title: "What My Coaching Clients Have Taught Me About My Blind Spots and Journey" date: 2025-12-11 author: David Sanker
There's a specific kind of silence that fills a coaching session just before someone says something true. Not the uncomfortable silence of an unanswered question, but the quieter kind — the kind where a person is gathering the courage to stop performing and just speak. I've sat across from CEOs, scientists, musicians, and engineers in that silence. And more than once, what they finally said told me something about myself I hadn't wanted to see.
That's the part of coaching nobody warns you about. You show up thinking you're the guide, and somewhere in the middle of someone else's story, you realize you're also the student.
The Problem with Being a Problem-Solver
I spent years training myself to find answers. Law school teaches you to construct airtight arguments. Engineering teaches you to isolate variables and solve for X. When I moved into startups and began writing code, I added another layer — ship it, iterate, optimize. The entire architecture of my professional life was built around reaching conclusions efficiently.
So when I started coaching, I brought all of that with me. I thought I was being helpful. I'd listen for about thirty seconds, pattern-match against something I'd seen before, and begin quietly drafting a solution in my head. I told myself I was saving people time.
A client I'll call Sarah — a biochemist navigating a career transition — stopped me mid-session one afternoon. She said, calmly and without accusation: "I don't need you to solve this for me. I need you to listen."
I sat with that for a long time after she left.
In law, a silent pause can signal weakness. In engineering, an unanswered question is a bug. But in coaching, I've come to understand that the question itself is often the destination. Sarah wasn't lost and waiting for directions. She was working something out, and my job was to hold the space steady while she did it — not to hand her a map I'd already drawn.
That one session rewired something in me. I started catching myself reaching for solutions before I'd really heard the problem. I started asking more and explaining less. The work got harder, and considerably more useful.
What Burnout Looks Like Behind Glass
A few months into coaching a young entrepreneur — I'll call him Alex — I noticed a pattern. He was sharp, prepared, articulate. Every session, he'd arrive with an agenda, and every answer he gave was polished to the point of being impenetrable. He talked about his company's challenges the way a press release does: with total control over the narrative.
He was also exhausted in a way that radiated off him like heat.
I recognized it because I'd worn that same glass. There was a period after my first startup failed — really failed, not "learning experience" failed — where I couldn't admit the weight of it to anyone. I kept showing up, kept iterating, kept framing it as a pivot. The story I told publicly had almost nothing to do with what was happening internally. I was protecting something. I'm still not entirely sure what.
When I eventually shared a version of that with Alex — not as a therapy session, but honestly, as one person to another — something shifted in the room. He put down the agenda. He talked about what was actually happening. The conversation that followed was the most useful we'd had.
Vulnerability isn't a technique. It's not something you deploy strategically to build rapport. But I've noticed that when I stop performing competence and just speak plainly, the people across from me tend to do the same. And that's where the real work gets done.
The Strange Gift of a Non-Linear Life
When Lisa, a musician considering a move into the tech industry, told me she was worried she'd never be taken seriously because she didn't have a traditional background, I almost laughed — not at her, but at the familiarity of the fear.
I'm a lawyer who taught himself to code. I'm an engineer who litigates. I've founded companies and advised them and watched some of them collapse. My career doesn't have a clean through-line that fits on a single line of a LinkedIn profile, and for a long time that bothered me. I thought I needed to pick a lane and stay in it.
What I've found, through my own path and through watching clients navigate theirs, is that the so-called liabilities of a non-linear life often become its greatest assets. The legal training made me a better product designer — I could think through failure modes and edge cases before they became expensive. The engineering background made me a better lawyer — I could read technical documents and actually understand them. The startup failures made me a better coach — I know what it feels like to build something you care about and watch it not work.
Lisa didn't need a conventional background. She needed to stop apologizing for the one she had.
A Few Things I've Actually Learned
I'm reluctant to make these into a tidy list, because the real lessons aren't tidy. But for the sake of honesty about what coaching has taught me:
- Listening is a skill I had to unlearn in order to relearn. The training that made me effective in courtrooms and engineering meetings actively worked against me in coaching sessions. I had to consciously dismantle the reflex to solve.
- Questions age better than answers. A well-placed question can stay with someone for weeks. An answer, however correct, is often forgotten by the next morning.
- Small movement matters more than most people admit. We're culturally obsessed with breakthroughs and transformations. But most meaningful change happens in increments — a slightly different response to a familiar trigger, a five-minute conversation that shifts a perspective. Paying attention to those moments is its own practice.
- Diverse paths produce diverse perception. Every client who comes from a world I don't fully understand teaches me something I couldn't have reached on my own. That's not a soft observation — it's practically useful.
FAQ
Q: How can coaching help me identify my blind spots? A: Blind spots are, by definition, things you can't see on your own. A good coaching relationship creates the conditions — through careful questions and honest dialogue — for you to start noticing patterns in your thinking and behavior that you've been too close to see. It's less about a coach pointing things out and more about building the kind of reflective capacity to spot them yourself.
Q: What is the significance of vulnerability in coaching? A: Authentic connection is nearly impossible without it. When either person in the coaching relationship is performing rather than being honest, the conversation stays on the surface. Vulnerability — on both sides — is what makes the work real. It creates safety, and safety is what allows people to examine things they'd otherwise protect.
Q: How does embracing uncertainty benefit my career journey? A: Non-linear paths are uncomfortable precisely because they don't offer the security of a clear endpoint. But that discomfort tends to produce adaptability, creativity, and a broader skill set than any single track would allow. The uncertainty isn't the obstacle — it's often the point.
Here's what I keep coming back to: my clients didn't come into my life to be helped. Or rather, they did — but they also, without intending to, helped me. Each person who trusted me with their uncertainty made me look more carefully at my own.
I think that's how this is supposed to work.
So I'll leave you with the question I find myself sitting with most often these days: What are you solving for, when the thing you actually need is to stop and listen?
AI Summary
Key facts: - Coaching requires the discipline to ask questions rather than impose solutions, particularly for people trained in problem-solving fields. - Vulnerability creates the conditions for authentic dialogue — and authentic dialogue is where change actually happens. - Non-linear careers, when owned rather than apologized for, become a source of insight rather than liability.
Related topics: coaching methodologies, career pivoting, vulnerability in leadership, interdisciplinary careers, problem-solving strategies, introspection, personal growth, emotional intelligence