How to Find the Best Executive Coach for You
The number of professional executive coaches worldwide has nearly doubled in the past five years. The market is flooded with practitioners of wildly varying quality — which makes finding the right one a real problem. But quality alone isn’t the goal. The goal is the right match. That matters for you, and it matters for me. This guide is designed to help us both figure that out.
Start with You
Start with your goals — but hold them lightly. Many leaders come to coaching thinking they need to work on X, only to discover in the process that Y is the real underlying issue. Having 2–3 general goals is a useful starting point; just expect them to evolve. The assessment phase of coaching exists precisely to help you refine them.
Common focus areas include:
• Leadership transitions (new role, M&A, rapid growth, turnaround)
• Navigating board and key stakeholder relationships
• Managing the isolation and pressure unique to the CEO role
• Self-awareness and overall leadership effectiveness
• Executive presence and peak performance
• Behavior change and blind spot identification
• Communication, delegation, and scaling through others
• Leading through AI adoption and organizational change
Evaluating the Coach
When evaluating coaches, three things matter most: their credibility, your fit with them, and ultimately the shifts they help you make. Credentials and certifications are worth noting — look for a minimum of PCC certification from the ICF — but track record matters more than pedigree. The right question isn’t where they trained. It’s who they’ve coached, at what level, and what changed as a result.
What Kind of Experience Actually Transfers
One of the most common assumptions executives make is that the right coach is someone who has sat in their seat — a former Fortune 500 CEO who’s run a P&L at scale. It’s an understandable instinct. You want someone who’s been in the room.
But operator experience and coaching ability are different skills. Many former executives who move into coaching are better advisors than coaches — and if advice is what you need, hire an advisor. What great coaching requires is something distinct: the ability to help you see yourself clearly and surface the assumptions you’ve stopped questioning. That’s the distinction I’ve built my practice around.
I came up through the world of technology, startups, and a nonprofit that I founded. That background gave me something I’ve found to be more transferable than many expect: I know what it costs to lead. I know what it feels like to make consequential decisions with incomplete information, to carry the weight of an organization, to be the person in the room where the buck stops. That’s not the same as having run a $10B business — and I don’t pretend otherwise. But it means I’m not coming to this work from the outside.
What makes my approach unique is a methodology grounded in somatic intelligence — the understanding that effective leadership isn’t just a cognitive or emotional challenge, but a physical one. My book, Somatic Intelligence: Leadership Requires More than IQ and EQ, explores this in depth, but the short version is this: the body holds patterns that the mind doesn’t always have access to. A small shift at the somatic level can make a monumental difference in how you lead and disrupt old habits that are hindering your leadership. Working at that level produces changes that outlast any strategy or framework.
The Change That Changes Everything
There’s one change I’ve seen transform how a CEO leads more than any other. It has nothing to do with strategy, communication, or organizational design. It’s pace — the ability to move consciously between fast and slow, and to know which one the moment calls for.
In 15 years working with CEOs and C-suite leaders, this has been the shift that surprises people most. Not as a time management technique, but as a fundamental change in how they operate — how they spot opportunity, how they catch problems before they materialize, how they lead others with a steadiness that commands a different kind of respect. When a CEO learns to work that register consciously, something in the whole organization settles. People around them slow down enough to think. Problems surface earlier. Decisions get better.
It’s rarely what they came to coaching for. It’s almost always what they leave with.
Assessing Fit
Once you’ve identified 2–3 coaches who meet your criteria on experience, level, and focus areas, the final filter is fit — and that’s harder to assess than a resume.
Fit runs both ways. The leaders I do my best work with tend to share a few qualities: a high degree of integrity and intensity, a genuine willingness to work hard, and a persistence that doesn’t quit when things get uncomfortable. Many of them carry an outsider mindset — they’re challengers by nature, people who question what others accept. If that’s not you, this probably isn’t the right match. If it is, it’s worth asking whether you’re also ready to be seen clearly — because that’s where the work begins.
Start by asking whether the coach offers a sample session beyond the initial intro call — a good coach will welcome this. You’re not just evaluating their methodology; you’re evaluating whether you can be honest with this person. Then ask for references and actually call them. Don’t just ask if the engagement was valuable. Ask what specifically changed, what was hard, and whether they’d hire that coach again today.
One last thing worth saying about fit, because it runs counter to instinct: the right coach for you is probably not the one you feel most comfortable with. Comfort and growth rarely occupy the same space.
When evaluating your finalists, don’t just ask yourself who you clicked with. Ask the harder questions: Who can you learn the most from? Who will challenge you most? Whose perspective adds something you don’t already have?
A CEO I worked with for five years later told me I wasn’t their first choice. They had felt more at ease with another coach’s pace and style. What changed their mind was being pushed by their Chief People Officer to answer exactly those three questions. The answers pointed to me — not because I was like them, but because in many ways I was different.
What you’re ultimately looking for is someone you trust, someone you respect, and someone whose work you can see evidence of. If you leave the first conversation feeling like you were handled rather than heard, keep looking. But if you leave feeling seen and slightly stretched — that’s worth paying attention to. That feeling is the beginning of the work.
If this resonates, the next step is simple: request a sample session. If it’s the right match, we’ll both know.