For years I believed coaching was remedial, and I was the VP signing the budgets.
Two lists lived in my head: coaching for the struggling (often a kindness before a hard exit), and executive coaches for the C-suite (filed under perk). Fixing or pampering. And privately: not for people like me, because I'm managing fine.
Two findings dismantled this, and I offer them because the belief is common, quiet and expensive.
Finding one: the usage data ran backwards
Auditing who actually used development support when offered, the heavy users weren't the strugglers. With irritating consistency they were the best people in the building: already performing, already self-aware, treating outside perspective as standard equipment the way athletes do. The strugglers went twice and drifted. The broader evidence agrees: meta-analyses of workplace coaching (Theeboom and colleagues among them) find solid effects on performance and goal attainment, not concentrated in low performers; top-of-scale people often improve more, because they implement faster.
The pattern generalises past coaching, and it's worth stating as a rule: the people most likely to buy an outside eye are the people who least obviously need one, and this is not a paradox. Seriousness about performance is exactly what makes someone treat perspective as equipment rather than confession.
Finding two: the jar problem
Then I hit my own wall: a role where the usual gears weren't biting. I did what managing-fine people do, the same things harder, until a blunt friend sat me in front of a coach. Second session, she asked what I was actually optimising for. I couldn't answer. I had advised hundreds of people on their careers and couldn't answer the foundational question about my own.
You can't read the label from inside the jar. That's geometry, not deficiency, and it applies at every level of talent, which is why the calibre of the person doesn't exempt them. Every protocol in this series that involves seeing yourself accurately (the reputation audit, day 11; the verdict extraction, day 9; the belief decomposition, day 17) runs better with an outside eye on it, for the same geometric reason.
The test
"Managing fine" may be the most expensive phrase in professional life, because fine is precisely the altitude where perspective changes trajectories: there's still time, room and optionality. Crisis support is rescue; fine-support is compounding. So the test, for a quiet Saturday: what are you currently managing fine that no outside eye has ever examined? Answer honestly, and notice any flicker of defensiveness as you do, because defensiveness around a question is usually the question.
Your assignment
No task beyond the test. Write your answer down; it's a candidate for question three of tomorrow's board meeting (day 21), and for something more structured if you choose.
Talk soon, Yasar
P.S. If the answer landed somewhere specific, that's a good 15 minutes: https://ovdlab.com/book/team/strategy-discovery-call/15min
