Yet another “genius” subject line arrives, uninvited, in my inbox:
‘Burnout is the new baseline - are you ready to coach it?’ 😐
What do I notice?
For a moment, I’m riled. Not just because my email has been added to yet another mailing list without my consent (sales dressed up as generosity), but because of the framing being used.
“Burnout is the new baseline…” Really? According to whom? Who has “burnout”? How is it being defined? What does it even mean to say it’s a baseline? And then: “…are you ready to coach it?”
Well, no. Because I don’t coach “burnout.” I coach human beings. Human beings in conversations about their concerns, requests, and hopes. I don’t coach a condition, or a label, or a buzzword.
The email continues with an offer of a Burnout Decoder Tool - five “powerful questions” to surface root causes quickly. Tools, techniques, problem-solving. All pitched with the faint buzz of excitement that feels oddly similar to the industry flutter around “imposter syndrome.” (You can read my perspective on that here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/myth-imposter-syndrome-what-youre-just-accurately-helen-woodward--4wq8e)
And here’s the thing: this way of thinking reduces people to problems that need diagnosing and fixing. It assumes the coach knows best, swooping in as the expert to decode, solve, and prescribe.
No wonder there’s so much misunderstanding about what coaching is.
A Different Conversation
By contrast, Alan Sieler describes the role of the coach like this:
The coach is neither a trainer or a teacher who delivers content and skills. The coach is a facilitator of learning, who serves the coachee by being deeply attentive and responsive to his or her needs, interests and concerns.”
Notice the differences?
📚Facilitator of learning
👂Deeply attentive and responsive
💭Centred on the coachee’s interests, needs, and concerns
This is the essence of ontological coaching. We don’t arrive with a decoder tool or a ready-made fix. We enter a conversation that enables the coachee to:
🌎Build self-awareness - noticing how they see the world and the meanings they attach to what’s happening.
👂Notice their own internal listening and narratives, and how these shape what they perceive.
💭Gain clarity about what’s not working - and what matters most.
🤸Develop the capacity to adapt, be resourceful, and create the life and work they want to live and love.
Let me explain more:
Way of Being: the ground of learning
Ontological coaching begins with what we call our Way of Being; the dynamic interplay of:
Language: how we speak and the stories we tell ourselves and others
Moods and emotions: the emotional lenses that shape what we see as possible
Body: how our posture, breath, and physical presence influence how we experience life
Together, these form the invisible background to all our actions. If coaching only attends to behaviour (“do more self-care”, “set better boundaries”), we’re tinkering at the surface.
But when we work at the level of Way of Being, we open the door to deeper, sustainable shifts.
Second-order learning: beyond the quick fix
This is where second-order learning comes in.
First-order learning is like getting a new strategy: downloading the latest tool, trying a new app, adopting a time management hack. Useful, but temporary.
Second-order learning, by contrast, is when we learn about how we learn. It’s when we notice the moods, stories, and embodied patterns that keep us repeating the same challenges, and discover new possibilities from there.
Take burnout. The quick fix might be shorter working hours. But the deeper inquiry could be:
❔What stories am I living under about my worth and productivity?
❔What mood am I carrying into my work?
❔How is my body holding stress or urgency, and what shifts could free me?
That’s where transformation happens.
The role of moods and emotions
Moods aren’t just fleeting feelings, they’re the background climate of our lives. Moods and emotions pre-dispose us towards particular actions, and away from others.
A leader in a mood of resignation will struggle to see new possibilities.
A leader in a mood of ambition will more naturally notice possibilities and move into innovation and action.
Ontological coaching invites us to name and notice these moods, not as right or wrong, but as present, and consider what whether they enable us to take the actions we want to or if they are hindering us in some way. E.g. Are we getting in our own way? Once we can see the emotional landscape we’re in, we can explore whether it’s serving us, and, if not, what new mood could open more generative action. We can only change what we notice. And, we can learn to shift our own moods and emotions.
Coaching people, not pathologies
This is why “coaching burnout” doesn’t sit right with me. Coaching isn’t about applying diagnostic categories. It’s about being with another human being, listening deeply, and inviting them to notice how they are currently seeing their world, what assessments they may be holding which are hindering them, and asking questions to promote deep thought and reflection helping them see themselves and their world in new ways.
In my own practice, I’ve seen how leaders flourish when they begin to notice:
- The assessments they’ve been living under (“I’m not a good leader”, “This will never change”)
- The moods they inhabit and how those moods shape what they see as possible
- The embodied habits that both constrain and resource them
From there, new stories and new actions emerge.
So, the next time an email drops in offering the latest tool to “fix” your coachees, perhaps pause and smile… and let it go! 🧘 Then remember: coaching isn’t about decoding, diagnosing, or correcting. It’s about our ‘way of being’ with human beings in learning conversations that expand possibilities and enable resourcefulness.
And in a world already quick to label and medicalise, this is a practice worth holding onto.