When The Truth Hurts.

Coaching, The Stress Response and Building Progressive Organisations.

Yesterday I was in my Level 7 senior leadership training and we were looking at coaching culture in progressive organisations. Gallup’s 2025 data shows that the way managers coach their teams accounts for 70% of the difference in how engaged employees feel at work.

In other words, coaching isn't just a nice-to-have. It can be a powerful tool for improving engagement. And engagement matters. Highly engaged teams are more productive, more creative, and more resilient. They have lower absenteeism, higher wellbeing, better retention, and stronger outcomes across the board.

If we want progressive organisations to thrive — especially those working in high-pressure or emotionally demanding sectors like charities, the arts, or community organising — then the quality of day-to-day coaching conversations isn’t peripheral. It’s central.

It seems right then that we are implementing coaching practices on this course, and from a care-rooted leadership approach, a couple of experiences yesterday stood out that made me question the way we use coaching and how we can ensure we are relieving stress rather than increasing it. Especially when as leaders we are expected to hold so much and especially in the charity sector or when working with marginalised communities.

I was delighted to be coached myself for part of the session. We only had a short time, but using the Michael Bungay Stanier The Coaching Habit approach, we started with the familiar: “What’s on your mind?”

My coach was a thoughtful and attuned person, who cares deeply, and so I very quickly started to feel safe enough to open up. She then asked, “And what is the impact that this has on you?”

I paused. It felt like such a pertinent question and made me realise all that I had been carrying. I felt compassion for myself and I felt a wave of relief fill my body. A release! *does a little dance*.

When we were discussing how the session had gone, my coach shared that she had had a visceral experience in receiving my response to her ‘impact’ question. She felt an emotion well up inside her. She said she almost cried. In somatic practice you’d think of that as a nervous system release. But for her it was uncomfortable. She felt the need to apologise for asking that particular question.

But as the coachee I felt that this was exactly the right question for her to be asking. It landed. It felt true. If we are trying to create progressive organisations built on trust, transparency and the safety to bring your whole self to work, then surely we are trying to uncover truth in coaching. No matter the style. Whether that be traditional coaching or somatic coaching.

But, when the truth feels uncomfortable, hurts even, what helps us as leaders ease the tension? How much of it do we carry after each session? How much do these activations continue to be held in the body as stress?

The fact is, as a workforce, we are tackling anxiety and burnout on a global scale. The WHO identified stress as the health epidemic of the 21st century. HSE data in 2023 states that stress, depression and anxiety accounted for 49% of all work-related ill health.

Is it any wonder that we are feeling overwhelmed?

If we had a physical injury in that moment, we wouldn’t ignore it. And yet an emotional pain, discomfort or activation, the subtle indications that our body is saying ‘no’ or is resisting, we brush this under the carpet.

Another person I spoke to yesterday was worried about having deeper conversations with a team member. We focus on the symptom — their employee not taking breaks. But that’s just the symptom. That doesn’t get to the underlying cause. This was an empathic and switched-on leader who already knew there were undertones of control, issues of self-esteem, of a fundamental lack of trust that this person was carrying.

How do you build trust in a team where a member of the team doesn’t trust themselves, let alone others? How do we equip ourselves to work effectively with these edges, without taking on the emotional load of our teams?

I see this in burnout everywhere. Overwork can be a distraction from the real demons the person is battling. Why do we put the out of office on yet never come back refreshed? The why under the why under the why.

What are the root causes of these tensions? Are we courageous enough to uncover them? And do we have the tools to look after ourselves when we do? In our coaching culture, do our teams have the skills and motivation to look after themselves when they start to uncover their truths?

What we need in these cases is humanity. Unshaming witnesses. Space to recognise the power we hold and the care we must take if we want to encourage flat organisational structures, self-managing teams. How do you manage within a self-managing team if you can’t manage yourself?

We often find ourselves as progressive leaders in that coaching space, with a lump in our throat, a fire in our bellies, a tenseness in the shoulder blades, because we know there is something more going on for our team members. And we bring these sensations into our coaching conversations and our feedback spaces. We are only human. It’s inevitable. It sometimes feels impossible to know where to draw the line and how to develop our own boundaries.

This is a people-pleasing pandemic. But we still want to do our authentic work and bring people with us.

So what tools could we use? Well, here are some strategies I use in my somatic coaching practice that work with the whole person, not just the surface level. When seeking truth, we must have our own truth settled and together.

Firstly, it might sound basic, but give yourself enough time. Make sure you are fed. Watered. Comfortable. Start to get to know yourself. Notice day to day when particular things spark your stress response. For me, team meetings used to do it. I’d realise halfway through that my jaw was tense, my shoulders were hunched, my hands were clenched together. Conflict or difficult conversations — I would people-please my way out of every single one. I’d never lay down my boundaries. I would find myself helping out others rather than getting on with my own work. The idea of leaving people without my support was terrifying to me.

My heart rate would go up. I’d get a dry mouth. I’d overheat.

I think about it like a barometer or a temperature gauge. At the very top, you’re on fire. In the middle, you’re just right. And at the bottom, you’re frozen. In your fire or your frozen state, nothing productive can come out of that. They’re both spaces where our cognitive functions close down and we’re not able to think clearly. So we can’t think clearly as coaches. And we can’t think clearly as leaders if we are activated into our stress response — especially when we’re so activated in our stress response all the time.

Stress response is a natural human experience. It’s below our perception. Our body feels it first. And if we don’t connect in with our bodies, if we suppress what we feel, we are missing the point.

It is important to know what activates you. Which stress responses you lean on the most. Is it fight? Is it flight? Is it freeze? Is it fawn? (That’s the people-pleaser.)

It’s also important to know how we can resource ourselves. The things that connect us in. The things that give us pleasure. The things that give us joy. The things that make us feel grounded. The things that make us feel held. Safe. Supported.

That might be an image. It might be a bunch of flowers. It might be a candle. It might be a space. A place. A comfortable chair. A cushion. A cup of tea. A scent.

Think about the sensory experience when you’re gathering the things that resource you. You can also reach out to your friends, family, supportive colleagues - a network of compassionate humans can be an incredible resource for this work.

We can’t ignore the truth. And when the truth hurts, how we resource ourselves as leaders really matters.

How do we ensure we’re feeling safe, connected, alert?

When we are activated, how do we notice that? And how do we bring ourselves back into that window of tolerance — that window of capacity?

The evidence is pretty clear about stress, as you can see from the statistics. And stress is a whole body response based in the nervous system. So, we’re missing the trick if we only work with the brain, and not with the brain and the body, through our coaching practice.

If we want to run progressive organisations, we have to consider the whole person, rather than just the thoughts and behaviours.

Otherwise, the inevitable stress activations and ruptures that occur in our work will have a lasting impact.

The body keeps the score.