Executive coaching is a structured working relationship in which a trained coach helps a leader close the gap between how they currently operate and how they want to operate. It is forward-looking, it is driven by your agenda rather than the coach’s curriculum, and it works on behavior: the decisions you make, the conversations you avoid, the habits that were fine at one level and are now costing you at the next.
That is the definition. The more useful question is what it actually does, what it costs, and how to tell whether it is the right instrument for what you are dealing with. I am going to answer that last one honestly, which is easier for me than for most people writing about this, because I am licensed to do both coaching and therapy and have no particular incentive to sell you the wrong one.
What actually happens in executive coaching
Most engagements follow a recognizable shape.
You start with a situation, not a goal. Good coaching does not begin with a template. It begins with what is actually happening: the co-founder relationship that has gone quiet, the team you inherited, the promotion you are not sure you want. Whatever the intake form says, the first few sessions are usually spent finding out what the real problem is, which is frequently not the one you booked about.
The work is specific and current. Not leadership theory. The conversation you are having on Thursday. What you will actually say, what you are afraid will happen, whether that fear is calibrated. Coaching earns its keep in the gap between knowing what good leadership looks like and doing it at 4pm under pressure.
Something is expected of you between sessions. Coaching is not a place you go to be listened to. If nothing is different in the week after the session, the engagement is not working, and a good coach will say so before you notice.
It ends. A coaching relationship should have a shape and a finish. If yours has quietly become a standing appointment with no destination, that is worth naming out loud.
What executive coaching costs
Wide range, and the spread is mostly about market position rather than quality.
Independent coaches typically charge somewhere between $150 and $500 for a session. Coaching arranged through a large consultancy for a senior executive is a different market entirely, running to thousands per session; Google’s own summary of the field currently puts the top end past $1,200 an hour.
Two things worth knowing before you read a price as a quality signal. First, most of the expensive end is priced for a corporate buyer with a development budget, not for a person paying out of their own pocket. Second, an unregulated profession means price carries even less information than usual, because there is no floor of required training underneath it.
For the record, coaching here is $185 for a 50-minute session, the same rate as counseling. That is on the fees page rather than behind a phone call.
The thing most articles about this leave out
Coaching is not a licensed profession. In the United States, anyone can call themselves an executive coach tomorrow. No training, no supervised hours, no board, no complaints process.
That is not an argument against coaching. Plenty of excellent coaches hold no clinical license and do genuinely valuable work. But it has one consequence that matters enormously and almost never gets said:
Most coaches have not been trained to recognize when what they are looking at is clinical. Burnout, depression and anxiety overlap heavily on the surface. All three produce poor sleep, irritability, flatness, dread on a Sunday evening. Telling them apart takes clinical training, and a coach without it will not do it wrong so much as not attempt it, because it is genuinely outside their scope. What that looks like from the client’s side is six months of sensible boundary work on a problem that was never about boundaries.
Coaching or therapy: how to tell
The cleanest test I know is one question: is the problem the skill, or is the skill-building not sticking?
If you know what you want to change, and the obstacle is habit, avoidance or a lack of structure, that is a coaching problem, and coaching is often faster than therapy at solving it.
If you have understood the pattern for years, tried the strategy, built the system, and it keeps collapsing from the inside, the pattern is being maintained by something the strategies are not touching. That is therapy territory. Other signals pointing the same way: the same dynamic showing up at work, at home and with friends; a transition that has destabilized you more than it should; a persistent gap between your external success and your internal experience.
I wrote a longer comparison of the two, including the licensure and confidentiality differences: therapy vs. executive coaching.
One practical difference that catches people out: coaching does not carry the legally protected confidentiality therapy does. A coach holds your information in confidence as a matter of ethics. A licensed counselor holds it under a legal standard with a state board enforcing it. If your employer is paying for the coaching, agree in advance what gets reported back.
What to ask a coach before you hire one
Five questions that sort the field quickly.
- What is your training, and is it a license or a certification? Both answers are acceptable. A vague answer is not.
- What happens if this turns out to need therapy? You want a coach who has thought about it and has an answer. “I would refer you out” is the right one.
- What does an engagement look like, and when does it end?
- Have you worked with someone in my situation? Not my industry, my situation. A coach who has never worked with founders will spend your money learning what a founder’s week is like.
- What happens between sessions?
Where I fit, and where I do not
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor in Colorado, and before that I was an engineer at Google and a nuclear engine operator on a US Navy submarine. I offer executive coaching anywhere in the United States, leadership coaching for people who got promoted into managing, and stress management coaching for the physiological end of it.
Counseling is different. I am licensed in Colorado only, so counseling is available to clients located in Colorado. Coaching has no such limit.
The reason I keep drawing that line rather than blurring it is that the blur is where people lose months. If we start coaching and it becomes clear you are dealing with something clinical, you will hear it from me. In Colorado we can move straight into counseling. Outside Colorado I will help you find someone licensed where you live.
If you are trying to work out which one you need, that is a good use of a free consultation. It takes about 30 minutes and there is no pressure in either direction. Schedule one here.