When Does Coaching Click? Instant Recognition, Gradual Growth, and the Many Paths Into Coaching

Coaching does not arrive in one neat, universal way. For some people, it is an immediate recognition: this is the work they have been looking for. For others, Coaching develops slowly through personal change, professional experiments, setbacks, training, and a growing awareness of the kinds of conversations they most want to have.

This conversation offers a reassuring perspective for coaches who wonder whether they are passionate enough, committed enough, or far enough along to call themselves a coach. Yannick Jacob, Siwash Zahmat, and Nicki Drab share three very different routes into Coaching, each shaped by curiosity, challenge, personal development, and a desire to support others. Their stories make a simple but important point: there is no correct timeline for finding one’s place in Coaching.

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.

Does Coaching Need to Click Straight Away?

“How long did it take to realise you wanted to be a coach?” sounds like a straightforward question. Yet beneath it may sit a much more vulnerable concern: What if Coaching has not felt like an obvious calling?

It is easy to look around the profession and see people who seem completely certain. They appear deeply identified with Coaching, consistently energised by it, and clear that this is exactly what they were meant to do. Someone balancing a day job, building a practice slowly, or still trying to understand whether Coaching is truly for them may then feel strangely inadequate.

But people grow into professions all the time. Many leaders are not born feeling destined to lead. They enter responsibility, develop competence, learn what matters to them, and eventually discover a relationship with leadership that feels authentic. Coaching can work in much the same way.

There may be an instant of recognition. There may also be years of exploration. A person may find Coaching after a difficult life period, through an inspiring conversation, a course, a sport, a book, a coach of their own, or the gradual realisation that they keep returning to certain kinds of questions. None of these paths is inherently more valid than another.

The more useful question may not be, “Did Coaching click quickly enough?” It may be: What keeps drawing this person back to Coaching, and what kind of coach are they becoming through that process?

Yannick Jacob: Finding a Professional Home

For Yannick Jacob, Coaching resonated quickly. While studying applied positive psychology, he discovered that Coaching existed as a professional field and immediately sensed a strong fit.

Before that point, he had been interested in psychotherapy and counselling. He was drawn to meaningful relationships, depth, and conversations about profound human questions. Yet Coaching seemed to offer something that aligned even more closely with his interests and personality.

Positive psychology gave him a rich set of questions and concepts that seemed especially alive in Coaching. Rather than focusing solely on what is broken, Coaching could explore what is already working, what matters, and what a person might build upon. Character strengths, engagement, flow, wellbeing, meaning, happiness, and purpose all felt highly relevant to the work.

This did not mean Yannick wanted to avoid depth. His move into existential foundations reflected a wish to retain the serious, searching, and sometimes therapeutic quality of conversations about life. But Coaching provided an umbrella broad enough to bring together depth, creativity, autonomy, complexity, energy, and a wide range of personal strengths.

For Yannick, Coaching was not simply a set of techniques. It was a profession that could accommodate the full texture of who he was. Its relative freedom, compared with more tightly regulated therapeutic work, was part of the appeal. It created room for creative and passionate conversations that could move across many dimensions of human experience.

What this means for emerging coaches

Yannick’s experience is a reminder that a strong fit with Coaching can emerge from recognising a bridge between existing interests and a professional practice. Those interests might include psychology, philosophy, wellbeing, leadership, relationships, learning, or personal development.

Notice the questions that consistently energise the coach.
Consider which existing knowledge feels naturally applicable in Coaching conversations.
Explore training approaches that support both practical competence and intellectual depth.
Allow a Coaching identity to be broad enough for the coach’s complexity.

A coach does not have to choose between depth and possibility, or between careful reflection and vibrant action. Different forms of Coaching make room for different combinations.

Siwash Zahmat: Personal Change and the Power of Being Coached

Siwash Zahmat’s route into Coaching was more gradual. Long before he considered becoming a coach, he had encountered ideas associated with personal development through an earlier career as a professional poker player.

At seventeen and eighteen, he was already reading Coaching-related books because he saw the value of mindset, emotional resilience, and managing emotions under pressure. High performance in poker demanded more than technical skill. It required an ability to work with thoughts, feelings, and setbacks. Yet becoming a coach was not on his radar.

After leaving poker and entering a faith-based journey in 2010, Siwash made major changes to his habits and lifestyle. He spent years reading about routines, thinking, habits, and change. Attending Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within was a significant experience, but even then, Coaching was not yet an obvious career choice.

The pivotal point came when he hired his own coach. Despite substantial self-development work, books, workshops, and events, he was struggling in several areas of life, including financially and emotionally. The coaching relationship helped something shift. Certain beliefs that had been holding him back became visible and changeable.

That experience made the distinctive value of Coaching tangible. Information alone had not created the change he wanted. A workshop had not been enough. The personal relationship, attention, challenge, and support of being coached opened something up that self-directed development had not.

From there, a longstanding desire to help others began to connect with a viable professional possibility. His coach had built a client base and could show him how. Coaching became both a way to support people and a career requiring a far wider set of skills than he initially imagined.

Marketing promises and professional reality

Siwash also raises a timely caution about the popularity of Coaching. Training and certification programmes are often marketed with compelling promises: helping others, freedom, flexible location, self-employment, being one’s own boss, and earning well. These aspirations are real and understandable. They can attract many people into the field.

Yet desire alone does not necessarily translate into a sustainable Coaching career. Only some people who are initially attracted to the promise of the profession will decide that they truly want to commit to its demands.

That is not a failure. It is discernment. Coaching involves learning how to have skilful conversations, work ethically, build relationships, develop a business where relevant, manage one’s own emotional world, and keep growing. Someone may be drawn to Coaching by personal transformation, then discover whether they are willing and able to undertake the longer professional journey.

Practical takeaways from Siwash’s story

Do not confuse consuming personal-development content with being supported through change. Both can be useful, but they are not the same.
Consider experiencing Coaching firsthand. Being coached can reveal aspects of the work that theory cannot convey.
Expect a learning curve. Coaching involves relational, emotional, commercial, and practical skills.
Interrogate the dream. Freedom and flexibility may be part of the appeal, but they are not substitutes for genuine commitment to the work.

Nicki Drab: A Meandering and Evolving Coaching Journey

Nicki Drab describes her journey as one of continuous evolution. Rather than a clean move from one career into another, her relationship with Coaching has remained present across changing circumstances, locations, and forms of work.

Her starting point came during a year living on a canal boat in London. With limited electricity, podcasts became a practical form of entertainment. One programme, Lewis Howes’ The School of Greatness, stood out because of the conversations it hosted with people who had made extraordinary achievements.

Nicki found herself asking a revealing question: What career would allow someone to have conversations like these? Coaching eventually emerged as an answer.

Her academic background in philosophy and sociology had already cultivated an interest in people and the bigger questions of life. What is the meaning of life? What is a person’s purpose? How do people make sense of themselves and their choices? Coaching felt attractive because it created room for these questions in a way that appealed to her.

Therapy had not felt like the right route. Nicki recognised that she could be strongly affected by other people’s emotions and sorrows. Coaching, by contrast, seemed to offer a realm of possibility, inquiry, and future-oriented exploration that suited her more naturally.

She chose to train with Animas because of its philosophical and academic orientation, which felt more aligned than courses that appeared primarily business-focused. She enjoyed the training and initially felt determined to establish herself as a coach. Then the pandemic transformed the landscape.

When circumstances change the plan

Nicki had imagined developing her Coaching practice through face-to-face conversations, networking, and meeting people naturally. The move online during COVID created a barrier, particularly because online marketing had also limited her in an earlier photography career. She had relied heavily on word of mouth and found it difficult to generate consistent work through digital channels.

At the same time, personal changes left her feeling more in need of emotional support than able to offer it. This was a crucial recognition. She did not feel she had the abundance, capacity, and space that Coaching requires. Continuing as if nothing had changed would have felt dishonest both to herself and to potential clients.

That acknowledgement is a mark of professional maturity. Coaches are often encouraged to be resilient, productive, and visible. Yet a responsible practice also requires the ability to recognise when capacity is limited. Pausing, changing direction, or reducing commitments can be an ethical response rather than evidence that someone is not meant for Coaching.

Capacity, Honesty, and Sustainable Practice

Nicki’s story challenges a simplistic idea of career commitment. A person can care deeply about Coaching without being available to practise it in the same way at every stage of life.

After moving to Portugal, she entered surf coaching. Initially, the work seemed primarily about teaching technique. Over time, however, she began to notice how many life Coaching skills were relevant to supporting people in their learning journey. Surfing became more than a sport. It became another medium through which personal development could happen.

Her experience points to an important distinction for coaches: the skills of Coaching may travel across contexts, but different roles also have different purposes. Teaching surfing technique is not identical to life Coaching. Still, the ability to listen, build confidence, ask helpful questions, respond to fear or frustration, and support learning can enrich work in both spaces.

Surf coaching also offered Nicki a way to develop confidence with groups. Group life Coaching had initially brought up fear and imposter feelings. Working with groups in another setting created an opportunity to practise speaking, leading, and holding attention. These skills may later support the kind of group Coaching she wants to offer.

This is an encouraging thought for anyone whose current job does not look like conventional Coaching. A career detour may also be a skills-building chapter. The important task is to remain honest about what the role is, what it requires, and where Coaching skills genuinely serve the people involved.

Questions for sustainable Coaching practice

Does the coach currently have sufficient emotional and practical capacity to work well with clients?
What form of Coaching fits the coach’s present circumstances, energy, and values?
Which skills are developing in adjacent roles, even if the role is not formally called Coaching?
What would an ethical pause, pivot, or gradual return look like?

What an Evolving Coaching Identity Can Teach Us

Across these three stories, Coaching is neither a fixed identity nor a single career ladder. Yannick found a rapid professional home in Coaching. Siwash arrived through years of personal development and the transformative experience of being coached. Nicki’s path has moved through training, pandemic disruption, personal change, surf coaching, and a continuing return to the field.

Each story contains a different relationship to certainty. Yannick’s certainty emerged early. Siwash’s developed through experience. Nicki’s has remained exploratory, shaped by changing life circumstances. Coaching can hold all of these experiences.

For newer coaches especially, comparison can be misleading. Someone else’s confidence, marketing presence, established business, or apparently straightforward story tells very little about what the work will look like in one’s own life. The task is not to imitate another coach’s timeline. It is to cultivate a relationship with Coaching that is both genuine and sustainable.

That may involve returning again and again to the work’s central questions: What kind of conversations matter most? Where can the coach be most useful? What learning is needed next? What current limitations require care? What aspects of the profession feel enlivening, and which need more exploration?

Conclusion: There Is No Single Way Into Coaching

Coaching may click in an instant, grow gradually over years, or disappear into the background before returning in a new form. None of these routes makes a person more or less legitimate as a coach.

Yannick’s story highlights the relief of finding a profession that brings together depth, positive psychology, freedom, and creativity. Siwash’s experience shows how personal struggle and the experience of being coached can turn an interest in growth into a professional calling. Nicki’s journey demonstrates that Coaching can evolve alongside life, and that capacity, context, and honest self-assessment matter.

Perhaps the most useful reflection is not whether a person chose Coaching quickly enough. It is whether their current relationship with Coaching feels alive, ethical, and worth continuing to explore. What has shaped that relationship so far? What skills are developing beneath the surface? What would the next honest step be?

A worthwhile next conversation with a coaching colleague might begin with one simple question: When did Coaching click for you, and how has that answer changed over time?

Coaches who would like to contribute a question for a future conversation can send it to Talking about Coaching. More episodes are also available through the Talking about Coaching podcast.

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. He is part of the teaching faculties at Cambridge University and the International Centre for Coaching Supervision, and he’s the Course Director of the School of Positive Transformation’s acclaimed Accredited Certificate in Integrative Coaching, for which he gathered many of the world’s most influential coaches and earliest pioneers. Formerly Programme Leader of the MSc Coaching Psychology at the University of East London, Yannick founded and hosts Yannick’s Coaching Lab which gives novice and seasoned coaches an opportunity to witness experienced coaches live in action. Yannick presents at conferences internationally, his book An Introduction to Existential Coaching was released by a leading academic publisher, and his self-study online course on the subject is now available for instant access. Across four seasons as host of Animas Centre for Coaching’s popular podcast Coaching Uncaged Yannick engaged the thought leaders of our industry in dialogue, and he passionately hosts his own podcasts Talking about Coaching and Talking about Coaching and Psychedelics.

A Note From the “Author”

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This article was created from the video When did coaching “click” for you? Was it instant or gradual? – Episode 81 with the help of AI.

YANNICK JACOB

As a coach, mediator, coach trainer & supervisor and as a creative, critical thinker who’s determined to introduce effective programmes to schools, companies and individuals, Yannick helps his clients explore their world, build a strong foundation of who they are and as a result grow, resolve conflicts and embrace life’s challenges.