Existential coaching: when the question is how to live

A founder sold his company two years ago. On paper, he has everything he worked for. He comes to coaching because he cannot decide what to do next, and he is embarrassed about it. "I should be grateful," he says. "Other people would kill for this problem."

A goal-focused coach might help him list options and score them. An existential coach would more likely stay with the embarrassment and the word should, and with the strange weight of having nothing left to prove.

Where it comes from

Existential coaching draws on a line of European philosophy: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Buber. In the twentieth century it became a form of therapy through people such as Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, Irvin Yalom and, in Britain, Emmy van Deurzen and Ernesto Spinelli. In 2012 van Deurzen and Monica Hanaway edited Existential Perspectives on Coaching (Palgrave Macmillan), which brought the approach into the coaching field with a set of practitioner chapters.

What these thinkers share is less a method than a stance. People are not machines to be fixed or optimised. They are beings who have to choose, without guarantees, how to live a life that will end.

The givens

Existential practitioners often talk about a few conditions that no one escapes. Yalom named four: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. Van Deurzen describes four dimensions of existence: physical, social, personal and spiritual, the last meaning whatever a person treats as worth living for.

In coaching these rarely appear in philosophical language. They show up as a career that no longer makes sense, a promotion that feels empty, a decision the client keeps handing to someone else. The givens are the background. Naming them can make an ordinary dilemma easier to hold, because it stops looking like a personal failure.

Phenomenology in the session

The main tool is phenomenological: describing experience as it is, before explaining it. Spinelli describes three steps that coaches can use directly. The coach brackets their own assumptions (the epoché), describes rather than interprets, and treats every part of what the client says as equally worth attention.

This is harder than it sounds. When the founder says "I should be grateful", most listeners hear a familiar story and move on. The existential coach slows down:

What happens in you when you say "should"?

Whose voice is that?

What would it mean to not know what comes next?

What are you choosing when you choose to wait?

There is no technique for making the founder find his purpose. The coach helps him look at how he is already relating to freedom and uncertainty, and that view often changes what he does.

Freedom and responsibility

Sartre's line that we are "condemned to be free" can sound bleak, but in coaching it is usually a relief. Clients who feel trapped are often surprised to see how many of their constraints are choices they have stopped noticing. That includes the choice to stay.

The existential coach does not push the client toward any particular decision. The coach asks the client to own whichever decision they make:

What are you saying yes to by staying?

What are you saying no to?

Which of these can you live with when you look back?

For leaders

Senior leaders are often surrounded by people who need them to be certain. Existential coaching gives them one conversation where uncertainty does not have to be hidden. That matters most in transitions (a new role, a merger, a retirement, an exit) where the old answers to "who am I at work?" have stopped working.

It also suits leaders who carry decisions that affect other people's lives. Layoffs, closures and restructurings raise questions of responsibility and guilt that no framework settles. A coach who can stay with those questions without rushing to reassure gives the leader room to decide in a way they will still recognise as their own.

The founder did not leave coaching with a plan. He left with a different question. He stopped asking what he should do, and started asking what he wanted his remaining working years to be about.