About the Unscripted series
These are fictional coaching conversations — invented scenarios that illustrate patterns I encounter in real work. No real client is depicted. The coaching responses are mine: word for word what I would say in the room.
She came in with a title she’d spent fifteen years earning.
Chief People Officer at a mid-size tech company. Passed over for the role twice at previous companies. This time she got it. Eight months in, she wasn’t sure she’d wanted it.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she said. “I’m not someone who asks for help. I figure things out. That’s literally my job. I help other people figure things out.”
I told her I had a hunch the sentiment ran deeper than what she’d just described.
She didn’t push back.
“I’ve been telling myself I’m here because of the team,” she said. “The exec team doesn’t trust HR. They never have. They see us as compliance. Risk management. I thought if I could just get to the CPO seat I could change that.”
“But you got the seat.”
“Eight months ago. And I’m still fighting the same fight. Just with a different title.”
I asked her what she’d imagined the title would give her.
A long pause.
“That I’m not just an operator. That I’m a strategist. That I have a seat at the table where the real decisions get made.” Another pause. “That I’m taken seriously.”
“What else?”
“…That I was right to bet on this career.”
So I named it directly: she thought the title would give her validation.
She laughed — not happily.
“When you say it like that it sounds so… small.”
I stopped her there.
“You just attached the word ‘small’ to wanting to be seen. Who told you that seeking validation is small?”
She was quiet for a long time.
“In HR you’re supposed to be the one who gives it. Not the one who needs it.”
I asked her to sit with it. To think about where that belief came from originally: not as a professional, but as a person.
“My father was an engineer. Very ‘results speak for themselves’ kind of person. You didn’t talk about how you felt about your work. You just did it.”
She stopped.
“I haven’t thought about him in the context of this job. Ever, actually.”
I asked her what was happening in her body.
“My chest is tight. And I want to move past it. I can feel myself wanting to intellectualize it and move on.”
She paused.
“Which is probably the thing, isn’t it.”
I asked her to stay with the tightness. Just for a moment.
A long silence.
“It’s lonely.” She said it quietly. “That’s what it is. It’s just lonely.”
“What do you notice about lonely?”
“It’s not new. It’s been there the whole time. I just kept filling it with the next thing.”
“What does it want you to know?”
Another long silence.
“That no title is going to fix it.”
I asked her if it needed to be fixed.
She exhaled slowly.
“No. I think it just needs to be… seen.”
“Does it feel seen right now?”
Her eyes were wet.
“Yeah. A little bit. By a stranger on a discovery call.” She laughed softly. “My therapist is going to be very annoyed.”
We stayed with what she’d said. I reflected it back: she was lonely. The loneliness didn’t need to be fixed. It needed to be seen. And the way she’d been showing up in the job, she was covering it so she could be present for everyone else, then move to the next thing.
I asked her what stood out most.
She was still for a moment.
“That I’ve been treating my own inner life the way the exec team treats HR. Like it’s just compliance. Risk management. Something to handle so I can get back to the real work.”
Then: “I became the thing that dismisses me. So I could feel like one of them.”
I asked her whether she could be a leader if her insides didn’t match her outsides.
“No.” No hesitation. “I’ve watched people try. I’ve coached people through exactly this.”
She stopped.
“I’ve been coaching other people through the version of this that I’m living.”
What I noticed in this session:
The presenting problem was structural: my exec team doesn’t trust HR. The real problem was existential: I don’t trust myself enough to stop performing for the room.
She spent fifteen years climbing toward a title she believed would finally make her belong. She got it. The belonging didn’t come. Because belonging was never going to come from the outside. Some part of her had known that the whole time. She’d just been too busy to look at it.
The moment that cracked everything open wasn’t a reframe or a strategy. It was a somatic check-in. “What’s happening in your body right now?” She named tightness. She named the urge to intellectualize and move on. And then, when she stayed with it instead of escaping it, she found what was actually there: loneliness that had been present the entire climb, covered over by the next goal.
This is one of the most common patterns I see in high-functioning leaders, especially those who’ve built their careers in service of others. They become extraordinarily skilled at holding space, at reading rooms, at facilitating other people’s breakthroughs. And they apply none of that skill to themselves. The inner life gets managed, not listened to.
“I became the thing that dismisses me” is one of the most precise things I’ve ever heard a client say about themselves. It took fifteen years and one honest conversation to get there.
If you’ve spent a long time chasing something you believed would make you feel differently about yourself — and you’re starting to wonder if you were right — this session might be for you.
Read the Comments +