Why confidentiality, non-judgement and genuine trust are essential to meaningful executive coaching.
The Coaching Dance
A coaching session can look productive and achieve absolutely nothing.
Two people sit opposite one another. Questions are asked, answers are given, perhaps a few objectives are agreed and both leave feeling they’ve had a worthwhile conversation. From the outside, it looks like coaching.
But was anything meaningful actually uncovered?
I’ve sometimes described this as the “coaching dance”. Both people go through the motions, saying what they think should be said, while the conversations that could make a genuine difference never happen.
For me, the explanation is straightforward. Without trust, there cannot be meaningful executive coaching. A coach might have impressive qualifications, decades of business experience and a sophisticated framework, but none of those things can compensate for a client who doesn’t feel comfortable opening up.
Research supports the importance of the relationship itself. A meta-analysis published in Human Relations, examining 27 samples covering 3,563 coaching processes, found a moderate and consistent positive association between the quality of the coaching relationship and client outcomes.[1] It does not prove that trust alone produces results, but it reinforces something I believe strongly from experience.
Trust isn’t something we introduce halfway through a coaching programme. It is the foundation on which the entire relationship is built.
Trust Begins Before the First Conversation
When somebody books a discovery conversation with me, usually around 30 minutes, I believe much of the initial trust is already beginning to form.
They may have read my blogs, watched my videos, examined my professional background or spoken to somebody who knows me. They’ve developed an impression of who I am, what I believe and whether I might be somebody they could work with.
The discovery conversation allows them to test that impression against the person sitting opposite them.
Can they relate to me? Do they feel comfortable? Do they believe I understand their world? And perhaps most importantly, could they tell me something deeply personal without worrying about how I might respond?
I don’t believe trust can be guaranteed in 15 or 30 minutes. It develops through consistency, openness and experience. But the foundations must be there, and the early coaching sessions should reinforce them.
In Why People Who Don’t Think They Need Coaching Often Benefit Most, I explored why highly capable people are often understandably sceptical about coaching. They want to know what they’re investing in and whether it will deliver something meaningful.
I welcome that scepticism. But once somebody decides coaching is right for them, I want them to go all in. Half-hearted participation, whether driven by fashion, professional expectations or because somebody famous has a coach, is unlikely to produce the depth of work we’re looking for.
Confidentiality Is Non-Negotiable
I’m fortunate to spend considerable time around the medical and legal professions. One thing I’ve always admired is how seriously confidentiality is treated, particularly in medicine.
A doctor may know something incredibly sensitive about a patient and have an absolute responsibility to protect that information within the boundaries of their professional and legal obligations.
I believe a good executive coach should approach confidentiality with comparable seriousness, although the legal and regulatory obligations are not identical.
Executive coaching remains a largely unregulated profession in the UK. That makes professional standards particularly important. Organisations such as the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and the Association for Coaching establish ethical expectations covering confidentiality, professional conduct, agreements and the handling of sensitive information.[2][3]
I see many fellow coaches taking these responsibilities extremely seriously, which is encouraging. Nevertheless, I believe clients should understand the boundaries rather than simply assume them.
My own coaches have approached the subject differently. One established confidentiality very professionally at the beginning and rarely needed to mention it again. I tend to emphasise it more frequently, particularly during discovery conversations and early sessions.
There are legitimate exceptions where legal obligations or serious safety concerns may require disclosure, and these should be explained from the outset. But beyond those clearly defined circumstances, clients should know their personal conversations are protected.
Because if somebody is wondering who might hear what they’re about to say, how much of the truth are they really going to share?
When an Employer Pays, Who Owns the Conversation?
This is an area where I have a particularly firm position.
Many organisations now recognise the value of executive coaching and are prepared to invest in their people. I think that is fantastic. An employer willing to support an individual who has identified a genuine development need is demonstrating considerable foresight.
But I draw a distinction between someone who actively wants coaching and someone who has simply been told by their employer that they should have it.
Some coaching providers work extremely effectively within organisations, operating as retained or internal coaching partners. That isn’t the space I choose to occupy. I prefer working with individuals who have independently decided they want to be coached.
I’ve worked with clients whose organisations have paid their fees, but the individual approached me. They wanted the coaching, and their employer was supportive enough to fund it.
From the beginning, I make the confidentiality boundaries absolutely clear. The organisation can fund the work, but that does not entitle it to know what has been discussed. Any sharing of coaching content requires the client’s informed agreement, within the established contractual, legal and safety boundaries.
Occasionally, that position has meant an engagement hasn’t proceeded because the organisation wanted greater involvement. I’m entirely comfortable with that outcome.
Clear expectations at the beginning are infinitely preferable to compromising the relationship later.
The Freedom to Speak Without Being Judged
One reason I enjoy coaching doctors, lawyers and other senior professionals is that I often bring a perspective from outside their profession.
A doctor who also works as a coach once asked why I seemed to attract so many medical clients. My response was that perhaps one reason was precisely because I’m not a doctor.
Some people naturally prefer a coach who understands their profession from the inside. Others may find it easier to reveal insecurities to someone who doesn’t share the same professional identity.
Imagine admitting that you feel intimidated by a colleague, inadequate in a boardroom or uncomfortable when being observed in an operating theatre. These are deeply personal concerns, even when somebody appears exceptionally confident and successful.
The coach must be non-judgemental. Equally, the client must believe that to be true.
A 2026 study in BMJ Quality & Safety, examining professional support for doctors experiencing performance-related difficulties, identified trust, psychological safety and skilled facilitation as important conditions for effective support.[4]
That resonates with my own experience.
I once worked with an exceptionally accomplished professional who had invested years and a considerable amount of money retraining for a different career direction. Having reached that destination, they began questioning whether the change had been right for them and ultimately returned to their previous field.
What struck me wasn’t simply the decision. It was how openly they discussed the disappointment, uncertainty and personal consequences during our earliest conversations.
I felt privileged that somebody who had achieved so much was prepared to trust me with something so personal.
Without that openness, we might have discussed career decisions without ever understanding what was happening underneath them.
Trust Must Be Strong Enough to Support Challenge
There is a misconception that a trusting coaching relationship should always feel comfortable.
I disagree.
A good coach isn’t somebody who agrees with everything a client says, constantly reassures them or avoids difficult conversations to preserve the relationship. Trust should make honest challenge possible, not prevent it.
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety, discussed in Harvard Business Review, highlights how people become more willing to acknowledge mistakes, ask for help and speak candidly when they feel psychologically safe.[5]
Although her research primarily concerns teams, I recognise a similar principle in one-to-one coaching. People are more willing to examine difficult truths when they don’t feel they must constantly protect their reputation.
In What High Performers Need Most Is Not More Advice: It’s Better Challenge, I explored why successful professionals rarely need another person simply telling them what to do.
They need someone capable of asking questions that challenge their assumptions.
That might expose an insecurity, a longstanding fear or an ambition that no longer makes sense. These aren’t always comfortable discoveries, but they can become enormously valuable.
In my Elevation Model™, trust supports the deeper work of Awareness and Breakthrough. From there, Pathways, Commitment and Embodiment help translate understanding into meaningful change.
The insight itself is only part of the journey.
Knowing When Coaching Isn’t Right
Trust also means being willing to tell somebody that coaching may not be right for them, at least not yet.
At one stage in my coaching practice, I was referring or declining around half of the enquiries I received. There were several reasons, including lack of chemistry, uncertainty about committing to coaching or circumstances where another form of support was more appropriate.
Recently, I spoke with a professional who genuinely wanted to work with me. However, they were dealing with the effects of burnout and other significant challenges.
I felt that introducing demanding executive coaching at that point could create another burden when they needed a different form of support. We discussed other options, with the possibility of returning to coaching when the timing was better.
Executive coaching isn’t necessarily easy. It can require considerable reflection, emotional energy, uncomfortable conversations and a willingness to change established behaviour.
A good coach needs to recognise when someone has the capacity and readiness to undertake that work, rather than simply accepting another paying client.
The Ambition I Had to Question
I’ve experienced the value of a trusted coaching relationship from the other side of the conversation.
For much of my corporate career, I aspired to become CEO of a very large organisation. I believed I had the ability, particularly given my people-centred approach to leadership, and I spent nearly three decades building a successful career.
But as I began considering leaving corporate life to develop my own executive coaching business, I faced a difficult question.
Was becoming CEO still something I genuinely wanted, or had I become attached to an ambition that belonged to an earlier stage of my life?
I explored that question with one of my coaches. With another, I uncovered something equally significant: a longstanding fear of failure.
Corporate life was familiar. I’d been successful, had good opportunities ahead of me and knew how to operate in that environment. Moving away from it meant accepting uncertainty and committing to a business that had, for many years, been a side hustle.
Recognising my fear of failure didn’t magically eliminate it. I still experience it. But understanding it has helped me challenge that fear rather than automatically allow it to determine my decisions.
Eventually, I walked away from the corporate career and committed fully to building my executive coaching business.
In last week’s article, The Day My Wife Dropped an Ironman, I explored how losing part of my identity as an endurance athlete eventually helped me reconsider what success meant.
My corporate transition involved a similar process, but this time I had trusted coaches helping me examine the assumptions behind my thinking.
Sometimes what we need most isn’t encouragement to pursue an existing ambition. It’s the freedom to ask whether we still want it.
From Going the Extra Mile to Going the Extra Depth
My understanding of trust developed long before I became an executive coach.
Throughout my corporate career, including leading teams of around 120 people, I saw what happened when people genuinely trusted their leader.
They were loyal. They communicated more openly. And when the business faced serious challenges, they were often prepared to get in the trenches alongside me and go the extra mile.
That didn’t happen simply because I held a senior position. I believe it came from the environment we’d created and the relationships we’d developed over time.
The Financial Times has explored a related leadership challenge: senior executives need trusted people who are prepared to offer uncomfortable truths rather than simply reinforce the leader’s existing views.[6]
I see a strong connection between leadership and executive coaching.
In leadership, trust encourages people to go the extra mile.
In executive coaching, it allows people to go the extra depth.
The expression of trust changes, but the underlying principle remains remarkably similar. People are more willing to commit themselves when they believe the person opposite them has earned their confidence.
Trust Is the Foundation, Not the Outcome
A 2023 meta-analysis in the Academy of Management Learning & Education, reviewing 37 randomised controlled studies involving 2,528 participants, found a statistically significant positive effect of workplace coaching across leadership and personal outcomes.[7]
That is encouraging evidence for coaching, but it doesn’t mean every coaching programme works or that every coach is right for every client.
Qualifications, experience, challenge, timing and the client’s willingness to engage all play a part.
But for me, trust sits underneath them.
Without it, people protect themselves. They provide safe answers, avoid uncomfortable subjects and leave the most important questions unexplored.
With it, they can begin questioning beliefs they’ve carried for decades, acknowledging weaknesses they rarely reveal and reconsidering what they genuinely want from their lives.
That willingness to question ourselves is closely connected to another quality I value enormously in high performers: curiosity. However experienced or successful we become, there is always more to understand about ourselves.
Trust makes those conversations possible. Curiosity helps us continue having them.
And perhaps the most useful question isn’t whether you have somebody who will listen to you.
It’s whether you have somebody you trust enough to tell them what you might not yet be ready to admit to yourself.
Who do you trust enough to have that conversation with?
References
- Graßmann, C., Schölmerich, F. & Schermuly, C. C. (2020). The Relationship Between Working Alliance and Client Outcomes in Coaching: A Meta-Analysis. Human Relations, 73(1).
https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726718819725 - International Coaching Federation (2025). ICF Code of Ethics.
https://coachingfederation.org/credentialing/coaching-ethics/icf-code-of-ethics/ - Association for Coaching. Global Code of Ethics.
https://www.associationforcoaching.com/page/AboutCodeEthics - Brennan, N., et al. (2026). Optimising Professional Support for Doctors Who Experience Work Performance Issues: A Realist Evaluation. BMJ Quality & Safety.
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2025-019749 - Edmondson, A. (2019). Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace. Harvard Business Review, HBR IdeaCast.
https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/01/creating-psychological-safety-in-the-workplace - Financial Times (2023). CEO Whisperers: Who Does the Boss Turn to in Their Hour of Need?
https://www.ft.com/content/e24f8965-6848-4f66-96d5-e39674a61cb3 - 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
About Laurence Loxam
I’m Laurence Loxam. I’ve pushed limits in business, on mountains and at the finish line.
Now I help high achievers do the same, pushing past the point most people stop. I coach CEOs, doctors, lawyers and founders who have achieved a lot, but still feel there is more.
Together, we unlock clarity, sharpen confidence and lead with conviction.
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