I did not know I needed an executive coach.
That was the irony.
I was not failing. I was not burned out. I was not trying to rebuild my career or recover my confidence.
In many ways, things were going well.
My corporate career was progressing. I was operating in senior commercial environments, leading teams, carrying responsibility, and making decisions where the outcome mattered. Alongside that, my own business interests were also developing. A consulting business was performing well, investments were moving in the right direction, and a co-founded import-export business, started in 2008, was eventually exited successfully in 2020 after a delicate and highly sensitive negotiation.
That detail matters because it challenges one of the biggest misconceptions about executive coaching.
People often assume coaching begins when something is wrong.
For me, it began because something was possible.
I was preparing to chair a prestigious three-day international conference with around 300 guests. I could probably have turned up and relied on instinct. I was a commercial leader. I knew how to speak, influence and handle pressure.
But the stakes were too high to wing it.
I wanted to be outstanding. I remember putting something out on LinkedIn about wanting someone who could help me present like Barack Obama.
That was the doorway.
Presentation was the question.
Leadership was what opened up behind it.
A short reflection on this topic will be captured in the accompanying video below, exploring why many high achievers do not realise they need executive coaching until they experience what it actually does.
I Wasn’t Failing. I Wanted To Get Better.
That distinction is important.
The people who use executive coaching well are not always in crisis. Often, they are ambitious, capable, respected and already successful. They have reached a level where intelligence, work ethic and experience have taken them a long way.
But something inside them knows there is another level.
That was true for me.
I wanted to be more confident. I wanted to hold a room. I wanted to walk into a boardroom or onto a stage and feel that I could command attention without force, ego or performance. I wanted to be convincing, composed and credible in situations where the room mattered.
At the time, I would not have called that executive coaching. I would probably have called it presentation coaching, communication support or leadership presence.
But a highly recommended coach entered the picture, and the work quickly went deeper than I expected.
That is what good coaching often does.
It starts with the presenting issue, but it rarely stays there.
The Door I Walked Through Was Presentation. The Room Behind It Was Leadership.
The original question was simple: how do I present better?
But beneath that sat something far more valuable.
How do I carry myself under pressure? How do I influence without overperforming? How do I communicate with confidence but without arrogance? How do I become more aware of how I am experienced by others? How do I step fully into the level I am already operating at?
That is where coaching began to change things.
It helped me see strengths I had not fully recognised. In particular, it brought my emotional intelligence and self-awareness into sharper view. Those qualities were already there, but they had not been fully named, tested or developed in the way coaching allowed.
This is one of the reasons coaching can be so powerful for high achievers.
It does not simply fix weaknesses.
Sometimes it reveals strengths the client has been underusing, undervaluing or misreading.
In the years that followed, I stepped into significantly larger roles, responsibility and reward. I also made decisions in my own business life that required confidence, judgement and emotional control, including negotiating a complex business exit and founding Loxam Consulting.
Coaching was not the only reason for those outcomes.
That would be too simplistic.
But it changed the way I saw myself, carried myself and backed myself. It helped me operate with a level of confidence that was not performative.
It was grounded.
Coaching Is Not Advice, Mentoring Or Consultancy.
I have always valued mentors. I have hired consultants. I have used sparring partners. I have had the conversations that sharpen thinking and challenge assumptions.
All of those things can be valuable.
But coaching is different.
A mentor may share experience. A consultant may provide recommendations. A sparring partner may debate ideas. A coach does something more subtle and, in many ways, more transformational.
A coach helps you see yourself while you are thinking.
Good executive coaching creates the conditions for you to rise above the immediate noise and observe the pattern. It gives you the mirror, the perspective, the accountability and the structure to examine how you think, decide, react, communicate and lead.
I often describe this through the lighthouse metaphor.
When you are in the waves, you cannot always see the coastline.
A coach helps you find that perspective. Not by giving you a map to copy. Not by telling you what to do. Not by rescuing you.
But by helping you see clearly enough to choose with greater awareness.
This is why Why Even Top Performers Need a Coach matters as a leadership idea. The strongest performers do not use coaching because they are weak. They use it because marginal gains, clearer thinking and better self-awareness matter more as the stakes rise.
What Coaching Revealed To Me.
One of the more uncomfortable truths coaching revealed was that not everything was as balanced as it looked.
I was not burned out. I was not falling apart. In many ways, life was good.
But my ambition had a cost I had not fully noticed.
Earlier in life, a long-term relationship had ended after years of a career-driven mentality. At the time, that was easier to rationalise. It worked out for the best. Life moved on. Success continued.
But years later, in another serious relationship, I could see how close I was to repeating a similar pattern.
That is the kind of thing high achievers often miss.
Not because they do not care.
Because the career becomes loud. The next goal becomes urgent. The opportunity feels important. The standard keeps rising. The identity of being the person who pushes, achieves and delivers becomes reinforced.
Coaching helped me see that.
Not with melodrama.
With truth.
This is also why I am careful when I write about burnout. I do not position myself as the specialist for people who are already at the point of collapse. There are other professionals and specialisms that may be more appropriate at that stage.
Where I often work best is earlier.
At the erosion point.
The point where a high achiever is still functioning, still delivering and still respected, but quietly losing alignment, perspective, confidence, enjoyment, purpose or relational presence.
If You Are Going To Be Coached, Go All In.
One of the things I now see as a coach is that many high achievers do not get the full value from coaching quickly enough.
They arrive cautious. That is understandable.
They are successful people. They are used to being composed. They are used to filtering. They are used to protecting reputation, status and credibility.
So they hold something back.
They test the process. They test the coach. They decide how honest to be. They spend the first session, sometimes the first two, still performing.
But the value of coaching increases dramatically when the client goes all in.
That does not mean oversharing for the sake of it. It means using the space properly. It means saying the thing you would normally edit. It means admitting the doubt, ambition, fear, frustration, confusion, hunger or possibility you have not yet said out loud.
That is why Why Coaching Only Works If You’re All In is such an important companion idea to this article. Coaching is not passive. It is not something done to you. It is a partnership that asks for honesty, effort and commitment.
If someone is going to invest serious time, money and attention into coaching, my advice is simple.
Go all in.
Do not waste the opportunity by trying to look impressive in the one room where you do not need to perform.
The Coaching Space Is More Serious Than Many People Realise.
Executive coaching is currently an unregulated field. Anyone can call themselves a coach.
That makes quality, training, ethics and experience important.
A serious certified executive coach treats confidentiality with exceptional care. I certainly do. Unless there is a risk of harm to the client or to others, the coaching space is designed to be one of the safest professional conversations a leader can have.
That trust level matters.
Clients need to know they are not being judged, exposed, mined for content, or casually discussed elsewhere. I am extremely protective of client confidentiality, to the point that I avoid putting sensitive client material onto platforms where there could be unnecessary risk, even when anonymised.
If a senior professional is going to tell the truth about what is really happening in their leadership, career, relationships, ambition or identity, the space has to be trustworthy.
This is also where blind spots become relevant. As I explored in Blind Spots: The Hidden Barrier to Leadership Growth, the things that limit capable people are not always obvious to them. That is why the right coaching space matters. It allows those hidden barriers to surface without judgement.
Coaching Does Not Give You A Badge. It Changes How You Operate.
This is another reason some high achievers hesitate.
Coaching does not always come with the visible reward they are used to.
There may be no MBA. No MA. No PhD. No postnominals. No certificate to display on the wall.
For academically successful professionals, that can create resistance.
I understand that.
There were times when I could have spent money on another qualification and come away with letters after my name. That has value. I respect education deeply.
But executive coaching does something different. It is not a badge.
It is closer to a personal operating upgrade.
It changes how you think. How you speak. How you hold yourself. How you make decisions. How you understand pressure. How you relate to others. How you lead yourself before trying to lead anyone else.
Done properly, people around you notice the change before they can name it. The credential is not written after your name.
It is felt in the room.
Why I Built The Elevation Model™.
My own approach to coaching did not appear overnight.
It has been shaped over many years, beginning with my early interest in Sir John Whitmore’s GROW model and his work in Coaching for Performance. I first explored that kind of coaching framework around 15 or 16 years ago because I wanted to empower teams, improve performance and get more out of people in a better way.
I still respect the GROW model.
But over time, I felt something more was needed for the complexity of modern high achievers.
The leaders and professionals I work with are often not simply asking what their goal is, what their reality is, what options they have and what they will do next.
Those questions still matter.
But the deeper work often sits beneath them.
What is driving this ambition? What has success started to cost? Where has confidence become performance? Where is identity tied too tightly to achievement? Where has pace replaced clarity? What does the next level actually require?
That is why I developed The Elevation Model™.
It is designed to help high achievers move from insight to impact through a more complete structure: Vision, Alignment, Awareness, Breakthrough, Pathways, Commitment and Embodiment.
High achievers can already move.
The real work is helping them move in the right direction, with clearer thinking, stronger self-awareness and more sustainable leadership impact.
Closing Thought.
You do not need to be broken to need executive coaching.
Sometimes you simply need to be ready for another level.
That may be greater confidence. Greater clarity. Greater presence. Greater purpose. Greater self-awareness. Greater impact.
For many high achievers, the question is not:
“Am I struggling enough to justify coaching?”
The better question is:
“What might become possible if I stopped trying to figure everything out alone?”
Because the right coach is more than a mentor. More than a consultant. More than a sparring partner.
The right coach becomes the person in your corner who helps you see clearly, think deeply, act deliberately and become the version of yourself your next level requires.
That is what executive coaching actually does.
And that is why high achievers use it.
References
Nicolau, A., et al. (2023). The effects of executive coaching on behaviours, attitudes, and personal characteristics: a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trial studies. Frontiers in Psychology.
Cannon-Bowers, J.A., et al. (2023). Workplace coaching: a meta-analysis and recommendations for advancing the science of coaching. Frontiers in Psychology.
Brooks, P.J., et al. (2023). Coaching leaders toward favourable trajectories of burnout symptoms and engagement. Frontiers in Psychology.
Harvard Business Review. (2025). Senior Leaders Still Need Learning and Development.
Harvard Business Review. (2019). The Future of Leadership Development.
Whitmore, J. (1992). Coaching for Performance. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
I’m Laurence Loxam – I’ve pushed limits in business, on mountains, and at the finish line.
Now I help high-achieving professionals do the same, pushing past the point most people stop.
I coach CEOs, doctors, lawyers, founders and senior professionals who have achieved success, but still feel there is another level of clarity, confidence and impact available to them.
Together, we unlock clarity, sharpen confidence and lead with conviction.
loxamconsultingltd.org
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