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Coaching is Long Enough For Change

February 17, 2026

Coaching holds a frame long enough for cumulative and meaningful change to happen.

My husband had a birthday last week. Oddly, my age anxiety rises more on his birthday than on my own. Maybe because his comes six months before mine. Maybe because he is two and a half years older. Maybe because it’s always strange to say I’m married to someone who is that age even though I am only thirty months behind.

As if he is a harbinger for my own older self.

We were talking. Standing at the stairs — he about to go down, me about to go up. I can’t remember the topic. Kids. Work. Laundry. Something ordinary enough that I could carry on a whole separate dialogue in my head while offering coherent ums and ahs at the right moments. (I don’t do this…very often.)

“Does he look any different?” I wondered.

“Older today out of respect to the calendar?”

Of course not. Not today. Not because the clock struck another year.

But cumulatively? Yes.

Greyer. Softer. Safer.

A deepened sense of companionship.

A wisdom I have grown to trust.

An enduring, un-erasable love — no matter what happens next.

A knowing.

If we slowed it down enough, we could witness this frame by frame. The solidity of adjustments made from awareness of impact and intention. Who we each want to be to the other. What we grow into because we contacted what was happening in any moment. And then what we become because of what we were willing to adjust.

It got me thinking about what coaching clients expect of themselves when “change” is the stated goal.

“How many sessions will it take?” they ask, with just enough hope that there might be a formula.

One.

It might take one session to see something new about yourself. One aha that’s strong enough to bring you back for another.

And yet change is cumulative.

It is the gathering of ahas. The small adjustments made with awareness and intention. The willingness to notice impact and choose differently next time. Until one day, before your own eyes, you realize you have grown into someone steadier. Wiser. More self-trusting.

Coaching is long enough.

Long enough for you to see the structure you’ve been living inside — what it gives you and what it costs you. Long enough to feel its edges. Long enough to decide whether it still fits.

You become aware of what has held you.

You decide what stays and what changes.

You adjust.

And over time you deepen your wisdom and companionship and love with that most important person.

You.

*Photo Credit: Ian Gao Unsplash

What We Already Carry

January 7, 2026

January leaves no wanting for posts about goals and resolutions and setting of intentions. I read some with envy. Some stir my resolve. With all of them I get familiar again with a determination that this very year will be the apex of my human mastery. A promise I make and break only days in and will remake and rebreak on a steady cycle through Valentine’s Day, July 4th, Thanksgiving and on back to the first of 2027.

Fascinating how easily I relent to my own norm. Alas. Blogs and posts are already being penned about this as well. A small comfort that I am not alone in my fallibility, but we must be missing some basic point. I wonder if the mistake we make is believing that change requires surrender, when in truth what stops us is a fierce commitment to preserving what we believe we cannot afford to lose.

Because I don’t think we can master our humanity by starting with what we don’t have, for in so doing we miss what we do have.

If we want strength, we miss our commitment to tenderness. If we want time for ourselves, we miss the loyalty we pledge to others. If we do only what we love, we miss our devotion to curiosity.

Tenderness, loyalty, curiosity…imagine giving these up! Or any of the other traits we so assiduously nurture and cultivate with active allegiance to our survival as a good-enough-human. These ways of being so precious to us as they should be-- they have been useful all these many years. So useful in fact, we might not even notice how freely we employ them…until we ask ourselves to do their opposite.

Then the focus shifts to somehow acquiring a behavior we don’t actually care for, first, because it has been exiled to the shadow, and second, because in pursuing it, we quietly dismiss the very goodness of what we already possess. We create a false polarity-- I am either this or I am that-- with an unspoken conclusion that I cannot be both. And judgment quickly follows. This way is good; that way is bad. I am bad for wanting this, or weak for being like that. STOP.

We are whole humans, already using what we have to navigate our world. The task, then, is not correction but awareness—not judgment, but a widening of sight. Awareness creates space, and in that space, choice and possibility materialize. When we truly see how deeply we value one way of being—when we recognize it as our default and feel how firmly it is ours—only then do we have the steadiness and courage to risk something different.

At the brink of this New Year, I want choice and possibility for all of us. Instead of beginning with what we lack, let’s begin with what we already carry. So much of what we do—often without thinking—is genuinely good. The fact that we can call on it with such ease is no small thing; it is a form of quiet mastery. That is worth noting. In fact, what comes most naturally to us may be exactly what others are hoping to learn. Imagine that!

In other words, I’m glad we know how to do the things we do. So, for the sake of the success of our New Year’s Resolutions, let’s not toss out what we’ve got. Instead let’s see what we’d like to add. I have a hunch this sense of wholeness might be just the thing to make it-- at least until Valentine’s Day.

*Photo Credit: Crazy Nana Unsplash

Building Your Range as a Leader

October 25, 2025

New England weather is a study in polarities.

Hang on. I was once told that talking about the weather is a lackluster stand-in for trust building at the start of a new relationship or conversation. That one should proffer an attempt at something more creative to demonstrate charisma and effort. I try to take this to heart but, as you can see, I quickly devolve into some weather-related anecdote.

Maybe it feels like a right as a born and raised New Englander. Palpable and tangible swings from one end of the weather spectrum to the other. We don’t have to talk ourselves out of one before another begins. I love the whole of it and would sense a loss or a lacking if I didn’t crave pure white snow in summer or emerald-green grass in the middle of winter. I know what it is to desire and resist. I know the cost was I to only have one forever over the other. I willingly pivot from pumpkin spice to evergreen.

It’s funny then, that this hardy stock of humans finds internal change so daunting! And I shouldn’t single us out; human beings in general like to live in the comfort of a single polarity period. We like to create norms in our behavior. To give us a sense of direction. A knowing. Something we can rely on that comes naturally and with ease.

In fact, sometimes we get so caught up in what we consider normal behavior that we argue, often with ourselves, that we’re onto something. The degree to which we think our polarity is right matches the degree to which we think the opposite is wrong.

For example, if you put all of your stock into structure you have little tolerance for anything that looks flexible or unplanned. You won’t accept it in yourself and so will be unrelenting in your devaluing of it in someone else. They. Are. Wrong.

But the truth is, they’re not. And you’re not. Rather, we learn how to stay safe. Maybe being structured was a way to stay ahead, especially if you didn’t feel like you learned as fast as others in the rigorous academic environment you grew up in. If you were sloppy or lacked rigor, you failed. Structure and rigidity were survival tactics. And you liked it, and you like it.

The trouble is that any polarity has a downside. When you become a manager, for example, your rigidity doesn’t work quite as well. You are told you are too controlling, and it is impossible to make you happy. People start to quit, and it doesn’t make any sense to you. Why can’t people just do what you tell them to do already?

In our coaching work, we build range. Not by manhandling ourselves into the other polarity but rather by appreciating the familiarity and the value we hold for the one we’re already in. Why do you like it so much? How has it served you? What are you afraid will happen if you stop?

Only then can we explore. Do you still need it? How is it getting in your way? What if you knew you still had it when you needed it but stopped letting it be your only tool? How might it feel to be a little different? What could you gain that you don’t now have?

We are such problem solvers. Executives are trained and rewarded on the fix and solution and strategy. But you can’t fix something that doesn’t feel broken. Coaching creates the container for exploration—what you love, what you will miss, what you stand to gain—and then the opportunity to apply meaningful and purposeful action to change.

It’s like letting go of one season for the next one. You can certainly offer pumpkin spice lattes July 4^th Weekend, but you might miss the strawberry shortcake.

Photo Credit: Chris Lawton Unsplash

Allison Iantosca, PCC | 78 W Elm St | Hopkinton, MA 01748 US

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