Why the people who already know the most can benefit from someone prepared to question what they think they know
High achievers rarely arrive in a coaching conversation because nobody has ever given them enough advice. They have usually spent years accumulating knowledge, qualifications and experience. Doctors, lawyers, founders and CEOs have often spent years building specialist judgement and making difficult decisions.
So another person simply telling them what to do is not necessarily what moves them forward. Often, what they need is harder to find: somebody they trust enough to challenge the thinking behind what they already believe.
When Success Makes Challenge Harder to Find
The higher somebody rises, the more complicated feedback becomes. Harvard Business Review has described a paradox at the top of organisations: as leaders become more senior, candid feedback can reduce while blind spots become more consequential. HBR has also reported that high performers often receive lower-quality feedback despite benefiting from constructive input.[1][2]
I have seen this repeatedly. A junior doctor may hesitate to challenge a senior consultant. A trainee lawyer may think carefully before telling a senior partner their reasoning is flawed. A leadership team may decide that challenging the CEO carries more risk than staying quiet.
I explored this in The Quiet Risk of Unchallenged Leadership. Seniority can gradually remove the friction that once tested your thinking. People still talk to you, report to you and agree with you. What changes is how many of them are willing to say, “I think you might be wrong.”
High achievers can make this harder to spot because they remain capable for a long time. I often describe it this way: they can operate on three cylinders and still outperform many people running on four. The results may still look good, so nobody asks what might be missing.
You Cannot See Your Own Blind Spots
We can challenge ourselves to a degree. Reflection, reading, learning and deliberately exposing yourself to different perspectives all help. But self-challenge has an obvious limitation: you cannot easily examine something you do not know is there.
Pace makes this worse. High achievers are often moving quickly, solving problems and carrying responsibility. Their mind naturally protects what has worked before. Confidence and experience are not the problem; the risk is when an assumption becomes so familiar that it starts to feel like a fact.
Forbes has recently highlighted how senior leaders can become insulated from unfiltered feedback as distance and authority increase.[3] That connects directly with something I wrote about in Blind Spots: The Hidden Barrier to Leadership Growth. The irony is that the more capable somebody becomes, the easier it can be for other people to assume they have already considered everything.
The Challenge That Changed My Own Thinking
I know the difference between advice and challenge because I have experienced it personally.
For almost 30 years I had the security of a successful corporate career: salary, pension, healthcare and the infrastructure that comes with senior employment. Alongside it, I was already coaching and consulting on a smaller scale, and I knew where my passion increasingly sat.
I wanted to build my own executive coaching business, but I had a long list of reasons not to. What if I could not attract enough clients? What if I was not good enough? What if I gave up what I had built and it failed?
My coach did not solve that by telling me to resign. He kept challenging the thinking underneath my hesitation until the real issue became visible: fear of failure.
That challenge changed far more than one career decision. I began to rethink what failure actually meant. Instead of treating it as an outcome to avoid, I learned to see it as information and learning. The coaching focused on one goal, but the shift travelled into other parts of my life because the belief underneath the goal had changed.
Advice Still Has a Place
None of this means advice is useless. I mentor people. I have mentors. I have coaches whose experience I sometimes want access to. The boundary matters.
If I am coaching somebody and believe my experience could genuinely help, I may say that I am taking my coaching hat off and ask whether they would like a mentoring perspective. One of my own coaches does the same with me. He asks permission before moving from coaching into advice.
Entrepreneur UK recently described executive coaching as fundamentally different from mentoring and consulting because coaching is non-directive: the role is to help the individual clarify their own thinking rather than fill the conversation with the coach’s answers.[4] The Financial Times has also recently reported on senior executives seeking confidential, candid feedback from experienced mentors.[5] Different disciplines, but both point towards the scarcity of honest challenge at the top.
Advice is most useful when there is a genuine knowledge gap and the person wants input. Challenge asks something different: Why do you believe that? What evidence are you relying on? What are you avoiding? What would have to be true for the opposite view to be right?
Knowing When to Ask — and When Not To
This is where coaching becomes more sophisticated than having a list of clever questions.
Sometimes the right challenge is another question. Sometimes it is, “And then what?” Sometimes it is pointing out a contradiction between what somebody says they want and what their behaviour is producing. Sometimes the most powerful intervention is silence.
A human coach can watch the shoulders relax, hear a change in tone or notice somebody becoming defensive. Push too hard and you interrupt the flow. Fail to challenge at all and you can spend an hour politely reinforcing the story they arrived with.
Good challenge is not confrontation. It is calibrated friction inside a trusted relationship.
Trust Comes Before Challenge
Trust has to come first. If the chemistry is wrong, challenge can feel combative rather than constructive. That is why I take the fit between coach and client seriously before any programme begins.
I am also protective of confidentiality. I do not record coaching sessions or feed them into AI note-taking platforms, even though doing so would make my administration easier.
When that trust is present, you can often see the guard come down. Shoulders relax. People sit back. The language changes from the professional version of the story to, “To be honest, this is what is really happening.” Once that happens, we can start unpacking the cases and laying everything out on the bed.
I coached a doctor who had worked extraordinarily hard to reach an important stage in their career. They expected the promised land; when they arrived, they felt flat. Because there was trust, we could explore that gap rather than simply congratulate the achievement.
When Growth Starts to Plateau
This is why challenge matters when successful people begin to plateau. They often know something is wrong before they can name it.
I have coached a partner from a leading London firm who could recognise that something had changed. Performance had not disappeared, but the feeling of progression had. High achievers are often acutely aware of that gap, yet awareness alone does not always reveal its cause.
This connects strongly with When Growth Turns Into Protection. Success creates more to protect: reputation, income, position, identity and certainty. The same instincts that helped somebody rise can later make the next move feel disproportionately risky.
There is evidence that coaching can help. A 2023 Academy of Management Learning & Education meta-analysis examined 37 randomised controlled trials involving 2,528 participants and found a statistically significant positive effect of workplace coaching across leadership and personal outcomes.[6] In medicine, The BMJ has similarly noted that observation and feedback can prompt reflection and constructive modification across performance levels.[7]
The Light Bulb Moment
For me, one of the best moments in executive coaching is what I call the light bulb moment. You can almost see it happen.
Up until then, we may have been exploring, questioning, slowing down and testing assumptions. Then something lands. The body language changes and the conversation develops a different energy because we finally know what we are really talking about.
For me, that may still only be around a third of the way through the process. Insight without action changes very little. In my Elevation Model™, the breakthrough still has to move through pathways, commitment and ultimately embodiment. But the light bulb matters because you cannot deliberately change what you still cannot see.
High achievers do not need somebody constantly telling them how impressive they are. Nor do they need a coach determined to prove how clever the coach is by giving them answers.
They need trust. They need space. They need somebody who knows when to listen, when to pause and when to ask the question everybody else has stopped asking.
What high performers need most is not more advice.
It is better challenge.
References and Further Reading
- Harvard Business Review (2026), “How to Convince Your Boss They Need a Coach.”
https://hbr.org/2026/04/how-to-convince-your-boss-they-need-a-coach - Harvard Business Review (2024), “High Performers Need Feedback, Too.”
https://hbr.org/2024/11/high-performers-need-feedback-too - Forbes (2026), “20 Practical Ways Senior Leaders Can Prevent Leadership Blind Spots.”
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2026/02/19/20-practical-ways-senior-leaders-can-prevent-leadership-blind-spots/ - Entrepreneur UK (2026), “What Is Executive Coaching? And Why the Highest Performing Execs Don’t Go Without It.”
https://uk.entrepreneur.com/entrepreneurs/executive-coaching-high-performers - Financial Times (2026), “The ‘Brutally Honest’ Feedback CEOs Cannot Get Enough Of.”
https://www.ft.com/content/1d00e81c-fc7a-4dd2-bebd-ddb077fb3fa0 - de Haan, E. & Nilsson, V.O. (2023), “What Can We Know about the Effectiveness of Coaching? A Meta-Analysis Based Only on Randomized Controlled Trials.” Academy of Management Learning & Education.
https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amle.2022.0107 - Kelly, E. & Richards, J.B. (2019), “Medical Education: Giving Feedback to Doctors in Training.” The BMJ.
https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l4523.abstract
About Laurence Loxam
I’m Laurence Loxam – I’ve pushed limits in business, on mountains, and at the finish line.
Now I help elite professionals do the same, pushing past the point most people stop.
I coach CEOs, doctors, lawyers, and founders who’ve hit success, but still feel there’s more.
Together, we unlock clarity, sharpen confidence, and lead with conviction.
loxamconsultingltd.org
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