I've been coaching for over 20 years now.
I've worked with hundreds of career coaches through my FCD and Continuing Education programs. I've built a business I'm proud of.
I still get stuck sometimes, and when I do, the thing that unsticks me is almost never a course, a book, or a new tool.
It's a conversation with another coach who can see what I can't.
I want to talk about that today, because I think it doesn’t get discussed enough.
Career coaching can become isolating work.
You sit with clients all day, holding their frustration and their fear and their hope, and then you close your laptop and sit with your own. There's no staffroom. There's no debrief with a colleague after a hard session. Many of us run solo practices, which means the only perspective we get on our work is our own.
That's a problem, because our own perspective has blind spots.
I call it "client blinders."
When you're deep in a coaching relationship, your view narrows. You start absorbing the client's pace. You pick up their frustrations. You catch yourself lying awake at 11pm replaying a session and wondering if you said the right thing.
I've done this more times than I'd like to admit, especially early in my career when I thought carrying that weight was proof that I cared.
It was proof that I needed a mirror.
A few years ago, I was working with a client who kept stalling on networking outreach.
Every session, I'd try a different angle.
I'd reframe it.
I'd make it smaller.
I'd assign one tiny task.
Nothing moved.
I mentioned it to a coach I trust, and she said something that stopped me cold: "Heather, you're solving the wrong problem. Networking isn’t the issue. She's grieving her old work identity, and you keep skipping past it."
She was right.
I'd been so focused on the tactic that I missed the emotion underneath. That 10-minute conversation saved me weeks of spinning, and it gave my client what she actually needed.
I would not have gotten there alone. That's the honest truth.
This is why I think peer learning matters more than most of us acknowledge.
There's a specific kind of growth that only happens when another experienced coach looks at your situation and reflects something back to you.
A podcast can't do that.
A certification can't do that.
A LinkedIn post can't do that.
It requires a real person who understands the work, who will be honest with you, and who has enough distance from your client to see the full picture.
The research backs this up.
The International Coaching Federation's 2023 Global Coaching Study found that coaches who participate in regular peer supervision report higher satisfaction with their practice and stronger client outcomes.
That tracks with everything I've seen over two decades.
The coaches who grow fastest are the ones who let other people in.
I also want to name something that might feel uncomfortable.
Most of us got into coaching because we're good at helping other people. We're less good at asking for help ourselves. We tell our clients to build support systems, to stop trying to figure everything out alone, to lean on the community when the process feels heavy.
Then we go home and do the exact opposite.
I've watched experienced coaches burn out over time. They just got a little duller in sessions, and their curiosity starts to fade.
They start giving the same advice to every client because they've run out of fresh thinking.
They stop investing in their own growth because they're too tired, and the tiredness creates a loop that feeds on itself.
That loop breaks when someone else steps in with a question you didn't think to ask.
There's a specific kind of community that works for this, and I want to be honest about what it looks like.
The free Facebook groups and open LinkedIn threads serve a purpose, but they rarely go deep enough. When there's no commitment, people drift.
The conversations stay surface level. You get motivation, maybe a quick tip, but you don't get the kind of "here's what I'm actually struggling with" honesty that changes your practice.
The communities that have made the biggest difference in my career were small, intentional, and filled with people who showed up consistently.
People who would say, "I don't think that approach is working, and here's why." People who shared case studies (anonymized, of course) and asked hard questions about their own assumptions.
That kind of environment requires trust, and trust requires commitment.
We tell our clients every day that they don't have to do hard things alone. I think it's time we believed that for ourselves, too.
More on this soon. I've been thinking a lot about what a real coaching community could look like, and I'll have something to share with you in the coming weeks.
Talk soon,
Heather