Maryam has hit every goal she set with her coach.
In January she wanted a regional role. By April she had it. In May she wanted to delegate more, and she built a team that runs without her. In September she wanted to stop working weekends, and she has. Her coach is good. The sessions are crisp. Every quarter there's a new target and, a few months later, a tick next to it.
And on a Sunday afternoon, with nothing urgent left to do, Maryam sits on her balcony overlooking the marina and feels exactly the way she felt before any of it. The same tight chest. The same sense that she's one mistake away from being found out. The same quiet question: is this it?
Nothing went wrong in her coaching. It just worked on a different layer from the one she was asking about.
What is transformational coaching?
Transformational coaching works on who the client is being, not only on what they do next. It looks beneath goals to the identity, beliefs and patterns producing the client's results, and helps change those, so that the change holds across every goal rather than just the current one.
Goal coaching asks "what do you want, and how will you get there?" Transformational coaching also asks "who has been getting you here, and do they need to keep driving?"
How is it different from coaching for goals?
The two aren't rivals. Most good coaching moves between them.
Goal-focused coaching, sometimes called transactional or performance coaching, is about momentum. A clear target, a plan, accountability, progress. It's valuable, and for many clients it's exactly what they need: a decision made, a skill built, a quarter won.
Transformational coaching is about coherence. It notices when the same pattern keeps showing up across different goals: the client who reaches every target and still feels like a fraud, the leader who delegates everything except the anxiety, the founder who's built three companies the same way and burned out three times. More goals won't change that, because the goals were never the problem. The person pursuing them is running an old set of instructions.
A simple way to tell them apart: if the client achieves the goal and the presenting feeling disappears, it was a goal problem. If the client achieves the goal and the feeling stays, it was never about the goal.
If you'd like to understand why so many coaches stall at exactly this layer, our free book, Why 88% of Life Coaches Fail, goes into it. Or read on.
What does transformational coaching actually work on?
Identity, mostly. The selves a client built to get through earlier chapters of life, and still lives through now.
At RSCI we describe the work in two movements, taken from the RS Method that Robert Simic has built over twenty years of practice. The first is an unbecoming: the client sets down the survival identities and old charges that have been running their choices, often without their knowing. The second is a remembering: what's left when those come off isn't a new personality, but the person who was there before them.
Notice the direction. Most coaching adds: new habits, new goals, new behaviours. Transformational work in this sense subtracts. It's less about building a better version of the client than about removing what was never them, so that the person they already are can lead.
That's why the moments that matter in this kind of session often look nothing like progress. A client goes quiet. A client cries. A client says something they've never said out loud. Those moments ask more of the coach than any goal-setting conversation does, which is why coaching presence sits at the centre of how we train.
What does it ask of the coach?
More than technique. It asks the coach to have been through it themselves.
You can't hold a client steady through an identity-level shift if your own identity still wobbles when the room gets intense. A client whose story touches your unresolved material will pull you out of presence and into managing yourself, and the client feels it. That's the gap we described in NLP coaching vs life coaching: a technique is only as good as the nervous system running it.
This is why RSCI is built on what we call the Inner Work First Principle: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. You do your own work first, inside the cohort, under supervision. By the time you sit opposite a client like Maryam, you've already been held through your own version of her Sunday afternoon.
If that's the kind of coach you want to become, the next step is a free conversation with Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach. She has met thousands of practitioners, and she'll tell you plainly whether we're the right fit for where you want to go. You can book it through our apply page.
Who is transformational coaching for?
Not everyone, and not all the time.
A client who needs to prepare for a board presentation next week needs focus, structure and practice, not an exploration of their childhood. Forcing depth on someone who came for a clear, practical outcome is its own kind of bad coaching.
Transformational coaching fits the client who has already tried the practical route and found that it works and doesn't last. The senior leader who has done every leadership programme and still micromanages under pressure. The founder who keeps rebuilding the same problem in each new company. The professional who has achieved what they set out to achieve and feels strangely absent from their own success. In Dubai, it's often the expat who rebuilt a whole life in a new city and discovers they brought the old patterns with them.
It's also not therapy. It works with healthy, functioning people on identity and patterns. When a client shows signs of something clinical, such as depression, trauma symptoms or thoughts of self-harm, a responsible coach refers them to a qualified professional and, where appropriate, keeps coaching alongside that care rather than instead of it.
How can I tell which layer a client needs?
Use these five questions in your next intake or discovery conversation. They take about ten minutes and they'll tell you whether you're looking at a goal or a pattern.
- "When did you first feel this way?" If the answer is "since this job started", it may be situational. If it's "as long as I can remember", you're probably looking at a pattern.
- "What have you already achieved that you thought would fix this?" A long list is a strong sign the issue isn't the next achievement.
- "What would you have to stop being to get what you want?" Listen for the identity that answers: the strong one, the reliable one, the one who never asks.
- "Where else in your life does this show up?" One area suggests a goal. Every area suggests a pattern.
- "If you got it tomorrow, what would you be afraid of?" The fear underneath the goal is usually the real coaching material.
Then notice what happens in you while they answer. If your instinct is to jump to an action plan, ask whether that's the client's need or your own discomfort with not knowing.
What should a transformational coach training give you?
Any coach can call themselves transformational. Before you choose a training, look for three things.
- Your own inner work, done first. Inside the training, under supervision, before you're trusted with a client's deeper material.
- A method for what's underneath. Not a list of powerful questions, but a coherent way of working with identity and patterns, so you know what you're looking at when a session goes deep.
- A credential stated accurately. If ICF matters to your clients, you should know exactly who designs, delivers and certifies the education and who awards the credential. At RSCI: The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the International Institute of Coaching & Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
That's how RSCI is built. Our razor puts the whole job in three lines: To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
And the practices our graduates build tend to grow on that foundation. Erin Kurt put it in one line: "My business literally tripled within 6 months."
You can read how the method works, and how we train it, on The Method.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Somewhere in your client list there's a Maryam: every goal ticked, and the same feeling on a Sunday afternoon. If you want to be the coach who can meet her there, start with a conversation. Book your free call with Sara.