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Are You Working Hard in Coaching? (Or Working Hard to Avoid the Hard Part?)

ByNicole Doria

Self-awareness and communication are the foundation of any good coaching relationship.

It is something I bring up from the very first conversation with a client. It is the basis of everything we need. Without it, nothing else works.

But there does come a point where self-awareness and communication can actually start blocking us from the next step. 

The part that requires more than awareness. 

The execution. The trial & error. The doing.

That is what this post is about.

Please note that this post is written from a coaching perspective and is not intended as therapeutic advice or clinical guidance. If you are navigating deeper attachment wounds or mental health concerns, I encourage you to seek support from a licensed therapist or mental health professional.

What Is Coaching, Actually?

Before we get into it, I think it is worth getting clear on what coaching actually is.

Coaching is a collaborative relationship built around helping you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. It is built on honesty, trust, consistency, and a shared commitment to growth. And like any real relationship… it requires both people to show up.

Check out Coaching with Nicole for more on my thoughts on coaching as a whole.

So what does showing up actually look like on your end?

  • Bring what is actually happening, not just what you wish was happening. Honest check-ins, even when things did not go well, are far more useful than polished ones.
  • Try the thing before you talk about why it might not work. There is a real difference between coming to your coach having attempted something and coming with a list of reasons you have not started yet.
  • Keep your check-ins focused. What went well, what was hard, what you tried, what you noticed. You do not need to include every detail of your week. Clarity serves both of you.
  • Let your coach know when something is not working for you. If a recommendation is not landing, if you need a different kind of support, if something feels off… say it. Silence is not loyalty. It is just a slower way of disengaging.
  • Do the thing between sessions. The real work lives in the days in between, in the small choices, in the follow through.
  • Stay in the conversation even when things get hard. Especially then. The instinct to go quiet during a hard week is understandable, but it is usually the moment your coach can be most useful to you.

These things sound simple. 

But in practice… they can be genuinely hard to do consistently. And a lot of what makes them hard has less to do with willpower or effort and more to do with the patterns we bring into every relationship we are in.

Trust me… I know. I have done everything right as the client in some coaching relationships and completely ghosted in others. I have been reactive, I have been resistant, and I have also been the client who did the work. Like I said… trust me I’ve been there.

Coaching Is a Relationship

Because coaching is not just a transaction where someone tells you what to do and you go do it. It is a relationship. A real one. And like every real relationship, it comes with all the relational patterns you have built over the course of your life.

That includes your attachment style.

Attachment styles are deeply rooted. They are a response to lived experience, and they show up in every relational space you occupy… your friendships, your partnerships, your family dynamics, and yes, your coaching relationship too.

I am not here to do therapeutic work on your attachment style. That is not my lane. But I do think it is worth naming what some of these patterns can look like inside a coaching relationship, because awareness is always the starting point for change.

When Working Hard Looks Like Avoiding the Work

One of the attachment patterns that shows up in coaching in a really sneaky way is anxious attachment.

I say sneaky because this one does not look like avoiding the work at first glance. 

It looks like effort. 

It looks like commitment. 

It looks like someone who is deeply invested in the process.

And in many ways… they are.

But there is a distinction that I keep coming back to, and it comes from insight I saw from two therapists I follow and respect, Dr. Jay (IG @dr.jacob.ambrose) and Kier Gaines (IG @kiergaines).

Dr. Jay talked about the difference between interpersonal accountability and intrapersonal accountability.

  • Interpersonal accountability is showing up in the relationship. Being present, communicating, being vulnerable, engaging with your coach.
  • Intrapersonal accountability is the internal shift. The behavioral change. The actual doing of the thing.

What can happen with anxious attachment is that someone becomes incredibly interpersonally accountable… they communicate everything, they share every feeling, they process every detail… while the intrapersonal accountability stays largely untouched.

The conversation becomes the work instead of the thing that supports the work.

  • I have seen this show up as very long, very detailed messages that arrive before anything in the previous message was ever executed. 
  • I have seen it in check-ins where a lot of things get covered, but by the next one… it all sounds all too similar to the last one. 
  • I have seen it as a constant loop of awareness without the behavioral shift that awareness is supposed to create.

This is not coming from a place of judgment. Not even close. Because I have been this person. I had to learn the difference between genuine processing and the loop that just kept recycling the same feelings without producing any movement. Even in therapy. Even in spaces designed for exactly that kind of processing.

So if any of this is landing for you… please know that you are not a bad client. You are a human being who learned to meet your needs through conversation and connection, and that makes complete sense. It just might be getting in the way of what you actually came to coaching for.

Sharing Is Not the Problem

Sharing is part of the work. It genuinely is.

Everything we are navigating in coaching… our relationship with food, our body, our health, our habits, our stress, our sleep… it is all tethered together. Having real conversations about what is going on beneath the surface, about the beliefs and the patterns driving behavior, that is not a detour from the coaching work. That is the coaching work.

What I am naming is something more specific. It is when the sharing begins to live almost entirely in the coaching relationship without any movement happening outside of it. It is when the conversation becomes a place to feel regulated and reassured rather than a place to build the actual capacity to do things differently.

Kier Gaines put it in a way that has stayed with me. He talked about a thirty pound dumbbell… something that might start out strengthening you, but at some point the weight that was once helping you is no longer helping you.

Let me pull that into the world we actually live in.

When the thirty pound weight is not getting you to the outcome you want… it is not creating progressive overload, it is not challenging you toward growth… you have to put it down. Not because it was always wrong. But at some point, staying with what is comfortable stops being useful and starts being a ceiling.

And putting it down is not the end of the story. Maybe you pick up the forty pound weight and it is too much right now. So you come back to thirty five. Maybe you need to build the supporting muscles through a completely different exercise before you can handle the heavier load. The path to the next level is rarely a straight line.

Some of the patterns that feel like deep work might be the weight you have been carrying for so long that you have stopped noticing how heavy it actually is.

The Sharing and The Doing: How Change Actually Happens

Real change in coaching is not a straight line. It is more of a rhythm. You share to surface something, identify what is in the way, build a strategy. Then you go do. Then you come back and share what happened… what worked, what did not, what surprised you. And then you do again. The sharing and the doing keep feeding each other. That is how the work actually moves.

The sharing is where we begin. Something gets named that you maybe sensed but had not quite put language to yet. A belief gets surfaced. A pattern gets identified. We start to work with it… the back and forth, the challenging of old stories, the conversations where you start to question whether what you have always believed is actually true. This is where a lot of sharing lives and it is genuinely necessary.

The doing is what comes next. This is where the doing begins to take up more real estate than the sharing. You start practicing the new thing. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes you adjust and try again. But you are building experience, and experience is what gives you evidence. And slowly… you accumulate proof. Proof that the old belief does not have to be true anymore. Proof that what you were afraid of is survivable. That proof is what actually replaces the belief. Not the conversation about it. The living of it.

The sharing does not disappear once the doing begins. Both can exist at the same time. But if the sharing never really gives way to the doing… if every session still sounds like the first one… that is worth paying attention to.

Because the goal was never just to understand yourself better. The goal was to actually change something.

A Question Worth Asking Yourself (And Your Coach)

If you find yourself stuck in the sharing for a long time without anything really shifting… that might be the moment to pause and get honest about what you are actually bringing to your coaching relationship.

Before you reach out, before you send the message, before you show up to a check-in or call… ask yourself…

Do I need to be heard, hugged, held, or helped?

Each of those needs asks for something different, and a coach who knows which one you are bringing can show up for you in a much more targeted way.

  • Needing to be heard means you need space to say the thing out loud and feel like someone received it.
  • Needing to be hugged means you need warmth and compassion. You are tender right now.
  • Needing to be held means you need reassurance that you are not alone in this. That someone is still here, still invested, regardless of the hard season.
  • Needing to be helped means you are ready. You have something specific and you want direction, challenge, a plan, or accountability.

Coaching lives most naturally in that last one. But all four show up at different times and that is okay. The difference is knowing which one you are in, so your needs can be met and you can move into the next thing.

When You’re Stuck in the sharing

A few questions worth sitting with when you notice yourself deep in the sharing and wondering why things are not shifting…

  • Am I seeking understanding, or am I seeking reassurance?
  • Will this message change what I do, or will it just feel better to send it?
  • Have I tried the thing I said I was going to try?

These are not about making you feel bad for where you are. They are honest prompts to help you figure out whether you are ready to move into the doing… into the practicing, the building of your own proof. Because that is where the belief actually changes. And that is where your coach can be most useful to you.

When Going Quiet Becomes Its Own Pattern

Just a side note… Anxious attachment is not the only pattern that can show up in a coaching relationship. There is another one that looks completely different from the outside… avoidant attachment.

Some people go quiet when things get hard. They disappear during the hard weeks and reappear when things feel more manageable. They read the message and do not reply. They disengage slowly and sometimes do not even realize they are doing it.

That pattern deserves its own conversation entirely. So I will leave that for another time.

But whatever pattern you might recognize in yourself, you are not alone in it. Neither one makes you uncoachable. They are just ways of protecting yourself that made sense at some point and may now be getting in the way of what you actually want.

If something in this post resonated and you want to go deeper into understanding your attachment style, I’d recommend starting with Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. It is one of the most accessible and well-researched books on adult attachment out there and it was written for exactly this kind of self-exploration.

A Final Thought

I genuinely believe that most people who come to coaching are doing their best. They are bringing all of themselves they can to a process that asks a lot of them. And the fact that you are reading something like this, asking these kinds of questions, reflecting on how you are showing up… that matters.

You are not getting in your own way on purpose. And the patterns that might be complicating your coaching relationship are not necessarily flaws. They are just patterns. And patterns can change.

That is quite literally what we are here for.

With love, Coach Nik

Further Reading

If something in this post sparked something for you and you want to go deeper, here are some resources worth exploring…

Content in this post was inspired by content shared by Dr. Jay (@dr.jacob.ambrose), psychologist and attachment specialist, and Kier Gaines (@kiergaines), licensed therapist.

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