A client of mine asked me yesterday to renew our coaching contract with a specific intention regarding his coaching goal: he wanted to focus specifically on the challenges that were coming up for him, thick and fast, during a time of significant organizational change.

He had achieved the goals his CEO had set for him during the previous coaching engagement, and he felt the most powerful and useful part of the coaching had been when those overarching goals had connected with a specific challenge that was arising for him in the course of fulfilling his responsibilities. One month it was a big decision he had to make. Another, it was how to respond to a mistake that created uncertainty amongst his direct and indirect reports. Another, it was intentionally preparing his message ahead of a difficult conversation he knew he needed to face.

For the coming months, he wanted to continue our coaching with him having a choice each session about what our topic was and what we would address in each session. He wondered if it was okay to coach without overarching goals agreed ahead with his CEO. It is always okay. I want my clients to bring what is getting in their way to the session. It would be pointless to ignore something that is causing disruption to their leadership just because it’s not in their coaching engagement goal.

But I understood his concern. We normally co-design the goal at the beginning with the CEO or sponsoring leader, and he wanted to ensure that his CEO had a clear understanding that we would not be setting it up that way this time – and know that she was okay with it.

I explained that as long as the sponsor of the coaching was okay with it, we could absolutely do this, and it’s what I call, “Coaching from the inside out,” because instead of identifying a goal and going in to his week to week challenges looking for areas where that need shows up, we would be looking at the needs: grappling with real challenges, making decisions, and then looking at his leadership through a wider lens to see where these everyday problems connect with emotional intelligence, communication, team motivation, delegation, etcetera.

In other words, the everyday struggles would lead us to insights about what areas of his leadership are the most challenging for him, and where his energy is being used least efficiently. With each challenge, we would identify principles that would apply to similar challenges, so that with each challenge, his muscles for handling them would be built up, and the stress they placed on him would be reduced.

Coaching from the outside in, where the sponsor or the coachee identifies a leadership goal and we look for examples to work on that relate to it, is equally valid and useful, but coaching from the inside out can be a powerful and effective tool.