Introduction: Where Light Meets Shadow
Coaching is often described as a space of growth, empowerment and possibility. We talk about transformation, mindset shifts and courageous conversations. Yet like any professional practice that works with human systems, it also has a shadow side. When we fail to see it, name it, or address it, we risk perpetuating dependency, power imbalance and even subtle forms of control – all under the guise of helping.
At Sandown Business School, we talk openly about this. We believe that developing true professional maturity as a coach means learning to recognise power. How it moves, how it hides and how it can unconsciously be used over, away from, or with others.
I am often curious when a professional coach tells me they are ‘helping’ their clients. Helping indicates they need rescuing if we take the psychological frame offered to us by Transactional Analysis. Do our clients need rescuing? Surely they are able to learn how to develop their own empowerment? This is why we challenge students with this language and invite them to explore how ‘supporting’ our clients has a very different energy and impacts their and our system differently. If you haven’t thought about this before – try it and see/feel/hear the difference.
However, as with all human practices, coaching carries both light and shadow. In earlier reflections, I have written about discernment, authenticity and the quiet strength that sits beneath transformation when firmly positioned in the light. This article turns towards the other side of that light — the shadows – and how power operates when it goes unnoticed.
The dark side of coaching is not necessarily about bad coaches or unethical practice – although the more I am leading in this field, I am seeing and experiencing unethical behaviour that has surprised and at times annoyed me. Generally, with most coaches, it is about the unexamined dynamics that sit underneath even the most well-intentioned sessions. This is where our attention is needed in developing an openness to a new and emergent awareness.
Table of Contents
Power in the Coaching Relationship
Every coaching relationship carries power. Even in a peer setting, the coach holds structural and psychological authority: they are the facilitator, the questioner, the one who ‘sees’ and reflects. Clients often arrive in moments of uncertainty, transition, or vulnerability – and in those moments, power naturally shifts toward the coach.
If this dynamic remains unacknowledged,
the coaching process can subtly reinforce hierarchy rather than dissolve it.
The coach becomes the ‘one who knows,’ or if we are going even more into the dark side of coaching ‘the one who can fix’, while the client unconsciously positions themselves as ‘the one to be fixed.’ This creates power over, a stance that contradicts the very spirit of coaching, which is about enabling autonomy and agency.
At Sandown Business School, we use three distinctions to support our students to explore power:
Power over. When a coach directs, interprets, or subtly leads the client toward the coach’s preferred outcome. You can hear this when a coach says, ‘I helped my client to achieve X’ or ‘I empowered my client to X’. Remember, we cannot empower another human being.
We can create the conditions of empowerment, but the step of being empowered comes from the individual. There is so much ego involved in this area, with many experienced coaches holding their ego in this space.
Power away from. When the coach retreats, withholds, or over-empowers, leaving the client unsupported or directionless. This again, I am seeing more and more with coaches, who are ‘slightly’ trained in trauma or psychological processes, wading into a client’s system to ‘heal’ them.
We have no right to work in areas where our skills and capabilities are not developed. I recently saw a coach educator positioning themselves as above all other coach education programmes because they do just that – address the trauma in the client first, and then you can move on to work with them to move forward. They backed this up by referencing an individual with a PhD in psychology. Really?
So much emotional and psychological damage can be created when people think they know how to ‘deal with trauma’ and they don’t. As you can see – I have strong views in this area.
Power with. When the coach and client co-create insight through mutual presence, curiosity and respect. This is where coaching, mentoring and any type of interaction with a client can sit.
This type of approach calls for humility, emotional steadiness and the capacity to stay in relationship without taking charge.
What ‘Power With’ Looks Like
So let’s dive deeper into what ‘power with’ looks like. ‘Power with’ is not soft or passive. It is a collaborative strength. It looks like a coach who holds structure but not dominance, who stays grounded in their own presence while supporting the client to think, feel and choose freely the direction of travel. It sounds like questions that evoke, support, challenge, generate the opportunity for insight, celebrate, rather than instruct, direct, or tell. It feels like psychological safety with stretch.
An example might bring this to life.
A client begins describing a workplace conflict. A less experienced coach might jump in: “It sounds like you need to set stronger boundaries.”
A coach practising ‘power with’ might instead say: “As you describe that moment, what happens in you? What sense are you making of it right now?”
The first response takes authority. The second invites awareness. One feeds dependence on external answers; the other builds internal capacity.
Without any judgment for yourself, what is your default?
‘Power with’ is also not neutral. It is a conscious stance of partnership, of standing alongside someone without steering them. I have learned, again and again, that power with is not achieved once and for all. It needs to be chosen in every conversation, especially when a client’s uncertainty tempts us to fill the silence or even their invitation for us to take control.
Pure Coaching and the Discipline of Staying in Role
This conscious partnership demands discipline. At Sandown Business School, we talk about pure coaching, the deliberate practice of staying within the coaching lane rather than drifting into mentoring or advice-giving.
It can feel uncomfortable at first. Many coaches begin with a mentoring instinct, wanting to share what they know, offer solutions, or provide reassurance, often from the best of intentions. But if you always default to mentoring, you are not coaching.
An illustration we often use in our ICF Mentor Coaching programmes, which I have been privileged to lead, is that learning pure coaching is like learning to drive a manual car. It requires coordination, awareness, and discipline. Once mastered, you can drive anything, manual or automatic. But if you only ever learn on an automatic, you limit your range, which in coaching and mentoring terms includes practices such as instructing, teaching, telling, and directing.
In the same way, once a coach strengthens that pure coaching muscle, they can choose to either coach or mentor, depending on what serves the client. Without that foundation, though, the distinction begins to blur, but more importantly, so does the client’s capacity to grow.
The more skilled a coach becomes, the less they need to do — and the more they need to be.
Mentoring vs. Coaching: Why the Difference Matters
So what is mentoring and coaching, and how are they different? This is an important distinction to understand, especially for those seeking coaching services and for coaches.
This distinction is not academic; it defines the ethical core of our profession. At Sandown Business School, we define coaching as a facilitative, non-directive process that supports individuals to access their own resourcefulness and insight, grounded in curiosity, psychological presence and reflective questioning. We draw on the Co-Active Cornerstones as foundational presuppositions — guiding beliefs that inform both our stance as coaches and the wider system of our coaching practice.
Mentoring, by contrast, is developmental and experience-based. The mentor shares wisdom, guidance, or specific expertise. It can be invaluable, particularly in career or leadership contexts, but it is not coaching.
The skill lies in knowing which hat you are wearing and why.
If you blur the two without awareness, you unintentionally alter the power dynamic. Coaching becomes advice with better listening skills. In a coaching conversation, the client’s self-authorship is paramount. The coach’s role is to hold the space, not fill it.
As I often say to students, if you have all your answers, how is your client maturing? How are they developing their neural pathways that will sustain them long after their contract ends with you?
Without this, there is the possibility of dependence or even co-dependence becoming part of the relationship. And as the title of this article states, there is a dark side to coaching, and dependence belongs to the shadow side of coaching.
So what do I mean when I talk about shadows…
The Shadows in Coaching
Every profession has its shadows, the places where good intentions meet human complexity and create distortion. Coaching is no different. One of my dissertations was based on the shadow side of organisations – the unwritten rules of an organisation. I really enjoyed this subject, as those who know me know I would!
Often, the shadows give us so much more information. It is similar in some of my client coaching sessions, where I encourage my clients to be ‘unfiltered’ in their communications with me. The un-filtering brings so much more insight as they are not performing or generating language they believe they ‘should’ be communicating. They are just being.
Here are five recurring shadows I see in practice and supervision — all of which can quietly distort the coaching relationship if left unexamined.
1. Dependence and Over-Attachment
When the client becomes reliant on the coach’s validation or insight, the relationship shifts from empowerment to dependency. This dynamic mirrors transference and countertransference patterns familiar in psychological practice, where the coach unconsciously reinforces their own significance by being ‘the one who helps.’ Over time, this erodes client autonomy and reduces the capacity for self-generated change.
Professional supervision provides the reflective distance to recognise this attachment and restore appropriate boundaries.
2. Rescue and Over-Empathy
Excessive empathy, often motivated by the coach’s need to alleviate discomfort, can slide into rescuer behaviour (Karpman, 1968). When the coach moves from witness to saviour, they take ownership of the client’s growth. This inadvertently weakens both parties: the client’s agency is reduced, and the coach loses their neutral stance.
Sustainable empathy holds compassion and curiosity together — a balance that allows the client to sit in productive tension without being “saved” from it.
3. Performance over Presence
As coaching gains cultural visibility, the shadow of impression management (Goffman, 1959) becomes more pronounced. Coaches may begin to focus on the performance of competence — fluent questioning, branded language, visible confidence — rather than the genuine presence that underpins psychological safety.
True presence arises from congruence, not choreography. When performance overtakes presence, the session becomes aesthetic rather than authentic.
4. Projection of the Coach’s Unresolved Material
Every coach brings their own history, values, and unfinished stories into the room. Without ongoing reflective practice, these unacknowledged influences can manifest as countertransference or projection, subtly shaping what is noticed, challenged, or avoided.
This is why supervision is not optional; it is an ethical necessity. Through supervision, coaches learn to differentiate between the client’s material and their own — cultivating the self-awareness that anchors professional integrity.
5. Complacency and the Certification Illusion
In developmental psychology, plateauing after competence is a recognised stage (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980). Many coaches, once credentialed, unconsciously settle at this plateau, mistaking qualification for mastery. This ‘illusion of completion’ halts reflective inquiry and invites stagnation.
Ongoing supervision, continuing education and peer dialogue are the antidotes — reintroducing curiosity as the engine of professional evolution.
Make sure you are continuing to plant new growth in your life.
Which part of your practice is calling for growth today?
As you can see, these shadows are not failings and can easily be picked up through the strength of supervision (which is why we support all coaches who work with clients to be in supervision); instead, they are invitations, mirrors that reveal where our own development still calls us forward.
I still notice moments where I lean too far toward reassurance or structure, and I have learned to welcome that recognition as part of the work. Awareness is not perfection; it is practice.
When Clients Do Not Know What Strong Coaching Looks Like
Another layer of the shadow lies in client expectations. Many clients have never experienced healthy coaching. Too many times, they have come to equate a ‘good coach’ with one who gives clear advice or offers comfort – because that is the service they have received.
In truth, healthy coaching can feel uncomfortable. It stretches, disrupts and invites accountability. It challenges limiting patterns and evokes self-reflection.
At Sandown Business School, we often see students reach that turning point in their development when they realise the importance of building their coaching muscle in pure coaching. This is when they learn to support clients who resist the stretch — when the work suddenly becomes more real than expected. It is here that professional courage meets compassion. We encourage our coaches to hold this tension without rescuing, to stay present without softening the edge of growth. We refer to this as:
‘healthy coaches – coach healthily.’
When clients understand this, they begin to appreciate how effective coaching is not about being told what to do. It is about learning to think, feel and act with greater self-awareness and agency. They empower themselves. Supporting the client to educate themselves about what ‘real’ coaching truly is, and is not, is therefore part of restoring balance in the system.
How to Develop ‘Power With’ as a Coach
So how do we cultivate power with? It begins internally. It requires ongoing self-awareness and a willingness to examine the subtle ways we influence, even unintentionally.
Here are some practices we encourage at Sandown Business School:
- Supervision as a mirror, not a check-box. Use supervision to explore how power shows up in your sessions; where you lean in, pull back, or unconsciously lead.
- Language audit. Listen to your words. Do they invite or instruct? Evoke or inform?
- Contract for agency. Make explicit contracts with clients that include discussions around roles, boundaries and clients’ responsibility for their outcomes.
- Stay curious longer. Resist the urge to offer insight too soon. Let the client’s meaning-making emerge.
- Practice systemic awareness. Notice how wider contexts, organisational, cultural, and relational, shape both of you in the coaching space.
A Call to Action: Raising the Standard
The coaching profession is maturing. With that, maturity must come honesty. We cannot keep presenting coaching as a universally benevolent activity without acknowledging the inherent power dynamics and shadows within it.
For coaches, the call to action is this:
- Examine your relationship with power.
- Practise ‘power with’.
- Deepen your supervision.
- Learn to know when to coach or mentor.
- Stay humble enough to know the difference.
For clients, the invitation is equally vital:
- Own your agency.
- Ask informed questions.
- Choose coaches who challenge and stretch you, not just those who comfort you.
- Recognise your own authority in the coaching space.
When both sides hold power consciously, coaching becomes what it was always meant to be, a co-partnership that builds capacity, strength, maturity and growth.
Closing Reflection
Perhaps the greatest irony of the dark side of coaching is that it thrives in light. It hides behind good intentions, certification and confidence. Yet when we turn toward it, when we look honestly at power, ego and influence, we begin to transform our practice from a performance into a profession.
True coaching is not about having answers. It is about building self, system and dynamic awareness. Because transformation, when it is real, begins not with answers, but with awareness.
Pheona Croom-Johnson
Co-Founder and Academic Director of Sandown Business School. She has been in the OD field for over 40 years, partnering with Coaches, C-Suite and Senior Leaders.
Pheona is a triple credentialed Master Coach (ICF, EMCC, AC), Master NLP Trainer, Team Coach Supervisor (ACTC, ICF) and credentialed Supervisor (ESIA, EMCC), IFS Trained therapist (Level 1) with psychological foundations and training (BPS). She has an MA in Psychological Coaching and an MSc in Psychology of Change Agency.
Get in touch to find out more about coaching, leadership and/or supervision.
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