When You Need Help: Understanding What Coaching Can (and Can't) Do For You

The Problem

You’ve lost your job. Or you’re thinking about leaving. Or you’re stuck and don’t know what’s next.

Everyone’s offering advice, friends, former colleagues, LinkedIn connections you barely remember. Most of it contradicts itself. Some of it’s well-meaning but useless. And somewhere in all that noise, someone mentions coaching.

But what does that actually mean? And how do you know if it’s what you need?

What Coaching Is Not

Let’s start with what coaching isn’t, because that’s where most of the confusion lives.

Coaching is not career counselling. A counsellor helps you figure out what job to apply for next. Coaching helps you understand why you keep ending up in the same situations.

Coaching is not therapy. Therapy addresses psychological issues and past trauma. Coaching works in the present and future, focused on specific goals and obstacles.

Coaching is not mentoring. A mentor shares their experience and tells you what worked for them. A coach helps you discover what will work for you.

And coaching is definitely not advice. If you want someone to tell you what to do, hire a consultant. If you want to figure out what you should do, that’s coaching.

What You Actually Need Help With

When you’re in transition — losing a job, considering a move, feeling stuck — you need clarity on three things:

1. What’s actually happening (not what you think is happening, or what you wish was happening)

   
   

2. What you want (which is harder to answer than it sounds)

   
   

3. What’s stopping you (and it’s usually not what you think)

   
   

Most people skip straight to solutions. They want the answer, the plan, the next move. But if you don’t understand what’s actually going on, any plan you make is built on sand.

When Coaching Helps

Coaching works when you’re ready to do the hard thinking. It’s not passive. You don’t show up, get told what to do, and leave. You show up, work through the mess in your head with someone who knows how to ask the right questions, and leave with clarity you didn’t have before.

Good coaching helps you:

• See patterns you’ve been repeating without realising

• Identify what you’re avoiding and why

• Understand what success actually looks like for you (not what it’s supposed to look like)

• Build a plan based on who you are, not who you think you should be

When Coaching Doesn’t Help

Coaching doesn’t work if you’re looking for someone to fix you, tell you what to do, or validate decisions you’ve already made. It doesn’t work if you’re not willing to be honest about what’s really going on. And it definitely doesn’t work if you think the problem is everyone else.

Coaching also doesn’t replace practical help. If you need interview prep, hire a career coach. If you need your CV rewritten, hire a writer. If you need connections in a new market, work your network. Coaching addresses the internal work — the clarity, the mindset, the patterns. Everything else is execution.

What To Look For

If you’re considering coaching, here’s what matters:

Not credentials (anyone can get certified). Not testimonials (everyone has them). Not their LinkedIn presence (irrelevant).

What matters is whether they ask good questions. Whether they’re comfortable with silence while you think. Whether they challenge you without making it about them. And whether you leave the conversation with more clarity than you came in with.

A good coach doesn’t need to have lived your exact situation. They need to know how to help you think through it.

The Real Question

The question isn’t “Do I need coaching?” The question is: “Am I ready to do the work?”

If you’re stuck, confused, repeating the same patterns, or facing a transition you don’t know how to navigate — and you’re willing to sit in the discomfort of figuring it out — then yes, coaching can help.

But only if you’re ready.