To Reach Mastery, I Had to Stop Trying So Hard
Karin Wellbrock is a Tokyo-based executive coach holding the ICF's Master Certified Coach credential and one of Tokyo's Top 15 Coaches two years running. She writes about the crossings where a leader's job stops getting bigger and starts getting different, how DEI plays out across Asia, and what real growth actually requires.
Every level of mastery has its own version of a checklist. Early on, you get better by doing more: more frameworks, more techniques, more ways to respond skilfully in the moment. That approach works, right up until it doesn't. At the next level, stepping up doesn't ask for another layer of skill stacked on top. It asks you to let the skill disappear.
I'd spent a decade getting very good at being seen doing the work well. Stepping up asked me to disappear instead.
In the room that mattered most, I stopped performing the skills I'd built a career on. I let the client's silence sit there instead of filling it with a technique. I asked whatever I was actually curious about instead of reaching for the “right” question. I accepted the client completely, exactly as they showed up, instead of angling them toward where a framework said they should go.
It worked better than any explicit technique ever had. That's the reset nobody warns you about on the way to mastery: more visible skill doesn't get you there. Less does, because what's underneath it has finally become who you are, not something you do.
I earned my Master Certified Coach credential this year, a level held by roughly three percent of coaches worldwide. I expected it to feel like arrival, the moment a decade of technique finally paid off. Instead, it felt like starting over. Here's what that reset taught me, in case you're due for one of your own.
1. Unlearn before you can learn
Every framework I owned, the ones that had built my entire practice, turned into noise the moment I tried to operate at this level. Not wrong. Just in the way. I had to actively set them down, one by one, and trust that what was left, presence, attention, and the willingness not to have an answer ready, was enough on its own. It wasn't a small adjustment. It was closer to demolition. The instincts that made me good were the first things I had to unlearn to get better.
2. Choose to be a beginner again
Years earlier, I'd taken a course with Marcia Reynolds, a former global president of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), where she talked about the difference between being proficient and being profound: proficient is how well you execute; profound is the presence you bring, unguarded, into the room. I remember the idea landing intellectually and going nowhere useful. It wasn't until I was inside my own process of stepping up, sitting in a session with nothing but the client and the unknown between us, that I understood what she really meant. Profound isn't a more advanced skill. It's the choice to stop performing competence and let yourself not know, on purpose, in front of someone who's paying you to know.
3. Find the people who are lost with you
None of this happened alone. It happened inside a group of coaches chasing the same credential, carrying the same uncertainty and the same fear that we'd built a decade of expertise on something we now had to take apart. We practised on each other. We debriefed honestly, no performance, no polish. Some days, what one of us needed most was a virtual hug, and someone in the group gave it.
Working toward the same near-impossible goal, with the same specific kind of lost, built friendships I never expected and wouldn't trade. That group gave me something most environments never do: permission to become a different version of myself without my existing network, my existing stories, and my existing relationships holding the door shut. Most workplaces don't offer that kind of room. Find or build one anyway.
Where this shows up outside a coaching room
You don't need a credential for any of this to apply to you. Every field has its own version of this shift, the point where doing more stops being the answer and doing less, more honestly, takes over.
It might show up the moment you're promoted into a role where your technical mastery stops being the point and the job suddenly needs your judgment and your presence instead of your answers. It might show up as a plateau you can't quite explain: you're doing everything the way that has always worked, and the results have quietly stopped moving anyway. It might show up when a client, a board, or a market that used to respond to your playbook stops responding to it, and no one can tell you exactly why.
In each case, the instinct is to add: another framework, another certification, another layer of proficiency stacked on top of what already works. The harder, more useful move is usually the opposite. Set something down. Admit, out loud, that you don't fully know. Let the people around you watch you rebuild.
So, where in your own work has the playbook started to get in the way? That's usually where your next reset is already waiting.
Read more from Karin Wellbrock
Karin Wellbrock, Leadership Consultant & Coach
Karin Wellbrock is a Partner and Executive Coach at Kay Group K.K. in Tokyo, where she works one-on-one with CEOs and senior leaders on the parts of leadership that are hardest to see from the outside: the assumptions they've stopped questioning, the instincts they've stopped testing, and the version of themselves the work ahead now requires. She holds the ICF's Master Certified Coach credential and has been named one of Tokyo's Top 15 Coaches two years running. Her path has taken her through nearly two decades at Deloitte Consulting across Europe, North America, and East and Southeast Asia, before she settled in Tokyo to build Kay Group. She's the creator of The Two Crossings, a framework built on a simple idea, that at each real career transition the job doesn't get bigger, it gets different, and she researches and writes on exactly that shift alongside how DEI plays out across Asia. Outside her coaching practice, she mentors founders across the region through Founder Institute and Techstars.
