching I do begins from an obstruction: there’s something whole and intelligent in you already, and the job is to clear what’s covering it up.
Three different premises. Three different kinds of work, even when the process looks the same.
I think of what’s in you as coals in a fire. Your values, your particular way of being, the things you cared about before anyone told you what to care about. They’re already glowing. You don’t manufacture them, you find them and blow on them until they catch.
A performance coach helps you run faster toward a finish line you’ve already drawn. My work is more often about noticing that you drew the line in the wrong place.
Which one do you need: is the goal fixed, or is it the question?
The cleanest test is what’s happening with your goal.
Every coaching conversation I have opens with three questions:
- What do you want?
- How will we know when you’ve got it?
- Why does it matter?
They sound simple, and they’re much harder to answer honestly than they look. For a performance coach, those questions are the setup. You answer them once, and then the focus shifts to the steps it takes to get you to your goal.
In the coaching I do, the answers move, and they’re meant to.
Someone arrives wanting to leave their job and discovers three sessions in that the job was never the problem. Another person arrives wanting to scale the company and realizes what they actually want is the life the company was supposed to buy them, which they could reach more directly. The goal you walk in with is rarely the goal you walk out with, and letting it change is the work, not a detour from it.
So if the goal is fixed and you need help executing, that’s performance coaching, and you should go and get some. If you’re not sure the goal is the right goal, if you’ve hit targets before and felt oddly flat afterward, if the thing you’re optimizing toward has started to feel hollow, then optimizing harder won’t fix it. You’ll just arrive at the wrong place sooner.
There’s a frame I borrowed from Jim Collins for this. He talks about the cliff and the fog.
The cliff is the moment the ground drops away: you sell the business, leave the role, finish the thing, get the promotion that was supposed to change everything.
The fog is what follows, where the old map is useless, but the new one hasn’t formed yet.
Performance coaching is built for solid ground, when the target is in view. It has little to offer the fog, and the fog is exactly where the deeper work lives. I’ve written more about that in why you feel lost after achieving a big goal and why you feel stuck even though nothing is wrong.
Why senior people are often the worst served
A lot of high-performing people are, in one specific way, unfree.
The system they’re in absorbs them. Their time isn’t their own, and their attention is spoken for, so the only help that fits the gaps is the kind that makes them more efficient inside a frame they never chose. Performance coaching is what’s available, what’s reimbursable, and what fits the calendar, so that’s what they get.
But the trouble isn’t that they’re using performance coaching. It’s that they’re often using it on a fog problem it was never built to solve, while the deeper question – “Is this even the life I want?” – never gets a slot on the calendar.
There’s a line from the teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj I often think of:
The mystical is the most practical.
Most people believe the practical is the most practical, and inside a quarterly target, they aren’t wrong. But across a whole life, the most practical thing you can do is get clear on what you’re actually ‘here for.’ Everything downstream of that, the goals and the discipline and the execution, gets easier and truer once the thing it serves is real.
That’s the order I work in. Clarity first, then confidence, then communication. Performance coaching often runs it backward, drilling the execution and assuming the clarity is already there. Sometimes it is. Often it isn’t, and that gap is the problem.
If this is the work you’re after
The life coaching I do isn’t therapy, a productivity program, or a tidy three-step plan.
It’s a series of honest conversations with a Buddhist monk and NYU-certified executive coach, aimed at finding what’s in you, seeing what’s in the way of it, and doing something real about the gap.
It runs on the same principle as the Rolfing and meditation work I do: remove the obstruction, and let the intelligent being underneath express itself.
More and more of what performance coaching does – the frameworks, the accountability, the quick reframe – is now being handed to AI, and it does a passable job.
But what can’t be automated is a person with judgment sitting with you in the fog while you work out what’s actually pulling at you underneath the goal you came in with. That part stays human, and it’s the part I do.
So when I say most performance coaching misses the point, I don’t mean it’s bad. I mean it answers a different question – “how do I get there faster” – and never reaches the one that decides whether the speed was worth anything: “is this actually where I want to go?”
Performance coaching can get you up the mountain quicker. It can’t tell you you’re climbing the right one.
The people I do my best work with are building something, contributing something, or standing in a transition they can’t think their way out of – people willing to sit in not-knowing for a while instead of bolting toward the nearest plan.
If you read the description of performance coaching and thought yes, that’s exactly what I want, good. You now know what to look for. If something in the second half landed instead, that recognition is already part of your journey.
