I spent the first year of my coaching practice convinced I was going to get found out.
Not by clients, exactly. More by the universe. I’d been a photojournalist, I’d made The New York Times my main client, and then I’d walked away from all of it to sit in a room and ask people questions about their feelings. There was no version of that career move that looked rational on paper, and some part of me kept waiting for someone to point that out.
They didn’t. What happened instead is that people kept showing up, and they kept getting better, and I kept not being able to explain why in a way that sounded like a proper business pitch. I’d tell people I was a coach and they’d nod politely and I could see them trying to figure out what that meant.
(It took me a while to figure out what it meant too.)
Here’s what I know now, after about 2,500 sessions with directors and VPs across tech, media, manufacturing, hospitality, finance. The thing that’s in the way for most of these people is not what they think it is. They come in wanting to fix their communication, or their delegation, or their executive presence. Those are real things. But they’re almost never the real thing.
What Holistic Coaching Techniques Are (and What They’re Not)
The word “holistic” makes some people’s eyes glaze over. I get it. It sounds like crystals and breathing exercises and someone telling you to journal about your inner child.
That’s not what I’m talking about.
Holistic coaching techniques means you’re looking at the whole person, not just the professional problem they walked in with. It means when a VP tells me she can’t delegate, I’m not handing her a delegation framework and sending her on her way. I’m trying to understand why delegating feels like a threat to her, what belief she’s carrying about her own value that makes holding on to the work feel safer than letting it go.
Chelsea was an SVP who’d built a team she never wanted to lead this large. She was carrying work that belonged to other people because trusting them felt riskier than just doing it herself. We didn’t fix that with time-blocking. We fixed it by naming what was underneath: that being needed had become the same thing as being valuable. Once she could see that, the time-blocking started to work. Before that it was just a to-do list she ignored.
That’s what holistic means in practice. You work on the presenting problem AND the thing underneath the presenting problem. Usually at the same time.
Why Leaders Keep Chasing Skills When the Problem Is Self-Trust
I see this constantly. Someone with fifteen years of experience, a track record of results, a team that respects them, and they’re still lying awake at 2am replaying the exact tone they used in that one sentence in that one meeting.
They don’t need a communication workshop. They need to trust their own judgment.
The tricky part is that the self-doubt looks like conscientiousness from the outside. The long hours, the over-preparing, the checking everything three times before it goes out. That stuff gets rewarded. Your manager thinks you’re thorough. Your team thinks you’re dedicated. Nobody tells you that what you’re doing is managing anxiety, not managing a team.
I had a client, a director-level guy in engineering, who kept doing the quick tactical tasks himself. Not because he couldn’t delegate. Because delegating would’ve freed up time for the bigger strategic work he was supposed to be doing, and that work was harder to be immediately good at. The small tasks were a hiding place. We spent weeks talking about delegation before I realized the delegation wasn’t the issue. The issue was that his entire identity was organized around being the expert in the room, and leadership kept asking him to be something else.
That’s where holistic coaching techniques become necessary. A skills-based approach would’ve given him a delegation checklist. What he needed was to figure out who he was when he wasn’t the smartest person at the table.
The Patterns I See Across 245+ Clients
I did a systematic review of my client data recently. 245 engagements. And the patterns were so consistent it was almost boring.
The stated goal at the start of coaching was almost never the whole story. Someone comes in wanting to work on executive presence, over two or three sessions it becomes clear they’re terrified of being wrong in front of senior leaders. Someone wants to improve their work-life balance, what they mean is that work has become the primary way they structure their self-worth and they don’t know how to stop.
Here’s what kept showing up.
Value tied to output. The belief that the way you earn your place is by doing enough, and “enough” is never fully defined so it can never be fully reached. This was the most common pattern by a significant margin. It showed up as perfectionism, people-pleasing, overworking, avoidance, burnout. Depended on the person. But the structure was the same.
Identity organized around expertise. When you’ve built your career on being the person who knows, leadership becomes a threat. Every moment of not knowing registers as a failure. Letting go of hands-on work isn’t a logistics problem, it’s an identity crisis.
People-pleasing that’s become invisible. It started as strategy and then the person forgot they were doing it. By the time they show up in coaching they think they’re just “collaborative” or “easygoing” and they don’t notice that they haven’t said what they think in a meeting in six months.
Holistic coaching techniques are how you get at this stuff. Not by lecturing someone about it. By creating enough safety that they can see it for themselves.
What Holistic Coaching for Leaders Looks Like in Practice
The first few sessions are usually translation. Getting from the surface goal to the thing that’s underneath it. A lot of people have never been asked what they’re afraid of in a professional context, and when you ask, the answer comes out fast. Like it’s been sitting there waiting.
Middle sessions, that’s where the real material surfaces. Old beliefs about what makes someone valuable. Family patterns that show up verbatim in how they’re managing their teams. The perfectionist whose father never said it was good enough. The people-pleaser who learned early that keeping everyone happy was how you stayed safe.
I had a client who had a genuine insight in session six about why she kept over-functioning. Great session. Real breakthrough. Session seven she did exactly the old behavior and felt like she’d failed completely. That’s normal. The work is to help people see the backslide as information, not a verdict.
Later sessions, if someone stays long enough, something qualitatively different happens. Less analysis. More real-time noticing. They start catching themselves in the old pattern before they finish the behavior. They develop their own language for it. Not framework language. Their own words.
One client started calling it “wearing better footwear.” Another just had “to what end?” as a question she’d ask herself before saying yes to anything. Another built what she called a “wheel of possibilities” and ended up teaching it to her colleagues. These phrases sound simple but they’re evidence of something deep. The person has internalized the work enough that they can coach themselves.
That’s the whole point.
Why “Just Work on the Behavior” Doesn’t Stick
I’ve watched this enough times to be sure about it. Clients who try to change behavior without updating the underlying belief almost always revert. The time-blocking doesn’t stick because the belief that being needed equals being valuable is still running underneath. The delegation experiment works for two weeks and then stops because “nobody else will care as much as I do” is still in charge.
What changes behavior is accumulated evidence from real situations. The client who starts saying no and discovers the world doesn’t end. The one who stops over-explaining in meetings and finds people follow them more easily. The one who has the difficult conversation they’ve been avoiding for six months and feels the relief of not carrying it anymore.
Each of those becomes a data point. Enough data points and the internal model updates. That’s not a technique, that’s how brains work. Your amygdala, bless its heart, cannot tell the difference between a board presentation and a bear. It takes repetition and real evidence to convince it that the thing you’re afraid of isn’t going to kill you.
Holistic coaching techniques work because they address both sides of that equation. The belief and the behavior. The pattern and the specific Tuesday morning meeting where the pattern shows up.
Impostor Syndrome Doesn’t Go Away at the Senior Level
One of the things that surprised me in the client data was how consistent impostor syndrome was across seniority levels. I had CPOs feeling it. People who’d been directors for ten years. People who had just gotten promoted and people who’d been in the role long enough that you’d think it would’ve worn off by now.
It didn’t correlate with performance. If anything, the clients who rated themselves most harshly tended to be the ones whose managers rated them most generously. Think about that for a second. The people who felt most like frauds were the ones other people thought were doing the best work.
That gap between how you see yourself and how others see you is where most of the suffering lives. And you can’t close it by getting another certification or reading another leadership book. You close it by doing the thing you’re afraid of and noticing that you survived. Then doing it again. Then again.
A skills-based coach will give you tools for that. A holistic coach will help you understand why the tools haven’t been working.
What to Look for in a Holistic Coach
I’m biased, obviously. But here’s what I’d say.
Look for someone who’s done their own work. Not someone who talks about self-awareness like it’s a concept. Someone who’s been through it. Who can talk about their own patterns without making it a TED Talk.
Look for someone who doesn’t give you a framework in the first session. The frameworks come later, if they come at all. The first thing a good coach should be doing is listening, and not in the nodding-along way. Listening for what you’re not saying.
Look for someone who’s willing to be wrong. Coaching isn’t about the coach being smart. It’s about the client seeing themselves more clearly. If your coach is performing expertise at you, that’s not holistic coaching. That’s consulting with feelings.
The first conversation is free. I’ll be straight with you about whether I think I can help.
Danny Ghitis is an executive coach with PCC and CAPP credentials, a former photojournalist, and the founder of Full Frame Coaching. He has completed over 2,500 coaching sessions and works primarily with senior leaders who are professionally successful and privately stuck.