I have already written about why the coach-client relationship is the strongest predictor of coaching effectiveness. What is usually missing from that literature is the client’s own voice: how the relationship actually feels from the other party. A Coachee of mine recently sent me a written review of our work together and suggested herself that I publish it. With her permission and after fully anonymizing anything that could identify her or her employer, I quote her words here directly, paragraph by paragraph, showing what emerges in each as it relates to the coaching relationship. (Note: the client wrote in Greek. The excerpts below are a faithful translation, not her literal wording; the original Greek quotations appear in the Greek version of this article.)
Bordin’s (1979) theory of the working alliance rests on three pillars: bond, goal agreement, and task agreement. Bond logically precedes the other two: without a basic sense of safety a client does not risk sharing what actually troubles them. Rogers (1957) had already described the “necessary and sufficient conditions” of therapeutic change as empathy, unconditional positive regard, and congruence on the helper’s part, conditions that contemporary coaching research shows operate in much the same way outside the therapeutic setting (de Haan et al., 2020; O’Broin & Palmer, 2006).
Trust is not there at the beginning of a coaching relationship; it is what the relationship builds gradually, session by session.
EUANTHIA KOURTBOUYANNI
One of the less discussed ingredients of a good coaching relationship is clarity about boundaries, where the Coachee’s responsibility ends and where it belongs to others in their system instead. This matters especially for long-tenured professionals, who often learn to treat anything that goes wrong around them as their own responsibility. Clarifying boundaries is not merely a stress-management tool; as Self-Determination Theory shows (Deci & Ryan, 2000), it is a precondition for a sense of autonomy, which in turn fuels the intrinsic motivation needed for change.
Self-compassion (Neff, 2003), the ability to treat ourselves with the same understanding we would offer a friend, is far from the “relaxation” of our standards, it is in fact a precondition for sustainable change. A Coachee who treats themselves harshly typically exhausts their psychological resources on self-criticism, leaving little left over for the change itself. I have written about this at greater length in Loving Thyself: Self-care, self-acceptance, self-compassion.
The Coachee discussed here had spent decades at a family-owned distribution business. She had built its finance function from the ground up on her own, as the business started small and scaled up onward. When a separate department was later formed around that function, leadership of it was given to a less experienced colleague, bypassing her own experience and contribution. She was a few years from retirement, with a diagnosis o burnout, a fact that – as often happens at this career stage – made the desire for self-improvement even harder to hold onto. We worked together for fifteen sessions. At the end of them she wrote, entirely on her own initiative, the review excerpted below.
She described how deeply the situation had affected her before we began working together:
“She helped me understand and manage a work situation that brought me so much anxiety and distress, that at times it was unbearable for me to be at work; I blamed everything on myself and I reacted badly toward my colleagues.”
The irritability and self-blame she describes (“I blamed everything on myself”) are recognizable markers of chronic activation of the nervous system under perceived threat (Porges, 2011) and are consistent with the classic burnout profile, in which emotional exhaustion is often expressed as irritability toward others rather than as a direct request for help (Maslach & Leiter, 2016). Naming this state herself, before we had even discussed solutions, was the first step of our work.
It was unbearable for me to be at work.
THE Coachee
She then described what shifted through our sessions:
“She helped me clarify my boundaries, how far I needed to involve myself in work matters, and when I needed to leave things to others. She showed me that I am far more than my work role. She talked to me about self-compassion, and with her help I saw that I had a self to consider, toward whom I had been acting harshly instead of compassionately.”
Here the two theoretical threads I developed above meet face-to-face: boundaries as a precondition for autonomy (Deci & Ryan, 2000) and self-compassion as the bridge to change (Neff, 2003). That she names them in the order she experienced them, boundaries first and self-compassion after, is not incidental: the capacity to set boundaries often logically precedes the capacity to extend understanding to yourself, since both require recognizing yourself as something distinct from your role.
I had a self to consider, toward which I had been acting harshly instead of compassionately.
THE coachee
About the relationship itself, she wrote:
“At the start of our sessions I was closed off; I didn’t know if I could trust her. But as we continued, I understood that I could let go and say what I was feeling, because first of all she is a very gentle, sweet, and tender person, and the way she works made me feel immense acceptance. So as time went by, from a certain point on, it was like talking to a beloved teacher, the kind we had as children, the ones we knew wanted to look after us for our own good.”
This is, in a Coachee’s own words rather than through a research text, a description of Rogers’s (1957) conditions: empathy, unconditional positive regard, congruence. The image of the “beloved teacher” also points to what the literature calls closeness and perceived empathy (Ianiro et al., 2013): the sense that someone genuinely understands your experience is a strong predictor of engagement in the process. It is worth noting that trust here was not given upfront; it was built “as time went by,” confirming the gradual, cumulative nature of the bond described above.
It was like talking to a beloved teacher.
THE coachee
She also wrote about what she carried away from each of our meetings:
“Every time I felt lighter, freer and more optimistic, and I kept in mind one or two points from what we discussed, the ones I needed to think about, accept, or develop, the things that would be good for me to focus on, if I wanted to change for the better, both as an employee and as a person, always for my own benefit, to do something good for myself.”
Two things are worth noting here. First, the selective focus on “one or two points” rather than everything discussed is consistent with what we know about consolidation in learning: a few well-chosen points are absorbed and applied far more effectively than a flood of information. Second, the phrase “always for my own benefit, to do something good for myself” is precisely the language of autonomous motivation described by Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000): the change is not experienced as imposed, but as something she chose for herself.
[…] lighter, freer and more optimistic.
THE coachee
She closed her review this way:
“I believe this is what makes her so good at what she does, that she genuinely loves people and wants to help them through the experience and the extensive knowledge she has. To me she was a teacher and a friend at the same time, if she’ll allow me to say so, and I feel I need to express that publicly, by writing this review.”
Two elements coexist here that the coaching-relationship literature often treats separately: closeness and perceived expertise. Our client feels a closeness deep enough to use the word “friend,” yet at the same time explicitly credits “the experience and the extensive knowledge” as the source of the help she received. Closeness, in other words, did not erode the professional role; it reinforced it. This is, I think, the hardest balance for any coach to hold: to be close enough that the other person can let go without ever ceasing to be the one who holds the structure and the boundaries of the relationship.
A so-called Coachbot, an AI chatbot designed and trained to provide “coaching” (a claim I personally question), can genuinely offer support: information, structure, even a first dose of relief. What it cannot offer is what the Coachee described: a relationship that builds gradually, that remembers, that recognizes, and that authentically cares about the person in it. Research on AI as a coaching “assistant” (Terblanche et al., 2024) shows that AI presence can strengthen certain aspects of the working alliance, but it does not replace the human bond at its core. Psychological safety, as I have written elsewhere, requires someone who actually takes a risk alongside you, not merely someone who answers you.
Long-tenured professionals who have built functions from scratch and subjectively experience their contribution as forgotten or left behind do not need stress-or disappointment-management tools alone. They need a space where their experience is witnessed, their boundaries are respected and their worth no longer depends solely on their job title. Organizations that invest in such relationships through executive coaching or business coaching, are not merely investing in an employee’s performance, but in the institutional memory and expertise that person carries.
What our Coachee wrote is not the exception; precisely because it was written spontaneously and on her own initiative, it is an authentic account of what a good coaching relationship feels like from the inside. Safety, boundaries, self-compassion, and a sense of acceptance that does not depend on performance are not “soft,” secondary elements. As the research shows, they are the very core of effectiveness itself.
- Bordin, E. S. (1979). The generalizability of the psychoanalytic concept of the working alliance. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 16(3), 252–260.
- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
- de Haan, E., Molyn, J., & Nilsson, V. O. (2020). New findings on the effectiveness of the coaching relationship: Time to think differently about active ingredients? Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 72(3), 155–167.
- Ianiro, P. M., Schermuly, C. C., & Kauffeld, S. (2013). Why interpersonal dominance and affiliation matter: An interaction analysis of the coach-client relationship. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 6(1), 25–46.
- Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111.
- Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.
- O’Broin, A., & Palmer, S. (2006). The coach-client relationship and contributions made by the coach in improving coaching outcome. The Coaching Psychologist, 2(2), 16–20.
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
- Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103.
- Terblanche, N. H. D., Van Heerden, M., & Hunt, R. (2024). The influence of an artificial intelligence chatbot coach assistant on the human coach-client working alliance. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 17(2), 189–206.