What Is Trauma-Informed Executive Coaching?

What the term means, how coaching differs from therapy, and what to ask any coach before you hire one.

The email she’s rewritten four times

Molly is an illustrative composite, not a real client or a real executive. She’s 52, and she’s the chief operating officer of a regional credit union. It’s 9:40 on a Sunday night in February. She’s at her dining room table with her laptop open, a mug of peppermint tea gone cold beside a stack of printed slides, and the dog asleep on her feet. The email on her screen is short. It hands the quarterly forecast to her new deputy, a person she hired because he’s good at exactly this.

She’s rewritten it four times. The first version was two sentences. The fourth is three paragraphs, with a list of things to double-check and a line offering to “take a quick look before it goes anywhere.” She knows what that line means. It means the forecast will come back to her, and she’ll redo it at 11 p.m. on Wednesday, the way she’s done every forecast for six years.

She did a delegation exercise at a leadership program last spring. She liked it. She could teach it. She has the matrix saved on her desktop, color-coded, with this forecast sitting squarely in the “hand off” box. None of that is the problem, and she knows it isn’t. I know how to do this, she thinks. Why can’t I just send it?

She deletes the offer to take a quick look. Then she types it back in. The cursor sits there blinking, and the dog shifts on her feet, and she hasn’t decided yet.

If that scene sounds familiar, this guide is about the gap Molly is sitting in: the space between a strategy you understand and what actually happens when it’s time to use it. It explains what “trauma-informed” means, what coaching is and isn’t, and how to tell whether coaching, therapy or both might fit what you’re dealing with. It ends with questions you can ask any coach before you hire one.

One note before we start. I’m a licensed therapist, and I also work as an executive coach. Those are different services with different purposes, and I’ll be specific about the difference throughout. This article is general education. It isn’t coaching, therapy or individualized advice, and the examples are illustrations, not people.

This article is educational and developmental in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individualized care from a licensed clinician, and reading it doesn’t establish a therapist-client relationship. If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, visit findahelpline.com for local crisis resources.

What “trauma-informed” means

“Trauma-informed” gets used loosely, so it helps to start with a public framework. One useful framework comes from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the federal agency known as SAMHSA. SAMHSA describes what it looks like for a program, organization or system to be trauma-informed.

Notice what that definition is about. SAMHSA is describing programs and systems, such as clinics, schools, agencies and the organizations that run them. It isn’t describing executive coaching. These definitions aren’t studies establishing the effectiveness of a particular executive-coaching program. When I apply the idea to coaching in this article, that’s my own application of a public framework, and it isn’t trauma treatment.

What carries over, as I use it, is the stance more than a technique. A trauma-informed approach doesn’t start from the question “What’s wrong with this person?” It starts from the assumption that the way someone works, reacts or holds back may make sense in light of what they’ve lived through, and that the setting itself can either help or get in the way.

For a senior leader, that shift can matter. It’s one thing to hear that you have a delegation problem. It’s another to be asked, with some curiosity, what handing off the forecast feels like at 9:40 on a Sunday night, and what you’re bracing for when you imagine it going wrong.

What coaching is, and what it isn’t

Coaching also gets used loosely, so here’s a definition from a professional body for coaches.

The same guide is direct about limits. It says a coach doesn’t diagnose and doesn’t offer treatment, and that a coach should refer a client to a mental health professional when the client’s needs go beyond the coach’s qualifications, experience or contract. It also notes that a coach may explore a client’s past, family life or emotions in service of understanding the stories the client tells about the present and future. So the line isn’t whether the past comes up. It’s purpose and scope: coaching works toward goals you and the coach agree on, and diagnosis and treatment belong with a licensed clinician.

When a licensed clinician works with you as a coach, the engagement’s purpose, scope and agreement are coaching, not therapy. It helps for that to be spelled out clearly at the start, so you both know what the work is and isn’t.

So what might “trauma-informed” add to coaching? As I use the phrase, it means the coaching takes seriously that some patterns at work have roots outside of work. It means pacing and choice matter. It means a coach notices when something is bigger than coaching can responsibly hold, says so plainly, and suggests talking with a licensed clinician who can do a proper assessment.

It doesn’t mean the coach decides what happened to you. It doesn’t mean the coach labels your reactions. And it doesn’t mean coaching is a cheaper or faster version of therapy. If what you need is treatment, coaching isn’t a substitute for it.

There’s more on the difference between the two in my piece on therapy vs. executive coaching and in my piece on when coaching fits and when trauma therapy does.

Why knowing the plan isn’t always enough

If you’re reading this, you may not be short on insight. You may have read the books. Maybe you’ve done the leadership program. You could probably tell someone exactly what to do in the meeting, in the one-on-one, in the email to the deputy. The strategy may not be the missing piece. The moment arrives, and something else shows up first. What that something is, and where it comes from, differs from person to person, and an article can’t tell you which it is for you.

It can look like over-explaining. It can look like saying yes to the fourth committee, or softening feedback until it doesn’t say anything, or quietly redoing a direct report’s work at 11 p.m. From the outside, it reads as a skills gap. From the inside, it can feel more like a reflex, fast and familiar and oddly hard to argue with.

Sometimes a reflex like that was learned early. For some people, doing everything yourself, keeping the peace, or staying one step ahead of someone else’s mood may have made sense in the family or setting where they grew up. When that’s the case, a habit can outlast the setting and show up decades later in a boardroom, looking like a leadership style. That’s one possibility among several, not an explanation for anyone in particular.

I want to be careful here. Not every hard moment at work is about the past. Sometimes the workload really is too big, the boss really is unreasonable, or the culture really does punish the thing you’re being coached to do. And I can’t tell from an article where any one person’s patterns come from. That takes a real conversation, and for some questions, a clinical assessment.

Here’s what that gap can look like in a different room.

Cathy is a second illustrative composite. She’s 49, and she’s general counsel at a mid-sized software company. It’s a Thursday afternoon in April, raining hard against the windows of a hotel conference room where the leadership team is on its second day offsite. There’s a flip chart at the front covered in someone else’s handwriting, a bowl of wrapped mints on the table, and a plan on the screen that she thinks has a serious legal problem in it.

She’s been clear in her head about it since lunch. She wrote the point on the back of her agenda in three lines. When the CEO asks for reactions, she raises her hand, and what comes out is this: “I think this is a really strong direction, and I love the energy behind it, and I’m probably just being the cautious lawyer here, but I wondered if maybe at some point we might want to look at one small thing.” The CEO nods and moves on. Nobody asks what the small thing was.

In the parking garage afterward, she sits in her car with the engine off and the rain loud on the concrete above her. She opens the notes app on her phone and types the three lines she didn’t say. She reads them twice. Why did I do that? she thinks. I’ve said harder things to opposing counsel. Then she puts the phone in the cup holder, and she doesn’t send the note to anyone, and she doesn’t start the car right away.

Cathy doesn’t need a lecture on assertive communication. She could give one. What might help her, if she chose coaching, is room to get curious about what happens between the three lines on the agenda and the words that came out, in service of a goal she sets, such as saying the hard thing at the next offsite. If she chose therapy, the work would start with an assessment of what she needs and could take in her work, her relationships and her history. Those are different services with different purposes, and she gets to decide what kind of help she’s asking for.

What a trauma-informed stance can look like in coaching

The label alone doesn’t tell you how a coach works. Here are practices I’d ask about, drawn from the plain logic of SAMHSA’s framing.

• Curiosity before correction. Instead of “You need to delegate more”, the question becomes “What happens for you when you picture handing this off?” The goal is to understand the pattern before trying to change it.
• Choice about pace and depth. You decide how much of your history, if any, is relevant to the work. A coach can ask. You don’t have to answer.
• Attention to the setting, not just the person. Sometimes the pattern is yours. Sometimes it’s a reasonable response to an unreasonable system. Often it’s some of both.
• Clear edges. The coach is honest about what coaching can’t do, and names it when a question belongs with a licensed clinician instead.
• The work stays tied to your actual job. The forecast, the offsite, the board meeting, the feedback conversation you’ve been putting off. Coaching is practical, and it should stay that way.

None of that promises a result. Coaching can’t guarantee that Molly sends the email or that Cathy says the three lines next time. What it can offer is a structured place to notice what’s happening, try something different, and see what you learn.

If the hardest part for you is letting go of the work itself, my piece on why delegating can feel so hard looks at that more closely. If the softening and over-explaining sound familiar, my piece on people-pleasing goes further into it.

Both/And: you can want to grow and still protect your capacity

You may carry an unspoken rule: that any limit is a career risk. Leaving at a reasonable hour looks like less commitment. Saying no to the committee looks like not being a team player. Handing off the forecast looks like not caring about the numbers.

That rule isn’t irrational. In some workplaces, it’s close to accurate. But when it runs everything, it stops being a strategy and starts costing more than it gives back. It’s there in the Sunday nights at the dining room table, in the evenings that belong to the inbox, in the weekend that never quite feels like a weekend.

Both/And means you don’t have to pick between caring about your career and caring about your capacity. You can want the bigger role and want your evenings back. You can be excellent at your job and still let someone else do part of it. You can hold high standards and still send the email without the offer to take a quick look.

You’re also allowed to find this hard. Holding both usually takes practice. It often starts as an idea you agree with and only slowly becomes something you can reach for in the middle of a tense meeting.

The Systemic Lens: some of the pressure isn’t yours to fix

It would be easy to read everything above as a list of personal habits to correct. That would miss part of the picture. The terrain senior women work on has its own features, and some of what looks like an individual pattern is a reasonable response to that ground.

Joan C. Williams, a legal scholar and Distinguished Professor of Law (Emerita) at UC Law San Francisco, has written about patterns of gender bias at work. Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research summarizes two of them. One she calls “prove it again”, where women may be asked for more evidence of competence than similarly situated men. Another is “the tightrope”, which includes what the article calls “office housework”, described as “the important work that keeps an office running but that does not advance one’s career”.

That lands in ordinary places. It’s the meeting notes you end up taking, the new hire you end up onboarding, the conflict you end up smoothing, on top of the job you were actually hired to do. It’s the extra slide of evidence you add to a recommendation a colleague might make in one sentence. It’s the tiredness that doesn’t lift on a Saturday.

Think about Cathy at the offsite. Part of what made the three lines hard to say may have been hers. Part of it may have been the room: a long history of the lawyer being cast as the brake, and a sense that one more objection would cost her something the next objection would need. Coaching can help her sort out which parts are which. It can’t make the room fair.

Naming this doesn’t fix it. What it can do is change the question. Instead of “What’s wrong with me that I can’t keep up?” the question becomes “How much of this is mine, how much belongs to the system I’m in, and what do I want to do about each?” A trauma-informed stance in coaching, as I use the phrase, keeps both parts of that question on the table.

If this is part of what you’re carrying, my piece on the leadership double bind looks at the direct-or-warm trap, and my guide to CEO loneliness looks at what it’s like at the top.

Coaching, therapy or both: how to tell

An article can’t answer this for you. Choosing therapy, and choosing what kind, is something a licensed clinician works out with you through an assessment. What I can offer here are a few questions that may help you think about which conversation you’re looking for.

• What’s the main thing you want help with? If it’s a specific work challenge, like delegating, giving feedback, a new role or a hard decision, coaching may fit. If it’s your mood, sleep, relationships, or memories that keep intruding, that’s a reason to talk with a licensed clinician.
• How much is this affecting the rest of your life? If the pattern is showing up at work and home, getting heavier, or making it hard to function, start with a clinician, who can assess what’s going on.
• Are you looking for clinical care, or for help with a specific professional goal? Therapy is clinical care, and it can address present-day work and relationships as well as history. Coaching works toward goals you agree on, and it doesn’t diagnose or treat.
• Are you already in therapy? Some people see a therapist and a coach at the same time, for different purposes. If you do, it helps to be clear with each about what you’re working on.

If you’re a woman leading at the top of an organization and wondering about therapy specifically, my piece on therapy for women CEOs talks through what that support can look like. For a side-by-side look at the options available to senior professionals, see my decision guide to therapy, coaching and EAP.

Questions to ask any coach before you hire one

Whether you’re considering me or someone else, these are fair questions to ask, and a good coach will be glad you asked them.

• What’s your training, and what’s your license, if any? Ask what the credential is, who issued it, and whether it’s a coaching credential, a clinical license, or both. A clinical license doesn’t mean the coaching engagement is therapy.
• What do you mean when you say “trauma-informed”? Listen for a plain answer about stance and limits, not a promise about outcomes.
• What won’t you work on in coaching? A good answer names clear edges, such as not diagnosing, not treating, and not processing traumatic memories.
• What happens if something comes up that’s beyond coaching? Ask how they’d raise it with you, and whether they’d suggest a clinical assessment.
• How will we decide what we’re working on, and how will we know if it’s helping? You should have a say in both.
• If my company is paying, what, if anything, gets shared with them? Ask who the sponsor is, what they’ll receive, and get the answer written into the coaching agreement before you start. Ask, rather than assume, how confidentiality works in coaching.
• What does the agreement say about scheduling, fees and ending the work? Read it before you sign it.

You’re allowed to take your time with these. You’re also allowed to decide that a coach isn’t the right fit, even if they’re very good.

Leading from where you are

Molly’s email is still sitting in her drafts. Cathy’s three lines are still in her notes app. For both of them, knowing what to do and being able to do it haven’t caught up with each other yet.

If you’re in a similar gap, you get to decide what kind of help you want with it, if any. Whether that’s coaching, therapy, both, or something on your own, you get to choose it, and you get to go at a pace that makes sense for your life.

If you take one thing from this guide, I hope it’s this: the question isn’t only “What should I do?” The more useful question may be “What happens in me when it’s time to do it, and what kind of help do I want with that?” That’s a question you’re allowed to take seriously.

If you’d like to talk about which kind of support might fit, you don’t have to figure it out alone.

Warmly,
Annie.