Coaching an overwhelmed client

“For fast acting relief, try slowing down.” — Lily Tomlin

Amy arrived on screen for her coaching session. Her eyes were full of tears; she looked agitated and restless, not wanting to engage; and she was looking at me as though she was waiting for permission to be there and let her emotions flow.

As we can see from this example, our coaching sessions will not always start from a neutral place. In fact, more and more, our coaching clients come to us in a state of overwhelm driven by an experience of organisational trauma.

Organisational trauma refers to collective psychological injury experienced by a group within a workplace. It can stem from:

• Sudden redundancies, change or restructuring
• The experience of chronic stress or toxic leadership
• Harassment or discrimination
• Scandal, litigation or public failures
• Systemic neglect or cultural silencing.

It’s not just about a traumatic event. It’s about the ongoing emotional residue that shapes how our coaching clients relate to authority, leaders, one another, and their work. Within our current geopolitical context, it seems experience of organisational trauma within coaching will only continue to increase.

Below is a useful model that helps explain what is happening to our coaching clients in these experiences of overwhelm: Daniel Siegel’s Window of Tolerance.

The Three Zones

1. Within the Window (Integration — Optimal Arousal)

When a coachee is within this window, they feel balanced and will be in a state of coherence. They will think clearly, process emotions, respond flexibly, and stay present.

1. The coachee will feel safe, calm, and in control.
2. They will reflect, process emotions, and engage socially.
3. They will experience their stressors as manageable, and their coping skills will be accessible.

2. Above the Window (Chaos — Hyperarousal)

When stress or an experience of organisational trauma pushes the coachee outside the upper limit of their window, they enter hyperarousal. This is often marked by:

1. A state characterized by fight or flight responses.
2. Anxiety, panic, anger, or a feeling of being overwhelmed.
3. An overactivated nervous system (the person may appear reactive or impulsive).

3. Below the Window (Rigidity — Hypoarousal)

Stress or an experience of organisational trauma may also push a coachee below the window, they will go into hypoarousal:

1. This is a shutdown or freeze response, where the the nervous system appears to go offline. You may experience the coachee as being ‘stuck.’
2. Coachees may present feeling numb, disconnected, fatigued, or depressed.
3. It can involve dissociation — disconnection from their experience or a sense of emotional “flatness.”

The size of someone’s window can vary depending on life experiences, especially the experience of stress and personal or organisational trauma. Chronic stress or trauma can constrict and narrow the window, making it easier for a coachee to be pushed into Chaos — hyperarousal or Rigidity — hypoarousal.

By understanding this model, we can see that Amy arrived for coaching in a chaotic state: she was overwhelmed, experiencing a challenge as a result of a potential redundancy that was currently too great for her internal system. This meant that her resources had been overwhelmed and she had lost connection with herself and her resources.

In these moments as a coach, we may have an impulse to be helpful and start to explore the coachee’s experience to help them find a solution. In fact, what we need to do in these moments is pause, slow down and resource, resource, resource the coachee.

This means learning techniques that can help the coachee regulate themselves back into their window and a coherent state. Once we experience them as being there, we can then turn to the exploration and start the coaching.

If they are unable to do this, it means coaching may not be the required helping relationship — for more about this, I would recommend reading our blog post on managing a therapeutic boundary within coaching.

It is important to know that interventions such as guiding a mindfulness exercise will not be helpful in these moments, as the coachee is overwhelmed — and by encouraging them to tune into their present moment experiencing, you will be dialling up their experience of chaos and risk them becoming even further overwhelmed.

Techniques to help overwhelmed clients

Here are a few techniques I recommend that coaches learn to help regulate an overwhelmed coachee:

1. Grounding techniques such as supporting the coachee to continually bring their attention and awareness to the felt sense of their feet on the floor — and their experience of feeling grounded.
2. Using external sensory anchors: guiding the coachee to pay attention to what they are seeing or hearing in the present moment, and to stay with the experience of what they are seeing or hearing.
3. Coherent breathing techniques: guiding a coachee to focus on the experience of their breathing, encouraging them to place their hand on their belly so they can feel their breath in their diaphragm, and introducing a count of three or five for the inbreath and a count of three or five for the outbreath. (It’s important that the count is balanced and the same goes for the inbreath or outbreath.) After a period of time, the coach can then encourage the coachee to extend the count of the exhalation to help engage their parasympathetic nervous system.

A final and important consideration is of course your own capacity as a coach to sit and be with the coachee’s overwhelm. If you have not built your capacity to be with stronger emotional responses — as we know, emotions are contagious — you are likely to become overwhelmed yourself. To help you with reflect further on how you are building your own capacity we could recommend reading our post on grounding exercises for coaches.

Sources:

• The Mindful Therapist by Daniel Siegel.