The Coaching Paradox: Too Busy for Coaching? That might be when you need it most
Nearly three decades ago, I was taking a walk with my uncle. At the time, he was a seasoned entrepreneur, and I was more like a fledgling entrepreneur. We were talking about the typical challenges of the entrepreneurial journey – I’m sure I was complaining about how incredibly busy I felt all the time, running from meeting to meeting, answering a daily avalanche of emails – all the flotsam and jetsam of early entrepreneurial days.
He offered advice that I have since heard in a multitude of ways from a multitude of sources: don’t let the urgent take over the important. Yes, yes, I thought, that is precisely the problem. The onslaught of daily tasks had been consuming my time and my mental bandwidth, making it impossible to focus on the more significant, more important strategic issues for both my work and my life.
28 years later, this insight has crystalized into what I have deemed the Coaching Paradox: the best time to commit to coaching is often when you feel too busy for coaching.
Why? Because when you’re deep in execution mode—checking off tasks, responding to that avalanche of emails, jumping from one meeting to the next—it’s easy to convince yourself that you’ll have time for strategic thinking later. But later never comes. Instead, you stay stuck in the whirlwind of doing, never stepping back to assess whether you’re focusing on the right things or moving in the right direction. Making busy the perfect time for coaching.
Coaching forces you to carve out time for high-level thinking and intentional decision-making. It pulls you out of the weeds and helps you see the bigger picture—not just in your business, but in your life. It gives you structured time to ask the questions that often get neglected in the daily grind:
Where am I going?
Am I focusing on the right priorities?
What’s my next strategic move?
How do I align my work with my long-term vision and values?
Without dedicated time for this kind of work, it’s easy to stay in a cycle of busyness and mistake movement for progress. If you’re telling yourself you’re too busy for coaching, it might be worth asking yourself: What’s the cost of continuing to operate this way? What opportunities might you be missing by staying in reactive mode? And what could be possible if you made space for strategic growth?
The paradox of coaching is that the more overwhelmed you feel, the more valuable it becomes.