Coaching After Loss: When Is It Okay to See Clients Again?

Grief eventually visits every life, and for coaches it brings difficult questions. When is it appropriate to return to clients? How much should be disclosed? What happens if personal loss is still very present in the room? And how can a coach stay deeply human without making the session about themselves?

In this conversation, Yannick and Nicki explore those questions through the lens of a recent personal loss. What emerges is a thoughtful reflection on discernment, self-awareness, boundaries, presence, and the reality that Coaching is often a meeting between two human beings before it is anything else.

For coaches navigating bereavement, or supporting clients through endings of all kinds, there is a great deal here that is practical, ethical, and deeply reassuring.

Table of Contents

• Why grief raises unique questions in Coaching
• There is no universal timeline for returning to Coaching
• Different kinds of Coaching ask different things of us
• When self-disclosure helps, and when it does not
• What grief can open up in the Coaching room
• Phenomenology, not-knowing, and lived experience
• “Share your scars, not your wounds” and the grey area in between
• How suffering can deepen the quality of Coaching presence
• Practical questions for coaches returning after loss
• Closing reflections
• Attribution
• A Note from the “Author”

Before We Dive In – A Word of Caution

Before you read on, please note that this article is an AI-generated summary of the above podcast episode. While prompted carefully, it’s possible that some views may be misrepresented and/or information incorrect. If you find any errors please report them to us by emailing report (a) existentialcoaching.net . If you find something that seems odd, untrue, or difficult to believe, my encouragement is for you to go to the source and listen to the episode to get the full context. If it turns out to be false or misrepresented, kindly let us know! Due to the volume of information and limited team resources, we can’t check all AI-generated articles for accuracy, but decided that these are good enough, and hence valuable resources.

Why grief raises unique questions in Coaching

Yannick opens from a very personal place: his father had recently died. Nicki could relate immediately, having lost both of her parents suddenly in recent years. That shared context matters, because this is not an abstract discussion about grief in Coaching. It is a live inquiry from two people who know what it means when loss rearranges your inner world.

The core tension is simple to describe and difficult to navigate: Coaching asks for presence. Not all Coaching asks for the same kind of presence, but relational, psychologically attuned Coaching requires a coach who can stay connected, grounded, and genuinely available to the client.

Grief can complicate that. It can bring heaviness, unpredictability, moments of sudden activation, fatigue, and a shifting sense of emotional capacity. So the question is not merely, “Am I back at work?” It is more nuanced:

• Am I available enough for this kind of Coaching?
• Can I stay with the client without needing them to take care of me?
• Do I need to disclose what has happened?
• Would disclosure support the work, or pull focus away from it?
• What is ethical here, both for me and for my clients?

These are good questions. In fact, the willingness to ask them is already part of responsible Coaching practice.

There is no universal timeline for returning to Coaching

One of the most valuable themes in the conversation is that grief does not obey a neat timetable. The old stage-based view can be too simplistic. People do not move through grief in a clean, linear sequence. They circle, regress, numb out, feel intensely, function well one day and not at all the next.

That is why there can be no universal answer to the question of when to resume Coaching.

Nicki’s path illustrates this clearly. Her grief was not only painful, but logistically and existentially overwhelming. With sudden deaths, travel difficulties, family complications, and the sheer impact of loss, she did not feel that returning to relational life Coaching was accessible or responsible. She kept some structure and connection through surf coaching, which felt lighter and more physically grounded, but chose not to resume deeper Coaching work for some time.

That is not avoidance. It is discernment.

Yannick’s path was different. After some time away and support from his own therapeutic and supervisory network, he returned gradually. He saw a few trusted clients first, and paid close attention to what the work felt like in practice rather than relying only on theory.

The important point for Coaching practitioners is this: capacity is personal. Two coaches may experience similar losses and make entirely different decisions. Both decisions can be wise.

Different kinds of Coaching ask different things of us

A particularly useful distinction in the conversation is between different forms of Coaching.

Some Coaching is more skills-based or performance-oriented. It may focus on practical development, habits, structure, time management, or learning a specific competency. That kind of Coaching can still be valuable and human, but it does not always require the same level of emotional attunement and relational depth.

Other Coaching is much more explicitly relational. It involves holding space, tuning into emotional dynamics, sensing what is in the room, and working with the lived experience of the client in real time. In that kind of Coaching, the coach’s own state matters more obviously because the interaction is more porous. Sensitive clients will often pick up on what is present, whether it is named or not.

That distinction helped Yannick think about his own return. He was less worried about whether he could “do Coaching” in a technical sense and more concerned about whether he could responsibly enter a psychological relationship in which his own grief would inevitably be part of the field.

For coaches, this is a very practical lens. Instead of asking one giant question, break it down:

• What kind of Coaching do I actually offer?
• How emotionally and relationally demanding is it?
• Which formats feel safe enough right now?
• Do I need to return gradually through lower-intensity work first?

That level of nuance can make a difficult decision much more workable.

When self-disclosure helps, and when it does not

Few topics in Coaching generate as much uncertainty as self-disclosure. Grief makes the question even sharper.

Yannick’s experience shows that disclosure is not all-or-nothing. Sometimes it is clearly appropriate. For example, when sessions had been moved because his father had gone into hospital and then died, it would have felt strange not to acknowledge what had happened. In a long-running group with an established check-in ritual, not naming the grief would also have meant withholding something significant that was already affecting the space.

In other moments, disclosure was unnecessary. In one one-to-one session, a client arrived with something heavy already present between them. There, the right move was simply to follow the client’s reality rather than introduce his own.

That is the discernment. Disclosure is not a rule. It is a judgment call in service of the work.

Done well, self-disclosure in Coaching is brief, honest, and bounded. It helps the client make sense of what they may be feeling or noticing, but it does not ask them to caretake the coach.

In practice, this can sound like:

• Acknowledging that something significant has happened
• Naming that some heaviness may be present
• Reassuring the client that the coach is taking responsibility for their own process
• Keeping the focus on the client’s needs and agenda

This is one of the strengths of more existentially informed Coaching. There is less interest in hiding behind a professional mask and more willingness to meet as person to person, while still maintaining a clear commitment to the client.

What grief can open up in the Coaching room?

One of the more moving insights in the conversation is that naming grief sometimes opens doors that otherwise remain closed.

Yannick noticed that once loss, finitude, endings, and temporality were acknowledged, several clients naturally moved toward their own experiences of grief. Some spoke about losing a parent. Others touched on looming endings in their own lives. Some found themselves in conversations they probably would not have entered that day had the room not already included this human reality.

Importantly, this did not feel like manipulation or priming. It felt more like reality had been allowed into the room, and clients responded to that permission.

This matters because death and grief are still strangely taboo in many cultures, especially in the West. People often think about these topics, but rarely get invited to speak about them in a setting that feels thoughtful and safe. Coaching can become one of those places, if the coach has the maturity and steadiness to hold it.

Nicki references Irvin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun, a fitting touchstone for this kind of existential inquiry. The larger point is not academic. It is relational. When death is no longer excluded from conversation, life often becomes more vivid. Love becomes clearer too. As Yannick reflects through a quote he encountered, “grief can be understood as love with nowhere to go”.

Phenomenology, not-knowing, and lived experience

The conversation then moves into one of the most interesting philosophical tensions in Coaching.

From an existential and phenomenological perspective, a coach works from a position of not-knowing. That means bracketing assumptions and becoming curious about the client’s actual lived experience rather than assuming understanding based on theory, similarity, or biography.

This has major implications for Coaching. It means a coach does not need to have personally experienced every issue a client brings. A coach can work very effectively with leadership challenges without having been a senior corporate leader, just as they can work with grief without having suffered the exact same kind of loss.

And yet, Yannick shares a moment of challenge here. Irvin Yalom had said that since losing his wife, he worked much better with people who had also experienced profound loss. That sits awkwardly, at least at first glance, with strict phenomenological theory.

The answer seems to be that both things can be true.

On the one hand, lived experience does not equal full understanding. No coach can truthfully say, “I know exactly what this is like for you,” because each person’s grief is their own.

On the other hand, lived experience can create resonance, credibility, and a kind of presence that clients feel immediately. It may not produce knowledge in the strict sense, but it can create trust and depth.

That suggests a useful principle for Coaching:

• Do not confuse resonance with understanding.
• Do not dismiss resonance either.

A coach who has suffered deeply may not know what the client is going through, but they may be less frightened by what enters the room. That alone can change the quality of the work.

“Share your scars, not your wounds” and the grey area in between

Brené Brown’s advice to share scars rather than wounds appears in the conversation, and it is a useful pointer, though not a perfect rule for Coaching.

The idea is intuitive. If a coach is disclosing from a place of integration, reflection, and perspective, that disclosure can be strong, wise, and useful. If they are speaking from an open, overwhelming wound, the risk is that the client becomes the container.

But grief complicates the neatness of that distinction. Yannick notes that his loss was not yet a scar. It was still fresh. At the same time, it was not a gushing wound either. He could talk about it. He could stay present. His voice might break slightly, but that did not mean he was no longer able to coach.

That middle ground is important, because many coaches will recognise it.

The better question may not be, “Is this fully processed?” but rather:

• Can I speak about this without losing the session?
• Can I stay oriented to the client?
• Am I spending too much energy trying to hold myself together?
• Would disclosure create clarity, or confusion?

If the coach has to devote substantial attention to managing their own activation, it is probably too soon for that kind of Coaching. If grief is present but held well enough that the client still receives a focused, grounded experience, then a return may be entirely appropriate.

How can suffering deepen the quality of Coaching presence?

Late in the conversation, Yannick brings in a thought shared by colleague Matteo Trevisan after his own near-death experience. The phrase is striking: you can only take a person as far as you have gone yourself.

It does not mean a coach must have lived every possible client experience. It does point to something real, though: coaches who have confronted life at depth often hold a different kind of space.

They may be less shocked by intense material. Less eager to fix. Less brittle in the face of despair. More able to sit with uncertainty, mortality, ambiguity, and pain without shutting the conversation down.

That is highly relevant for Coaching. Clients do not only bring goals and performance blocks. They bring divorce, illness, death anxiety, ageing, failure, meaninglessness, identity collapse, and major life transitions. A coach who has done serious inner work around suffering can often meet those realities with steadiness.

This is where the existential thread becomes particularly helpful. Yannick references Viktor Frankl and Alfried Längle in pointing to the possibility of meaning even in suffering. Not silver-lining positivity. Not “everything happens for a reason.” Something more sober and more human: even terrible experiences can become meaningful experiences.

That does not remove grief. It can, however, build what might be called existential resilience. And that resilience can enrich Coaching in profound ways.

Practical questions for coaches returning after loss

For coaches navigating grief and wondering about their own return, the conversation offers several practical takeaways.

1\. Assess your capacity honestly

Do not ask whether you should be “over it” by now. Ask whether you are available enough for the kind of Coaching you do.

2\. Distinguish between Coaching formats

You may be ready for some forms of Coaching before others. Group work, deep relational work, and psychologically rich one-to-one work may require different levels of capacity.

3\. Use your support network

Therapy, supervision, consultation, peers, and trusted personal relationships matter. Returning to Coaching while isolated is far harder than returning with support around you.

4\. Disclose with purpose

If disclosure helps the client make sense of the room, supports contracting, or explains a practical disruption, it may be appropriate. Keep it contained and relevant.

5\. Stay committed to the client

Even when the coach shares something personal, the Coaching session is still for the client. If that focus slips, something needs recalibrating.

6\. Do not force conversations about grief

Sometimes naming loss opens rich territory. Sometimes it does not. Both are fine. Coaching follows what is alive and useful, not a preferred theme.

7\. Trust gradual return

There is no prize for coming back fast. A careful, ethically grounded return is better for both coach and client.

For coaches wanting to stay in touch with future conversations of this kind, there is also a mailing list for new episodes that keeps things simple and low-noise.

Closing reflections

What makes this exploration of Coaching and grief so valuable is its refusal to offer a simplistic answer. There is no magic number of weeks, no universal rule about disclosure, and no single threshold that proves readiness.

What there is, instead, is a model of thoughtful practice.

Yannick and Nicki show that good Coaching in the aftermath of loss depends on discernment, honesty, and responsibility. It depends on knowing the kind of work one does, the kind of support one has, and the degree to which one can stay present without asking the client to carry the coach’s pain.

They also point to something quietly hopeful. Grief can make Coaching harder, yes. But it can also deepen it. The coach may return with more humility, more sensitivity to endings, more respect for what is unsaid, and more courage to open conversations that matter.

That is worth reflecting on:

• What would tell a coach that they are ready to return?
• What kind of Coaching feels possible right now, and what kind does not?
• How much self-disclosure supports the work rather than diluting it?
• What topics become easier to hold after a profound personal loss?

These are good conversations to have with a supervisor, a colleague, or a trusted peer in Coaching. As Yannick suggests, sometimes all it takes is for someone to open the door. Once that happens, people often discover they are not alone in what they have been carrying.

Attribution

Talking about Coaching is a podcast by coaches for coaches. It does what it says on the tin: We talk about coaching. We, that is Yannick, Siawash and Nicki. We love coaching, collectively got a tonne of experience, knowledge and charm; and we all felt it was time to give something back to our wonderful coaching community. Whether you’re a life coach, work with organisations or practice any other form of coaching, you can ask us anything and we’ll discuss it for and with you so you can learn, grow and develop your practice and business skills!

Committed to helping leaders and coaches do their best work and live their best lives, Yannick Jacob, the founder of Talking about Coaching, is a Coach, Trainer & Supervisor with Masters degrees in Existential Coaching and Applied Positive Psychology.

A Note from the “Author”

I hope you enjoyed this article. If any of it resonates, make it swing! Start a conversation with someone about what came up for you, or let us know what you think*. We’d love to hear from you!*

Please keep in mind that, while this article is based on the podcast episode, this content is AI-generated, so the general guidance is to go to the source and listen to the podcast.

If you’d like to continue the conversation, send a question. And if you want to support the podcast, sharing it with a coaching colleague is one of the most helpful things you can do.

This article was created from the video My \[\\\\\_\] died. When & how can I start coaching again? – Episode 93 with the help of AI.