Love in Coaching – Part Four

In my previous posts, I’ve explored what love looks like in coaching and how it spans the spectrum from heartfelt compassion to challenging confronting. Now it’s time to address a question I posed earlier: “In what ways do you feel cramped in your display of love?”

This question has been lingering with me because I sense that many of us feel constrained in bringing our full loving presence to our coaching work. That is certainly the case for me – you know by now that the theme of the therapy I am engaged with is for me to lead with love.  And oh, the discoveries I’ve made!

These constraints deserve careful examination if we’re to fully accept love as central to our practice.

In exploring this question, I’ve been greatly informed by Helena Clayton’s research and practice on love in organisations. Her work, alongside my own experiences, offers a framework for understanding both personal and systemic barriers.

The Personal Barriers

Helena’s research revealed that our personal relationship with love significantly affects our ability to express it professionally. As she notes, “we can only be loving with others if we learn to be loving to ourselves.” Additionally, each of us carries our own template of what love means based on our upbringing and experiences.

Let me start with my own experience. I feel cramped in my expression of love when:

• Fear of judgment surfaces. Will I be seen as unprofessional if I speak openly about love? Will potential thinkers be put off? Might colleagues dismiss my approach as “soft” or lacking rigour? These fears have led me in the past to self-censor, to use euphemisms rather than the word “love” itself.  I’m still a work-in-progress in this regard.
• Professional training and business introjections emphasise distance. Many of us have learned that professionalism requires emotional distance. The message was implicit: care for your clients, but don’t love them. This creates an internal conflict between what feels authentic and what feels “correct.”
• Past experiences of vulnerability create hesitation. I’ve created protected layers around myself as a result of the times when I’ve been open about my values and been met with scepticism or dismissal. It’s easier to use the accepted language of “client-centered” or “human-centric” than to speak plainly about love.
• Trauma affects capacity for connection. Helena’s research (and others besides) point to how trauma (personal or collective) can limit our ability to feel and express love. For many, solid unconscious protections were established to prevent being hurt again, making it difficult to connect with, feel, or receive love. I have not encountered big Trauma in my life, but I have certainly been affected and shaped by past relationships that my body remembers even if my head rationalises them away.
• Confusion about boundaries. Without clear models of professional love, I sometimes find myself uncertain about how to express care while maintaining appropriate boundaries. This uncertainty can lead to holding back rather than risking overstepping.  The more I step into this, the more I realise that people crave this level of connection.

These personal barriers don’t exist in isolation. They’re reinforced by systemic constraints that shape our professional environment.

The Systemic Barriers

“Extractive capitalism” creates excessive pressure to do more with less and at pace. The hustle culture leaves little space for the attentiveness that love requires.

• The language of business excludes love. Corporate environments prioritise metrics, outcomes, and ROI. Tangible, measurable, logical.  Love doesn’t fit neatly into these frameworks, making it difficult to articulate its value in terms that organisational clients understand and respect.
• Care and compassion are gendered. Bunting (2020) highlights how during the 19th century, qualities like care and kindness came to be seen as soft, emotional, and associated with femininity. Care-giving was outsourced to women and is (still) not seen as work. The workplace crowds out love and care with its competitiveness, performance drive, and results focus. Interestingly, both men and women have reasons to distance themselves from “love as care”—men because it wasn’t traditionally their role, and women because they’ve fought to not be boxed into caring roles. As a result, no one champions love in the workplace, says Helena Clayton.
• Technique-driven approaches to coaching dominate. The emphasis at the start of coach-training on techniques, tools, and frameworks can overshadow the fundamental importance of the loving relationship between coach and client, even when we know from Erik de Haan’s work that relationship is key to the success of coaching.

Moving Beyond Constraints

So, how might we move beyond these constraints? Here are some approaches I’m exploring in my own practice:

• Naming love explicitly in my work.
• Finding community with like-minded practitioners. Connecting with coaches who share this perspective helps me feel less alone and more courageous. Together, we can create new norms that honour love’s place in our work.  One special place is Helena Clayton’s one-day Love Lab and her monthly Acts of Love for Tough Times.
• Developing clear language about professional love. I’m working to articulate precisely what I mean by love in coaching—distinguishing it from personal or romantic love, connecting it to a kind of awakening (though I feel awkward using that word out loud too, it seems), and grounding it in ethical practice.
• Bringing research and theory to support love’s legitimacy. I’m always on the look-out for books about love – I mentioned a few of my latest favourites in the first post of the series. I hope this might counter the perception that love is merely “soft” or lacking rigour.
• Examining my own fears and assumptions. Through supervision, therapy and personal reflection, I’m exploring where my hesitations come from and whether they serve my clients or merely protect my comfort.

An Invitation to Collective Emancipation

These constraints don’t affect just me—they impact our entire profession and, by extension, our clients and our world. When we feel cramped in our expression of love, our clients receive less than they deserve as our fellow human beings.

I believe we have a collective responsibility to examine and challenge these constraints. This isn’t just about individual courage but about reshaping our professional culture to make room for love’s expression.

In my next post, I’ll explore how love manifests in coaching supervision and ethics, examining how these professional structures can either constrain or enable love’s expression.