The Blind Spot Most Coach Training Creates
There’s a moment most coaches recognise, even if they don’t talk about it much.
You’re in session with someone who is clearly capable. They understand the work. They engage fully. They reflect honestly. They leave with insight and intention.
And yet, week after week, the change doesn’t quite land.
Not enough to say the coaching isn’t working.
But enough to feel that something is missing.
For a long time, I thought that moment meant we needed to go deeper. Ask better questions. Refine the goal. Explore the block more thoroughly.
That’s what we’re trained to do.
What I didn’t realise, and what most coach training doesn’t prepare us for, is that sometimes the issue isn’t depth. It’s capacity.
What coach training does very well.
Let me be clear about this.
Coach training does many things brilliantly. It teaches us how to listen deeply. How to stay curious. How to hold clients as capable, resourceful, and whole. How to facilitate insight without advice-giving. Those foundations matter, a LOT. I wouldn’t be doing this work without them.
But coach training is also built on a set of assumptions that often go unexamined.
Assumptions about readiness.
About agency.
About choice.
About the client’s internal resources being available when insight appears.
Most of the time, those assumptions hold.
Until they don’t.
The blind spot isn’t skill - it’s context.
The blind spot most coach training creates isn’t a lack of skill.
It’s a lack of contextual awareness.
We’re trained to work cognitively. To trust insight. To believe that once someone sees clearly, change will follow.
What we’re not trained to assess, at least not explicitly, is whether the nervous system underneath that insight has the capacity to respond. So when Burnout is present, even quietly, we can misread what we’re seeing.
We can mistake:
compliance for commitment
insight for readiness
agreement for capacity
And because the client looks fine, we keep coaching as usual.
And that’s not negligence, but it is the consequence of a missing lens, an incomplete story.
This is where my own work started to shift.
When more and more clients came to me already exhausted, I had a choice. I could assume they were resistant, unmotivated, or afraid of change. Or I could question whether the coaching model I was applying was enough for the reality they were in. I got curious, and I took my questions and I trained in everything I could find to understand stress and Burnout and the impact on the brain and the body.
That curiosity led me into neuroscience, somatics, nervous system regulation, and a deeper understanding of how Burnout actually shows up, and not just emotionally, but physiologically.
And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it - and I’ve continued to join the dots surrounding Burnout for more than 12 years.
The issue wasn’t that coaching had stopped working, it was that coaching without a Burnout lens was incomplete.
Why this matters now.
Burnout isn’t rare anymore, over the last decade I’ve coached over 700 leaders through Burnout and I still get daily messages from people asking for help.
It isn’t extreme. And it isn’t limited to certain roles or personalities.
Which means more coaches are encountering it, whether they recognise it or not.
If we don’t widen our lens, we risk doing exactly what we’ve been trained to do… in situations where it no longer fits.
That’s not about blame.
It’s about evolution.
Because when coaching adapts to include Burnout awareness, it doesn’t become weaker.
It becomes more precise.
A few things for coaches to consider.
If you’re reading this as a coach, here are some reflections from my work that are worth sitting with:
Insight does not equal capacity.
A client can understand everything and still be unable to act - not because they’re avoiding change, but because their system is depleted.
Burnout often shows up as compliance, not resistance.
Clients at Burnout are often agreeable, reflective, and eager to “do it right,” which can mask how little they actually have left.
State matters more than strategy.
Coaching tools don’t land in the same way when someone is dysregulated or exhausted, even if those tools have worked beautifully before.
Early Burnout requires adaptation, not escalation.
More challenge, more accountability, or more pressure is rarely the answer when capacity is already compromised.
Burnout awareness improves all coaching, not just Burnout work.
Understanding nervous system load, pacing, and capacity makes coaching safer and more effective for every client, Burnout or not.
None of this means you’re doing it wrong.
It means the work has moved on.
Where this leaves us.
Coaching is still one of the most powerful developmental tools we have, but the world we’re coaching in has changed. Raising standards doesn’t mean discarding what works. It means expanding our understanding of when and how it works best.
Being Burnout aware isn’t a specialism on the side.
It’s becoming part of the professional baseline.
Kelly
Do you know how Burnout-Aware your coaching really is? Find out here.