The pressure is building. Here's what coaches are seeing
Last week, I facilitated a workshop with executive coaches from completely different worlds.
Finance, healthcare, technology, startups, the NGO sector. Different clients, different contexts, different continents. And something that made the conversation particularly interesting, some of the people in the room are headhunters as well as coaches. People who see both the market and the human side of what is happening right now. Who know what organisations say they want, and who also sit with people in the quiet of a coaching session and hear what is actually going on underneath.
What emerged from that conversation was striking. Not just new things surfacing, but familiar pressures from 2025 that have not resolved. They have compounded. And sitting underneath all of it was a quieter, more human signal. People are asking for community. They want to feel less alone in what they are carrying. They want to be listened to.
If any of that resonates, this newsletter is for you.
The most capable people in the room
Something coaches across every sector are noticing is this. The people who appear to be struggling most right now are not the ones who were already on the edge. They are the ones who were holding everything together. The committed, reliable, and the ones who stayed when colleagues left and absorbed what they could not carry.
Most of those people describe what they are feeling as a personal failing. A sign that something in them has shifted.
But what coaches are observing is a pattern. Not only individual stories, but a pattern playing out across organisations, across sectors, across the world. That distinction matters.
A different question about resilience
Resilience has been the answer to everything for years now. And most people have been resilient. Stretched and asked to return to their original shape, again and again.
But something that surfaced in that room is perhaps worth sitting with. Resilience, as a concept, may itself be contributing to the exhaustion by keeping people in a permanent recovery mode rather than helping them move forward into something new. Always bouncing back. Never actually arriving somewhere different.
The question that coaches are increasingly exploring with people is not how do you get back. It is where do you actually want to go next. That is a subtly but significantly different conversation.
Going quiet is not always what it looks like
Coaches are also noticing that some people, particularly those in senior roles, are pulling back. Staying smaller than they have before. Not raising their heads. And the conversation in that room was about whether that is always the problem it appears to be.
Knowing when to protect your energy, when to wait, and when to go inward are not necessarily signs of disengagement. Sometimes they are signs of someone reading their environment carefully and responding accordingly. The more useful question might not be why someone has gone quiet, but what it would take for them to feel ready to come back out.
The tensions in the room that are worth naming
Two things came up that I have not stopped thinking about.
The first is generational. Different generations are not just working differently. They are operating from fundamentally different beliefs about what work is for, what loyalty means, and what a career is supposed to look like. The friction that creates in teams and organisations is real. Coaches with headhunter experience in the room noted that this shows up on both sides of the hiring conversation too.
The second is that the landscape for navigating work has genuinely shifted. This came through in coaching conversations across every sector represented in the room. How people find opportunity, how they build credibility, how visible they are, all of this is changing. And not at the same pace for everyone.
On AI coaching: coaches reflect
Something that generated a real conversation in the room was the growing presence of AI coaching, particularly for people who are not at senior leadership level. And there is something genuinely positive about that. Making coaching more accessible matters. For someone who cannot afford or access a human coach, having a structured space for reflection is better than having nothing.
But there is a real limitation worth understanding. When you use AI as a coach, you are the prompter. You can only ask what you already know to ask. The questions you do not know you need, the ones that come from someone watching you carefully, reading between the lines, noticing what you are not saying, those require another person. A skilled coach sees things you may not see about yourself. That is not something a prompt can replicate.
AI coaching as a starting point, as a complement, as a bridge, yes. As a replacement for the relational work, that is where something important gets lost.
Something that stayed with me
One person walked into that room not knowing if they would find what they were looking for. By the end, they had. Not because anything had changed. Because others in the room had shared their experience, brought questions and hope with them and left it there.
That is what happens when people who are open and who are asking similar questions find each other. Not more noise. Not more doing. Just people, oriented in the same direction, choosing to show up for each other.
An Invitation
If reading this makes you feel like, "oooh, I want me some of that! I'd love to be part of a community exploring different questions."
Then join us on 9th April, and find out exactly where you stand
This is why Aga and I builtPurposeful Futures.
Because the questions coming out of that room about how to stay relevant, how to adapt, how to lead well in a world that keeps shifting, are better explored together than alone.
Our next Deep Dive is on 9th April at 2pm CET:Core Skills 2030 Sharpen What You Have, Enhance What Needs to be Built.
AI is reshaping every field. But the human capabilities that will matter most are not going away. They need to be cultivated, deliberately, now. When you sign up, you will receive a link to a short quiz that does two things. It will show you where your strengths already are. And it will give you a clearer picture of what to focus on next to stay ahead as the landscape keeps shifting.
You will leave knowing something specific and useful about yourself and how the community can support you.
Purposeful Futures is for purpose-driven professionals and curious graduates who want to think carefully about where the world is going and how they want to show up in it. 25 CHF a month. Cancel anytime. And if you join before 9th April, you will be in the room with some really amazing people.
With you,
Linda
Founder of Touching Distance
