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Coaching the person, not the mask

Writer: Sara B
Sara B
Sep 29
5 min read

Updated: 2 days ago


Coaching is supposed to help people get closer to who they are. Sometimes it does the opposite.


Many of the people I work with have spent years adjusting themselves to fit: quieter in some rooms, more polished in others, always a step ahead of what's expected. That's masking. Kept up long enough, it blurs a person's sense of who they are underneath the adjustments, which psychologists call identity diffusion.



Then they sit down with a coach, who asks who they really are and what they really want. And they do what has always worked for them: they figure out what a good answer looks like, and give it.


I know this from the inside. During my coach training we did an exercise to identify our values. I came up with plenty, and they all looked good. That was the problem: I couldn't tell which ones were mine and which ones I'd picked because they were the right answer. What were my values, really?


Why coaches love identity questions


"Who do you want to be?" "What does the real you want here?" "What would your authentic self do?" These questions are everywhere in coach training, and for understandable reasons.


They feel deep. They move the conversation away from the to-do list. They signal that the coach is interested in the whole person. And they often produce a moment of visible reflection, which is satisfying for both sides of the call.


They also assume something: that the client has a stable, accessible answer, and that saying it out loud is safe. For a lot of the founders and operators I work with, neither is true initially.


What it costs the client


Some of my clients have spent years working out which version of themselves gets rewarded. Many of them are neurodivergent and have learned to mask: to watch how others talk, sit, joke and respond, and perform the expected version. Others have simply built a career in environments where showing uncertainty was expensive. Startups produce a lot of both.


The research on this is sobering. In a 2021 study of 238 adults, Miller, Rees and Pearson found that people who masked described feeling exhausted and disconnected from their own sense of identity. That held for autistic, otherwise neurodivergent and neurotypical participants alike. A 2023 review by Rivera and Bennetto links camouflaging to anxiety, depression and a weaker sense of belonging, and describes the bind many people are in: mask and pay for it, or show up as yourself and risk prejudice.


Ask these clients who they really are, early, and you get the mask. It is well rehearsed and it is convincing. And coaching rewards it: the coach lights up at a coherent, reflective, coach-sounding insight, and the client learns that this is what good looks like here. The coach takes it as the baseline, builds goals on it, and reflects it back. The session has just reinforced the performance it was meant to help with, in a relationship that felt safe the whole time.


There's a second cost. For someone who doesn't have a ready answer, an identity question can land as a test they are failing. That's more work, on top of the work they came to get help with.


How I notice it, without diagnosing anyone


I'm not in the business of deciding whether someone is masking. That's their call, and guessing wrong is its own harm. What I do is stay curious about what's happening between us in the session. A few signals make me slow down:


  • Over-alignment: the client agrees with every reflection I offer

  • Rapid self-correction: they start a sentence, then swap it for a better-sounding one

  • Answers that feel right and strangely empty, like a well-written summary of someone else

  • Answers that take a very long time to come, or come in the form of questions

  • The client telling themselves how they should feel


When I notice something, I say so and ask, rather than interpret. Something like: "You're giving really thoughtful answers. What's it like for you to be answering me right now?" If they say it's fine, I believe them. The goal is to create an environment that feels safe always.


What I do instead


I still get to identity if that is the goal. I just get there later, and I get there through evidence the client produces, rather than a description they hand me.


In practice that runs in four stages:


  1. Safety and permission. Before anything deep, I make it explicit that there is no right answer and no version of them I'm expecting. I say out loud that "I don't know" is a complete answer. I watch for over-preparation and name it kindly when I see it.

  2. Gentle self-discovery. I ask about behaviour, not self-concept. "What did you do on Tuesday when the investor email came in?" "What did you notice in your body before the board call?" "When did you last lose track of time at work?" These are hard to perform because they are about specific moments.

  3. Strengths, values, self-compassion. Once we have a few weeks of those moments, patterns show up. We look at them together. The client usually spots things about themselves that no amount of asking "what are your values?" would have surfaced. Often they are traits the client has spent years being told are too much or not enough: too intense, too blunt, not strategic enough, not polished enough. We look at what those traits actually do for them. That's where self-compassion earns its place in the work.

  4. Agency and integration. Now we can talk about who they want to be, and the question has something to stand on. The goal is choice. Plenty of clients decide to keep adapting in some rooms, with some investors, in some cultures, and that's a clear, informed decision. What I'm watching for is whether the performance feels chosen or compulsory.


Two studies shaped how I think about the third stage. In interviews with Swedish teenage girls with ADHD, Grimell, Ericson and Frick heard the same trimming-down I see in adults at work: "I become a lot quieter than I really am. Kind of diminishes my personality very much." And a 2024 systematic review of 20 studies on autistic identity found that a positive sense of identity went with higher wellbeing, and that acceptance from the people around someone mattered a lot in getting there. For an hour every couple of weeks, a coach is one of those people.


Where I'm still unsure


Much of the thinking on authenticity comes from a Western, therapeutic tradition, and in plenty of cultures adapting to context is a respected skill. The line I care about is between adaptation and self-erasure, and I don't think it sits in the same place for everyone. Identity questions have their place. My problem is with timing, frequency, and how much weight we give the first answer.


The most useful thing a client says in a session often comes mid-sentence, on the way to talking about something else. I avoid trying to make it arrive sooner.


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