Clients come with varying desires for what they want out of our coaching – there is more variation than I can list. For example, the last three clients I worked with were navigating challenges with managing upwards and across, cross-cultural communication, and executive presence respectively.

They are easy to solve at the surface level. But if we only optimize the surface mechanics, the leader will succeed outwardly while suffocating inwardly. And they will likely assume that this is just the tax to be paid for being a leader.

Underneath these work-desires, there are some more common desires that I have seen in almost all my clients. Sometimes, these surface after a few conversations, and sometimes they are more apparent from the beginning. I can describe these desires as a sense of being comfortable and safe within themselves, being confident in expressing themselves under varying circumstances, being at ease and enjoying their life, waking up and feeling alive rather than stressed, enjoying genuine connections with people…you get the idea. These are more fundamental human desires.

Addressing the work-desires, as important as they might be, will only sustain when they contribute to fulfilling the underlying human desires, rather than going in opposition to them. While this could sound obvious from the outside, it does not come across as obvious to many leaders who are navigating their circumstances.

For example, in the case of the leader who was learning to manage upwards and across better, their actions to improve the situation happened to go against their desire to have a genuine relationship with their peers. This resulted in a sour feeling within themselves, a feeling of a loss of sense of self in a not so desirable way.

But these actions were working on the outside, and the situation was surely improving. So they ignored the dissonance within them until it became strong enough to warrant a fresh look.

They inherently understood that aligned actions are infinitely more impactful than misaligned actions. But they were struggling to act in an aligned way because of a lack of insight into where their attention was.

The work was to harness the power of their attention. It was to find aligned actions towards managing upwards and across, and later recreate their identity around who they would be for their peers. It was creating a possibility for a sustainable and enjoyable way for them.

On the surface, this can be labelled as executive coaching for better stakeholder management. But this is also about the leader’s relationship to power, to boundaries, and to their truth.

All of my clients are relatively self-aware people, which is why they are able to sense the limits of traditional interventions. This allows them to be open to cultivating Awakened Leadership, of operating from a place of alignment, presence, clarity, and appreciation for the microcosm that they are.