Why I Almost Left Coaching and What Made Me Stay

In year two of my coaching practice, I almost walked away from it entirely, and not because I wasn't getting results.

My clients were improving, I had a growing business, a waitlist, and on paper things were going well.

But there was something I couldn't get past. A feeling, a gut feel, an almost constant discomfort underneath the work that I hadn't been able to name clearly enough to do anything about.

What I discovered pretty quickly, is that I was trying to coach burnout with tools that weren't built for it. And the discomfort was the gap between what I could sense was needed and what at the time I actually had to offer.

The second burnout.

My first burnout made me seriously ill. I pushed through, recovered eventually, and in the way coaches do I decided to turn the experience into something useful. I started working more consciously with clients who were reaching burnout. I brought my lived experience into the room. It helped.

And then I reached my second burnout.

I was already coaching. Already, in many ways, an advocate for this work. And my second burnout nearly killed me.

I don't say that for dramatic effect. My body was shutting down. I had cognitive symptoms I didn't have language for. I was frightened in a way the first burnout hadn't frightened me.

And I was still coaching other people through it.

The gap between what I knew and what was happening to me was so large it forced a reckoning.

The reckoning.

The reckoning was this: the coaching tools I'd been taught weren't working for burnout.

They were built for growth. For stretch. For unlocking potential in people who had the resources to grow. They were excellent tools for the work they were designed for.

Burnout is not a growth problem. It is a physiological one. And you cannot coach your way through a dysregulated nervous system with tools designed for a regulated one.

I had been doing the equivalent of prescribing exercise to someone with a broken leg. The intention was right. The tool was wrong, and whilst I couldn’t prove it, it felt like I was doing more harm than good.  But I also know from my own experience, that many other ‘experts’ also didn’t know how to support burnout either.

The year I nearly left coaching was the year I decided that if I was going to stay, I was going to build something different.

The build.

What followed was not fast.

Twelve years, 700+ plus clients, 11,000+ hours, constant learning and studying and research, and more ‘evidence’ than I care to count. The methodology that became a core part of Burnoutology didn't arrive fully formed. It emerged slowly from the intersection of my coaching practice, neuroscience research, somatic work, and the slow, painstaking process of turning practice knowledge into something teachable and something repeatable.

There were years where I knew what I was doing worked but couldn't fully explain why. Years where the methodology existed but I couldn't yet articulate the structure of it. Years where I circled the claim - burnout specialist, burnout methodology - without being able to stand on it completely.

The circling stopped when the work was solid.

And what I built is not just a personal methodology. It's a teachable one. Which is why I train coaches in it.

What made me stay.

What made me stay, ultimately, was the clients who needed what didn't yet exist, and in many cases it still doesn’t.

The leaders at severe burnout who had been told by three previous coaches that they'd reached the limit of what coaching could offer. The clients with significant cognitive symptoms who had been referred on so many times they'd stopped believing recovery was possible. The coaches I supervised who were doing brilliant work and running out of map in their most complex cases. Even the clients who had coached with the ‘world’s number one burnout coach’ before ending up as clients of mine.

They needed something more specific than what the field was offering.

So I built it.

If you're in this field and you've felt the pull to go deeper, to build something that actually holds the full complexity of this work, I understand that pull. And I say it often, this isn’t work we choose, it work that chooses us.

Kelly

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