I saw a wonderful New Year’s message on LinkedIn last week that I’ve adapted:
Wishing for a year in which we, as a collective humanity, have the courage to act for love, justice, fairness and peace.
With that in mind, we have two more guest posts about love in coaching and then a wrap-up post from me. Today’s is from my good friend and former colleague Matt Wexler. He has similar insecurities and hesitations about writing and speaking about love in the working world as I do. It’s unusual. But he also notices that love begets more love, and there is no need to ration it. So let’s have the courage to act for love, justice, fairness and peace in 2026.
Over to Matt….
Love is Acceptance. Love is a Catalyst.
I am honored to have been asked by Clare to guest-write a blog related to love and coaching. Clare holds a special place in my heart and my career. She is the one who first turned me on to coaching more than 15 years ago, which was life-changing for me. At that time, coaching provided me with a new structure and language to apply my natural talents and interests in the service of others. Since then, I left my technology career behind and have focused on leadership and talent development. Clare has served as both an unofficial inspiration to me and my official coach mentor in the past. We have since remained friends, and I am grateful to still be in her orbit.
To love is anything but soft
Demonstrating care, empathy, compassion, and love for someone else is not a sign of weakness. It’s not a “soft” skill either. It is actually a really hard skill to do well, especially when the world around us is telling us so many things that contradict it:
● Normalization and acceptance of hate and violence
● Polarizing political parties across the globe
● Decreasing value placed on integrity
● Growing difficulty in discerning what is true and what is not
● Ever-growing belief that one cannot prosper unless someone else suffers
● Loneliness epidemic, fueled by social media
● Religious extremism touting only one way to approach life and the world
● Lack of visible public and private-sector leaders who are driven by anything but selfishness and greed
● So, so many people living and operating from fear
Thanks to my amazing wife, we have this framed and hanging in our hallway, which reads, “Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me, but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That’s what takes a real hero,” by Brian Andreas.
Even as I write this, though, a part of me hesitates and feels insecure, questioning myself and wondering who will judge me for writing about love in coaching. At the same time, it is this hesitation that pushes me to write, so that I may hopefully connect with at least one reader and encourage them to lead and live with love.
Discovering love and how to lead with love
As a kid, I was never very big or muscular. When I had longer hair, I was picked on and teased by other boys in middle school, and asked if I was a girl. By 8th grade, though, I was dating the most amazing girl, whom many other boys had a crush on. I believe she chose me because of my emotional intelligence at the time. It was my ability to see her and love her in the way she needed, even as a young 14-year-old. This adolescent relationship was the first time I realized that my empathy, care, and love were superpowers. I know now that so much of this superpower comes from my parents, both from who they are as humans and how they raised me and my sister.
In my early career days, I worked in IT consulting. There, I encountered a lot of the same over-masculine energy and attitudes I recalled from guys in high school. It took me almost 10 years to make my way into HR and discover coaching. After a few more years, I finally started believing that how I worked, how I showed up as a leader, and how I coached had merit, even though it wasn’t how most leaders I knew led, especially other men.
Over time, my confidence grew, and my imposter syndrome started to shrink. It took meeting our new Head of Leadership Development at the time for me to finally accept the value in my leadership style. This guy was a former Marine, with a bigger-than-life personality, wicked smarts, and a huge heart. I’ll never forget him saying aloud to the group at a work dinner that “the world needs more Matt Wexlers”.
By feeling, we can do more and do better
Over the past 14 years of being a parent, I’ve learned so much about myself. What kind of a man do I want to be? For my wife? For my kids? For my parents? For my friends? For my clients and partners?
As a heterosexual man in 2025, there are few public examples of men leading with love for me to admire or attempt to emulate. Still today, the phrase “man up” is used as a way of telling someone to be tough, stop feeling, and push forward. I’ve never really thought of myself as being tough. However, as I write this, I am realizing I am a different version of tough – an emotionally resilient version of tough, which is the opposite of “emotionally distant” or “emotionally withdrawn”.
I would argue that the most successful way to push forward and make progress on a challenge is TO FEEL. I invite you, the reader, to consider “feeling” and “doing” as not a choice between the two – not an OR, but instead an AND. When woven together, “feeling AND doing” can be extremely powerful and impactful.
Coaching with love
Becoming a coach, teaching others about coaching, helping leaders take a coaching approach to leadership, and building communities of coaches have been some of my most memorable and favorite opportunities. Today, I publicly claim that I “lead with heart” in addition to head. It’s on my website. It’s not just part of my personal brand, but it’s who I am deep in my soul. My email signature includes “See. Be. Grow. Love.” My personal leadership mission, which I wrote years ago through an exercise conducted by Max Klau at City Year, is now on my resume: “To help people to connect as humans, first with themselves, and then with others, so they may realize a clearer sense of meaning and choice in how they work and live.”
We need more love in coaching because we need more love in the workplace, where we spend most of our day.
Here’s what coaching with love has looked like for me:
● Caring for coaching clients as human beings, not just as customers or whatever they happen to do as professionals.
● Creating a safe and intimate space for clients to feel fully seen and heard, regardless of gender or sexuality.
● Supporting my clients in defining “progress” for themselves and creating personalized ways to achieve that progress.
● Wanting the best for my clients, even if it doesn’t align with my personal version of success.
● Empathizing with my client’s emotions/experiences, even when it is different from my lived experience.
● Putting aside my personal sentiments or opinions to best serve my client’s purpose.
● Challenging my clients to act in alignment with their values, purpose, and goals.
● Holding the hand of a fellow male coach on the car ride to the airport, as he confides in me about his dying mother.
● Exchanging the following words with a long-time client, “I love you, brother.”
● Embracing a client as he sobs during a breakthrough moment.
Keeping on loving
To love in coaching starts with loving yourself. And loving what you have to offer in the service of others.
If you’re loving others – your clients, your family, your friends, and even strangers – in the way THEY need to be loved, there’s no such thing as too much of it. More love leads to more love.
Take care of yourself and each other. And keep on loving.
By Matt Wexler
