I have invested hundreds of hours of my life into being a client to coaches at the pinnacle of their craft, and thousands of hours being a coach to successful leaders running global organizations. This is my opinion on what to pay attention to in deciding to work with a coach. It is immediate and obvious to me that transformation at the highest levels does not happen just through the coach holding credentials.

Credentials represent a lot of useful things. They attempt to de-risk the coaching engagement by assuring a base level of standards. But the higher the level of maturity of the leader, the more the requirement goes beyond credentials. You must look for indicators that the coach has done the inner work on the specific frontier you are facing.

For example: If you are confronting limiting beliefs around money, it is ineffective to sit across from a coach who is themselves silently lost inside the same limiting beliefs. This is not about whether they went through the outer experience, such as having earned more money than you – which is a naive parameter arising out of a misunderstanding of the subjective nature of money. This example can be extended to highlight the naivety of looking for any outward experiences of the coach such as having worked in the same industry or having held a similar role. This is about their inner work.

It’s because one can’t coach with consistent effectiveness around their own limiting beliefs. One cannot create outside their own beliefs, and even if they’re great at following a coaching process, the energy leaks. Their presence will falter when the topics you explore mirror and trigger their own limiting beliefs.

Many assume that a practitioner can reflect on these blind spots after the fact. But in the moment, the container is compromised. You can viscerally sense when the coach sitting across from you is unable to champion your potential, no matter how experienced or credentialed they are. The burden shifts to you and you will find yourself working twice as hard to compensate.

In these cases, the coach is simply not a capable energy container for the transformation you are seeking. Because coaching at the highest levels is all about energy alchemy and very little about process or methodology. Here, the mechanics of coaching are completely secondary to the energetic capacity of the coach holding the space. You cannot be championed by someone who is still trapped by and oblivious to the same illusions you are trying to go beyond.

When you hold significant power and responsibility, and the stakes are high, the integrity of this energetic container dictates the entire ceiling of your impact.

There is no credential, label, or metric of experience that can measure a person’s inner sovereignty. The quality of energy cannot be quantified by the market. It can only be felt through the depth of their understanding and the weight of their presence.

So this might take some time and intention, and perhaps a conversation or two with the coach before formally engaging with them. But when you really care about the impact of the coaching, finding a space with a capable energy container is not just time well invested; it is the only thing that you can bet on to alter the trajectory of your world.