Love in Coaching – Part Nine

Love as Revolutionary Practice

Throughout this series, I’ve explored what love looks like in coaching, how it manifests in supervision, the constraints we face in expressing it, and its role in creating psychological safety. I’ve attempted to do this with nuance, acknowledging the complexities and challenges involved.

But perhaps I’ve been too gentle.

Perhaps it’s time to name some uncomfortable truths and ask some challenging questions. Not to create controversy for its own sake, but because love sometimes demands that we speak difficult truths with clarity and conviction.

The deeper challenge

The challenges we face in bringing love into coaching aren’t merely personal preferences or cultural norms to be gently nudged. They represent something more fundamental: a systemic devaluing of human connection in favour of measurable outcomes and marketable techniques.

Let me be more direct:

• What if our professionalisation of coaching has inadvertently stripped away its heart? In our quest for legitimacy, accreditation, and commercial viability, we’ve constructed a professional identity that often marginalises love. We’ve created competency frameworks that can be measured and assessed but may miss the essential quality that makes coaching transformative.
• What if our emphasis on technique is actually a defence against vulnerability? It’s easier to learn a clever questioning technique than to develop the capacity for loving presence. It’s more comfortable to follow a model than to sit in the discomfort of genuine human connection. Perhaps our methodologies sometimes function as sophisticated ways to maintain distance.
• How much of what passes for “professionalism” is actually fear dressed up in a business suit? When we avoid words like “love” in professional contexts, is this truly about maintaining boundaries—or about protecting ourselves from the vulnerability that love demands?

Coaching and systems of dehumanisation

Here’s an uncomfortable question: How many of us are colluding with dehumanising systems while claiming to support human flourishing?

We work within organisations structured around profit maximisation and efficiency. These organisations often treat humans as resources to be optimised rather than whole persons to be valued. As coaches, we’re frequently asked to help people “adapt” to these systems—to become more resilient, productive, or aligned with organisational goals.

But what if the systems themselves are the problem?

What if our emphasis on resilience has become part of that problem? Rowan Gray recently shared a profound insight: “There are times when our capacity to be resilient is unhelpful.” He called this the “shadow side of resilience”—when we use resilience to become ‘ok’ in dysfunctional environments rather than taking a stand for something better.

This is a deeply uncomfortable thought for coaches. We help clients build resilience because we care about them. But what if, in doing so, we’re sometimes helping them tolerate the intolerable? What if we’re inadvertently supporting their adaptation to systems that damage their humanity?

Perhaps love demands something more radical than helping people cope. Perhaps it demands that we help them recognise when resilience has become the enemy of necessary change—when letting go, saying no, or walking away might be the most self-honouring choice.

What if, instead of helping people cope with dehumanising work environments, our role should be to create spaces where their full humanity can be recognised and honoured? What if love in coaching isn’t just a nice addition but an act of resistance against systems that reduce humans to their utility?

The silent complicity

Our professional bodies talk extensively about ethics but rarely about love. This isn’t a minor oversight—it’s a fundamental failure of vision.

The emphasis on “professional boundaries” can sometimes function as a convenient way to avoid the messiness of genuine human connection. It allows us to maintain the illusion of helping while keeping safe distance from the full reality of another person’s experience.

I wonder: Are we using “professionalism” as an excuse for emotional safety at the expense of authentic connection?

The radical alternative

What if the most revolutionary act in today’s business environment is creating space for love?

Not love as a soft, comfortable feeling, but love as:

• Fierce commitment to seeing the whole person
• Courageous challenge
• Radical honesty that risks disapproval
• Deep presence that doesn’t flinch from pain
• Stubborn insistence on human dignity in dehumanising systems

This kind of love isn’t about being nice. It’s about being real. It’s not about making coaching more pleasant; it’s about making it more honest, more challenging, and ultimately more transformative.

Challenging questions for coaches

I’d like to end this series with some questions that don’t have comfortable answers:

• How might your coaching change if you placed love at the centre rather than technique?
• What parts of your “professional identity” might actually be protecting you from the vulnerability that love requires?
• In what ways might you be colluding with systems that diminish human flourishing?
• When have you helped clients become more resilient to intolerable situations, rather than supporting them to recognise when “letting go” might be the more loving choice?
• What would it mean to make your coaching an act of loving resistance against dehumanisation?
• How comfortable are you using the word “love” with clients? What does your discomfort (if any) tell you?
• What price are you willing to pay for bringing love more explicitly into your coaching?
• What might you be afraid of losing if you centred love in your practice?

A final thought

Perhaps love in coaching isn’t just a nice idea or an added dimension. Perhaps it’s the essential quality without which coaching becomes merely another management technology, a sophisticated way of getting people to adapt to systems that may be damaging their souls.

I believe coaching has revolutionary potential—not to help people “succeed” within dehumanising systems, but to create spaces where their full humanity can be recognised, honoured, and expressed. This is what love in coaching makes possible.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s what the world needs most from us right now.