I'm too busy!

I’m too busy! I’m not in the right frame of mind! My own clients and my colleagues are ever more demanding of me!

These are some of the things I hear when my coachees  decide not to continue with executive coaching. There are a myriad of individual reasons why this might be the case – there aren’t many people who enjoy feeling uncomfortable when confronting new ways of thinking. But there’s also an essential organisational reason. Does your business embody a culture of coaching? Do you measure, value and reward your employees for having coaching (or any other professional development process) in the same way as you value and reward them for their productivity and profitability?

So why bother with executive coaching when every minute is accounted for? It provides a structured, high-impact way to enhance leadership skills and efficiency of decision-making. A skilled coach helps cut through the noise, offering insightful questions and facilitating the development of actionable strategies that can be immediately implemented. In the legal world where I spent most of my corporate career, the most effective Partners didn’t work ever harder and for longer hours – they worked smarter by utilising external perspectives to refine their thinking and performance.

Executive coaching allows busy professionals the gift of protected time to think with a clear head. It’s so easy for leaders to get caught up in managing urgent but non-essential tasks given the competing demands on their time.  Are you spending your energy on what truly drives results, or just reacting to what’s most pressing in the moment? Another valuable component of a coaching conversation is to explore and promote sustainable high performance, ensuring that you maximise your impact without sacrificing your wellbeing.

And the most neglected benefit of coaching for time-poor professionals is an opportunity for self-reflection. You are expected to make critical decisions, manage teams, and drive profitability, yet when do you truly step back to assess your own growth and blind spots? How often do you challenge your own assumptions and push beyond your comfort zone? Coaching facilitates these deep, transformative conversations, unlocking new levels of leadership effectiveness that simply wouldn’t be possible without the gift of protected time.