Are You Actually Ready for Coaching?
- Jul 5
- 5 min read
Simon Adair has spent his career in environments where getting it wrong wasn't an option, from covert intelligence operations to leading crisis response for one of the world's best-known broadcasters. As the founder of Crisis Pathway Consultancy, he helps leaders bridge the gap between perceived and actual preparedness.
You've probably considered coaching at some point. Perhaps someone suggested it, or perhaps you've been through a difficult period and felt that something needs to shift. Or perhaps you're performing well and want to perform even better. But before you commit the time, energy, and vulnerability that genuine coaching requires, there is a question worth asking honestly. Are you actually ready for it?
I've guided individuals at all levels through a range of challenging scenarios and periods of high professional stress. A clear pattern has emerged. Coaching produces transformative outcomes for some, while for others, it yields only marginal results. Interestingly, the key difference is seldom due to the quality of the coaching itself.
It comes down to you. Coaching differs from training, mentoring, or consulting. It relies entirely on your willingness to engage in honest self-reflection, take genuine ownership, commit to the process, and be receptive to change. Without this, sessions risk becoming costly discussions that produce no results.
I developed the Crisis Pathway READY Framework to answer a simple question. How likely is coaching to create meaningful value for this person right now? I use it in discovery sessions before every engagement. Here are the five questions I ask, along with the five you should ask yourself.
R: Responsibility
"Are you willing to own your situation?"
This is the foundation. Under pressure, the instinct to attribute difficulty to external factors is powerful and entirely understandable. A difficult board, an impossible brief, an organisation that doesn't listen. Sometimes those things are true, but coaching cannot gain traction if every challenge you face is seen as lying outside your sphere of influence. If the problem is always external, the solution will always feel out of reach.
Responsibility doesn't mean accepting blame for everything. It means being willing to ask, "What role am I playing in this?" "What can I actually control?" "What choices do I have from here?"
The leaders I've seen develop fastest through coaching are those who arrive already asking those questions, even when the answers are uncomfortable. Responsibility doesn't provide the solution, but it creates the conditions in which a solution becomes possible.
E: Engagement
"Are you choosing this or complying with it?"
I've sat across from leaders who were physically present in every session, yet psychologically absent from all of them. They had been sent to coaching and had not chosen it.
Genuine engagement is characterised by curiosity, energy, and a genuine desire to explore new perspectives, including those that challenge your existing view of yourself. It means leaning into the process, not merely tolerating it.
This distinction matters more than most people acknowledge. The capacity to learn under pressure must be built before the pressure arrives. Leaders who resist genuine engagement before a difficult moment rarely find it available when that moment arises.
If you're considering coaching because someone else thinks you should, it's worth sitting with that before you begin.
A: Awareness
"Do you have an honest picture of what's actually holding you back?"
High performers are often the least aware of their blind spots, not through arrogance but through pace. When you've spent years operating at speed, there's rarely time to examine the patterns beneath the performance.
I've worked with leaders who were responsible, engaged, and eager to develop, yet still made limited progress. Not because they lacked commitment, but because they were working on the wrong thing. They had a story about themselves that felt true but wasn't.
Your blind spots are, by definition, invisible to you. That's precisely where the most important coaching work tends to take place, and why you can't always get there alone.
D: Development Mindset
"Do you believe you can change?"
This sounds obvious. It isn't. I've worked with highly intelligent, deeply experienced leaders who had quietly concluded, consciously or not, that their behaviours, responses, and patterns were essentially fixed. They weren't overtly resistant to coaching. At the level that matters, they didn't believe that anything could be meaningfully different.
Coaching rests entirely on the assumption that change is possible. If you don't share that assumption, the engagement will stall, no matter how skilled the coach or how well structured the sessions are.
Leaders with a genuine development mindset welcome challenges, experiment with new behaviours, and treat setbacks as data rather than verdicts. If that description feels foreign rather than familiar, that's useful information, not a reason to avoid coaching, but a reason to understand what's underneath it first.
Y: Yield to reflection
"Can you slow down enough to examine yourself honestly?"
This is the dimension I find most revealing, and the one most often underestimated by high-performing leaders. In fast-moving, high-pressure environments, the instinct is to act. Reflection can feel like a luxury, or worse, a weakness. Yet coaching adds value not through answers but through insight, and insight requires a willingness to slow down, examine your assumptions, notice your patterns, and sit with uncomfortable questions long enough to learn from them.
I've worked with leaders who were exceptional in operations, yet deeply resistant to this kind of internal examination. They wanted solutions, not exploration. For those individuals, coaching rarely delivered what it could have, not because they weren't capable, but because they couldn't yet yield to the process.
The leaders who gain most from coaching are those who understand that slowing down internally is often how you speed up effectively.
So, are you ready?
Honestly assess each aspect. Focus on your current state, not your desired position. If most of these resonate, coaching is likely to create real value for you, and the sooner you begin, the greater the compounding effect.
If some feel uncomfortable or distant, that's not a reason to walk away. It's information. It shows what needs to shift before coaching can do what it's capable of. Sometimes a different intervention, such as mentoring, clearer expectations, or time and space to recover, is needed first. The most effective development decisions are those that choose the right intervention at the right moment.
What I know from working with leaders at the sharp end is this. The best performers under pressure are those who did the developmental work in advance. They understood their defaults, examined their patterns, and built the self-awareness that holds when everything around them is uncertain.
That work begins with readiness. If you'd like to explore whether coaching is right for you right now, I'd welcome the conversation.
Read more from Simon Adair
Simon Adair, Founder of Crisis Pathway Consultancy
Simon Adair is a crisis leadership specialist, executive coach, and founder of Crisis Pathway Consultancy. His career spans the Royal Marines, British Intelligence, BT, the NBA, and the BBC, where he led the corporate crisis response. He holds an Executive MBA and is a Chartered Manager Fellow. Through Crisis Pathway, he partners with organisations to strengthen crisis preparedness, leadership resilience, and organisational readiness.
