Yes, I’m a coach. No, I don’t have my shit together. And perhaps you shouldn’t either.

A small content warning: this piece contains repeated use of the word “shit”, several holes and considerably more discussion of poo than is usual in an executive coaching newsletter. Proceed accordingly.

I turn 40 next week. Milestone birthdays have a way of making us take stock. Where did I think I would be? What have I achieved? Who have I become? And, most importantly, have I finally got my shit together?

Language is interesting. We tell people to “get your shit together” as though the ideal outcome is to gather all of it up and keep it close. But why? What exactly am I supposed to do with it once it is together? Put it in jars? Label it? Arrange it neatly on a shelf? Because, honestly, if I collected my shit in jars and displayed it around the house, people would quite reasonably think I had lost the plot. 

So perhaps getting your shit together is not actually the goal. Perhaps the goal is to know where it is, clean up what needs cleaning up and avoid stepping in it quite so often.

The years I kept my shit in jars

When I turned 30, my life probably looked more together than it does now. I was at the height of my corporate success. I had seniority, responsibility and plenty of external evidence that I was doing life correctly. My mum was alive and came to my party. Both my parents are gone now, and approaching 40 has made that absence feel particularly sharp. I wish they could see me now.

I also feel sad that so much of what I understand about myself arrived after they died. I now have language for ADHD, dyslexia, trauma, masking, family systems and the many ways people adapt when life does not feel safe or predictable. I did not have that understanding when they were alive.

I sometimes wonder whether, with what I know now, I could have helped my mum more, had a better relationship with her and understood my dad differently too. Most importantly, I wonder whether I might have resented them less. 

It feels easier to forgive them when I can understand why they were the way they were, rather than making their behaviour mean they simply did not love me enough.

I grew up in a family where overwork was one of the main ways we knew how to belong to each other.

We achieved things. We managed things. We kept going. We kept busy enough to never really know each other. 

Work gave us a shared language when we did not always know how simply to be together. And an excuse to be apart when being together was too hard. 

So I became extremely good at working.

For a long time, having my shit together meant controlling myself with enormous precision.

At one stage in my corporate career, I was waking at 5.00 every morning, having an ice bath, training, going for a walk, journaling, meditating and following an extraordinarily rigid routine before the working day had properly begun.

From the outside, it probably looked disciplined.

I thought it meant I was thriving.

Looking back, I was ill.

The routine was not really wellbeing. It was a different kind of compulsion that allowed me to keep functioning in a life that was becoming unsustainable. It was also an excellent way of compartmentalising everything that felt difficult.

Work in one jar. Grief in another. Anger over there. Exhaustion at the back. Neurodivergence somewhere out of sight because we did not have a label for that yet. Keep the lids screwed on tightly. Keep moving. Do not knock the shelf.

As the daughter of a psychotherapist, and the sister of people who have experienced addiction and significant difficulties, I became ferociously committed to project-managing myself into being okay.

I would be the successful one. The reliable one. The good leader. The good daughter. The productive one. The healthy one.

I would not be too neurodivergent. I would not be too emotional. I would not be too intense.

I would not be too much, but I would make absolutely sure I was never too little.

And for periods of time, it worked. The jars stayed on the shelf. I looked competent. I performed. I achieved.

Then, inevitably, I would become tired, overwhelmed or confronted by something I could not control.

I would knock into the shelf.

And shit would fly everywhere.

The problem with containing everything is that the system only works while nothing moves.

The hole I did not know I was in

There is a poem by Portia Nelson called Autobiography in Five Short Chapters. I was reminded of it in a group supervision session recently (thank you, Eseem).

It describes someone repeatedly walking down a street and falling into the same hole. At first, they do not see it. Then they see it and still fall in. Eventually, they learn to walk around it. Finally, they choose another street.

I have always liked the poem. But I am no longer convinced real life is quite that linear.

Sometimes we choose another street and discover a completely different hole. Sometimes we avoid one for years and then fall straight back into it because we are tired, grieving, hormonally compromised or distracted. Sometimes we sit at the bottom of the hole with a great deal of therapeutic language, explaining precisely why we are there (this is one of my personal greatest hits). And sometimes what we thought was solid ground turns out to have been a hole all along.

At 30, I was highly successful on paper. I was also, in some important respects, at the bottom of a hole I had really made into a home. I had become very good at succeeding inside a life that was costing me too much. By 2020, I was at one of the lowest points of my life having lost my mum and become physically and mentally unwell. It is difficult to believe that the person I was then and the person writing this now are the same woman.

Since then, I have left my corporate career, retrained, completed the Hoffman Process, received an ADHD diagnosis, understood more about my dyslexia, built a coaching practice and slowly redesigned my work around how my brain actually functions. The life I have now is less straightforward than the one I had at 30. It may be harder to explain at a school reunion. But it feels considerably more like mine.

Noticing the hole is not the same as avoiding it

When I first started therapy in my twenties, I found self-awareness profoundly irritating - I still do if I am honest. I began to notice what I was doing, but I could not necessarily stop doing it. For f**k’s sake, I thought. Now I am doing exactly the same thing, but consciously.

Insight does not immediately create change. Sometimes it simply means watching yourself repeat an old pattern while being able to describe it with increasingly sophisticated language. That can feel worse before it feels better.

I am also prone to what I have previously called success amnesia. I notice everything I am doing wrong and forget what I am doing right. An achievement happens, briefly exists, then evaporates. My brain has already moved on to the next problem.

That can create a distorted picture of progress. If I still struggle, I assume I have not changed. If I still fall into a familiar hole, I decide all the previous work was pointless. Then I press what I call the f**k-it button.

One small thing goes wrong. A routine slips. A plan changes. I forget something. My confidence crashes. My body refuses to cooperate.

Instead of treating that as one difficult thing, I decide the entire enterprise has failed. F**k it. Then I knock one jar over, decide the whole shelf is ruined and sweep the rest onto the floor for good measure.

I still do this from time to time, but less often. I notice it sooner. I recover more quickly. A bad day is less likely to become a bad month. That might not look dramatic from the outside, but it is progress.

Perhaps progress does not mean never pressing the f**k-it button. Perhaps it means noticing my hand moving towards it, pressing it with slightly less force, or cleaning up one jar without declaring the entire house condemned.

What do we learn in the hole?

I do not believe every painful experience is secretly a gift. Some things are simply painful. Some holes should have been filled in, fenced off or clearly signposted long before we reached them. We do not need to romanticise suffering in order to learn from it. But once we are in a hole, there may still be something worth noticing.

What brought us here? What keeps us here? What do we do when we are frightened, ashamed or overwhelmed? Who helps us climb out—and whose help makes the hole deeper?

I would not choose every experience in my life again. I would not choose the difficult childhood, the loss, the unhealthy overwork or some of the ways I behaved when I was running on fumes.

There were times in my corporate career when I failed my own values. I did not look after myself. I did not value myself. And I passed that cost on to other people. Put less delicately: sometimes I was a dick. I feel genuine remorse for that.

For years, I responded to that remorse with self-flagellation. I thought repeatedly punishing myself demonstrated how much I understood the harm. It did not; it mainly kept the focus on me. I am trying to develop a different relationship with that part of my history, one that allows responsibility, regret, changed behaviour and repair without requiring me to live permanently at the bottom of the hole shouting about how awful I am.

Being unfinished does not excuse our impact. Knowing where the shit is also means recognising when it belongs to us and cleaning it up. But shame alone rarely makes us better.

The clean-up is rarely complete

So what am I doing differently now? I am not pretending the jars have disappeared. Some are empty and washed up. Some still contain things I am working through. Some are clearly labelled. Others are lurking somewhere at the back of a cupboard, occasionally announcing their presence through the smell.

When that happens, I try to notice it and do a remedial clear-up. Sometimes, a month later, I realise I did not clean it up quite as thoroughly as I thought, so I go back and have another go. That does not mean the first attempt failed. It means I am human, and the work required another pass.

I am no longer trying to create a sterile environment in which nothing difficult, inconvenient or emotional can survive. I am trying to create a liveable one: one where I know roughly what I am carrying, take responsibility when something spills, apologise and repair when I need to, ask for help when the clean-up is bigger than I thought, and keep returning to what needs attention.

It is imperfect progress, but it is still progress.

Some things remain gloriously unresolved

Leaving corporate life did not sort me out. Therapy did not sort me out. The Hoffman Process did not sort me out. An ADHD diagnosis did not sort me out. Training as a coach most certainly did not sort me out. Being coached didn’t sort me out. 

All of those things gave me language, understanding and greater choice. None of them turned me into a finished person. And really, what even is that? 

I am increasingly accepting that, as an ADHDer, I may always experience some version of a boom-and-bust cycle in my confidence, mood and energy. The more desperately I try to flatten it, the harder it becomes. Acceptance does not mean doing nothing. It means working with the reality of how I function rather than measuring every day against an imaginary version of me who is endlessly consistent, emotionally regulated and delighted by admin.

My health remains complicated. I live with EDS, and sometimes my body has firm views about what I should and should not be doing. My identity shifts, and my relationship with routine remains unresolved. I need routine. I hate routine. I create routine. I rebel against routine. I miss routine. I create a new routine and announce that this one will definitely work. It is an ongoing negotiation.

Someone recently used the word “re-sparkling” to describe making mundane things feel less mundane. I liked that. It feels more useful than treating myself like a failing employee who requires another performance-management process. Perhaps the work is not to conquer ourselves, but to understand how to live and work with ourselves.

A coach does not need a pristine shelf

I have been thinking a great deal this year about who I am as a coach. I have also been updating my website yet again—Jesus Christ, will that ever end? One thing I have noticed is that I have not always felt quite as much like myself in my business this year.

From a place of lower confidence, I became too influenced by what marketing advice told me would work and less guided by what I actually wanted to build. Commercially, it did not work particularly well either. I have written before that the issue is not always motivation or execution. Sometimes it is design. I had started designing parts of the business around a version of coaching that seemed easier to market, rather than around the work I most believe in and the person I actually am.

I was back to arranging jars, trying to make everything look neat, trying to present the right version of myself and trying to keep the mess out of sight. So this piece is partly a reset; it is me putting a stake back in the ground.

Being unapologetically yourself can sound twee and, when you are your product, a little dangerous. But I think I need to be brave enough to say what it means for me: I am a good coach. I know I am a good coach, and I also know I am not finished. I will not always be neat and tidy, inspirational or right about everything.

Sometimes I may do something and you may quite reasonably think, “What the heck, TMI?” But I am intuitive. I care deeply. I am trained, supervised and ethically grounded. I am willing to challenge, and I am willing to be challenged. I will continue doing my own work. That matters more to me than appearing polished.

I think coaches have some responsibility to acknowledge that being human is hard. That does not mean sharing everything or making clients responsible for our emotions. Vulnerability without boundaries is not good coaching, but neither is pretending that we have conquered every difficulty and now possess the formula everyone else should follow.

A coach does not need a pristine shelf of neatly labelled jars. They need enough self-awareness to know which jars are theirs, enough discipline not to hand them to the client, and enough humility to clean up when something spills.

What should you expect from coaching?

Not a perfect upward line, a dramatic breakthrough every session, or someone handing you a five-step formula and promising that your life will become effortless once you follow it correctly. Often, progress is much less glamorous.

You notice a pattern sooner. You make a different choice once in five attempts. You recover more quickly and repair better. You stop turning one difficult day into evidence that you are a fundamentally defective person. You understand why the same jar keeps falling off the shelf and, perhaps eventually, decide that it does not need to be on the shelf at all.

The feedback I receive that touches me most is when someone tells me they felt able to say something without being judged. Coaches talk frequently about creating non-judgemental spaces, but how often do any of us genuinely feel unjudged?

In the past, I sometimes chose coaches I was slightly in awe of or wanted to please. I wanted them to think I was impressive. I felt embarrassed about certain parts of myself and performed competence in the very place where I was supposed to stop performing. That was not especially useful.

So perhaps, when choosing a coach, the questions are not only: How impressive are they? What qualifications do they have? Who else have they worked with? Those things may matter, but so do these:

Can I tell this person the truth? Do I feel I need to impress them? Could I tell them the thing I am least proud of without fearing I will fall in their estimation? Are they helping me become more myself, or encouraging me to become someone else? Can they stay curious when the answer is complicated? Can they help me look at the mess without judging it or pretending it does not smell? And is there room for joy?

Because personal and professional development is hard. Coaching can be hard. Leading people is hard. Changing your life is hard. But it does not all have to be solemn.

I am turning 40, and I am also still, in several important respects, a child. I like silliness and cracking jokes. I believe there is energy in joy. You can have fun and be successful. You can laugh and still do serious work. You can create an excellent culture without everybody looking as though they are waiting outside the headteacher’s office.

A coaching relationship should be comfortable, but not so comfortable that nothing is challenged: safe enough to stop performing and challenging enough to help you move.

Learning to read the terrain

I spend a great deal of time walking and coaching in the Ashdown Forest. One thing the Forest keeps reminding me is that routes change. Bracken grows, trees fall, and ground that was easy to cross in winter can look completely different by summer.

The useful skill is not finding one flawless path and staying on it forever. It is learning to notice where you are, adapt when the conditions change and recognise when you are still following a route you no longer want to be on.

This is much of what I do with clients. I do not perfect them, fix them or hand them my map and insist they follow it.

We look honestly at the terrain: what is working, what keeps catching them, what they are carrying, what they are trying to prove, what needs cleaning up, what can be put down, what they actually want and what another path might make possible.

Perhaps there is a hole you are tired of falling into. Perhaps you recognise it now but still cannot seem to walk around it. Perhaps you have become extremely competent at surviving inside it. Perhaps your jars are still neatly arranged, but you know how much energy it takes to stop them falling. Or perhaps you are beginning to suspect that the road you have been trying so hard to master is not one you particularly want to be on.

You do not need to wait until you are more confident, healed, disciplined, organised or certain. You are allowed to lead while still learning, make changes before you have all the answers, ask for help, be successful and unresolved, and be good at what you do without pretending everything is always good in the hood.

Perhaps there is a hole you are tired of revisiting, or a shelf you are exhausted from keeping upright. This is exactly the kind of work I do with clients: looking honestly at what keeps happening, what it is costing you and what a more workable way forward might look like, without trying to turn you into a perfectly polished version of somebody else.

Perhaps having your shit together was never the right ambition. The world has lied to us: the shit will never be together.

Maybe the goal is simply to know where it is, to build a mental map of the shit and the holes, walk in it a little less often as we get older, clean up what belongs to us, and try to get to the end of each day not covered in poo.