Coaching Didn't Work for Me — Until I Understood Why
I have sat across from some of the best coaches in the country.
I did the journaling. The accountability calls. The values clarification exercises. I wrote my vision on index cards and read them out loud before bed.
For a few years, none of it moved. Not really. I would show up, do the work, feel a brief moment of clarity — and then watch myself make the same foggy decisions, the same fatigued retreats, the same inexplicable withdrawals from things I said I wanted.
I am a physician. Board-certified. I spend my clinical days helping women think more clearly about their health. And I could not see what was happening to me until I looked back at it through a clinical lens years later.
Perimenopause was running the show. Not my coach. Not my vision board. My hormones.
Coaching is a precision tool. It requires a certain kind of mental and emotional capacity to work on. And for a significant number of women in their late thirties, forties, and early fifties, that capacity is compromised in ways they cannot name.
Brain fog is not just a productivity problem. It is a neurological one. The same estrogen receptors that regulate mood, memory, and executive function are the ones being destabilized during perimenopause. Sleep disruption — which begins years before most women recognize any other symptom — chips away at the prefrontal cortex’s capacity for reflection, discernment, and planning. Anxiety that seems to come from nowhere is often not a mindset issue. It is an inflammatory response with a hormonal origin.
Coaching asks you to think clearly, reflect honestly, and act with intention. Perimenopause makes all three harder. That is physiology, not a character flaw.
In my clinical practice, I stopped being surprised by how many high-performing women describe the same arc.
At the top of their field. Years of personal development work. Deep self-knowledge. And then somewhere in their early forties, things start to feel effortful in ways they cannot quite explain. They stop trusting their own judgment. They make decisions they later describe as “not like me.” Some turn down opportunities. Some blow up partnerships. Some quietly scale back and tell themselves it was a choice.
A lot of them went to coaching during this period. Some found it helpful in the short term. Many told me something felt missing — like they could see the insight but could not hold it. Like the work was not sticking.
That is the perimenopause gap. The insight gets in. The biology does not cooperate with acting on it.
I am not arguing against coaching. The opposite. I recommend it, but coaches who understand this will be more effective with a whole category of clients who currently feel like they are failing the process.
If you are working with someone who is smart, motivated, self-aware — and the work is not sticking — ask about her sleep. Ask about her menstrual cycle. Ask if she has noticed changes in how she handles stress over the last two or three years. Not because you are her doctor. Because you are paying attention to the whole person.
The coaches who learn to spot the signs and say “this might be worth looking at with your physician” are going to have clients who actually move. Not because the coaching changed, but because the person is finally in a state where coaching can land.
This is a gap between two disciplines that have been operating in separate rooms for too long. Closing it does not diminish either one.
Your most stuck client might not need a different framework. She might need a different doctor.