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Overview of the personalised Resilience Assessment Report

See how we measure Resilience and the detailed insights into individual strengths and growth areas.

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    What It Takes to Be a Resilient Coach or Leader: Insights on Presence, Growth, and Impact

    • Presence, not performance, is what makes coaching genuinely transformational. Without it, clients can’t feel safe enough to reflect, open up, or actually change.
    • Feedback triggers a real stress response, not unlike seeing a police car pull up behind you. Curiosity-based questions open reflection where feedback tends to trigger defensiveness.
    • Coaching mastery isn’t about technique or having the right answer. It’s about being willing to stay present in genuine discomfort, both the client’s and your own.

    A conversation with Dr. Marcia Reynolds on presence, growth, and impact

    There’s a quiet power in coaching that often goes unnoticed. It isn’t about asking the perfect question or applying the right model. It’s about how you show up, especially when someone else is struggling to think, lead, or move forward. That’s what makes coaching both genuinely challenging and deeply human.

    To explore this, we sat down with Dr. Marcia Reynolds, former president of the International Coaching Federation, a globally recognised leadership coach, and author of Coach the Person, Not the Problem. On the Resilience Podcast, she shared what it genuinely means to be a resilient coach, and how presence, more than performance, is what actually unlocks real transformation.

    Why Presence Is the Foundation of Resilience

    Asked what matters most in building resilience through coaching, Dr. Reynolds brings it back to presence immediately. Without it, clients can’t feel safe enough to open up, reflect, or genuinely change. “If I break presence, I might break their feeling of safety.”

    Presence isn’t passive. It’s the anchor that holds space when emotions run high, when thinking turns cloudy, or when someone is sitting in real discomfort. Too often, coaches rush that exact moment, reaching for a solution or trying to prove their worth instead of simply staying present. “When you slow down, you actually move faster,” Dr. Reynolds says. Real transformation begins in that stillness.

    What Actually Makes Coaching Transformational?

    Coaching isn’t about having the answers. It’s about helping someone else think more clearly. Where training and advice tend to activate the rational, task-driven part of the brain, coaching engages the creative, reflective parts where genuine insight actually lives. “When I reflect your story back to you and ask, ‘How is that working for what you want?’ you begin to see differently,” Dr. Reynolds explains.

    That shift doesn’t come from strategy or skill alone. It comes from slowing down, listening fully, and being willing to walk alongside a client rather than ahead of them. “I’m not here to fix you. I’m here to think with you,” she says.

    What Do Coaches Get Wrong About Feedback?

    Much of coaching happens in the space between a question and someone’s own reflection, yet many coaches and leaders still default to feedback as their primary tool. Dr. Reynolds challenges that directly: “Feedback triggers the same stress response as a police car pulling up behind you.” Instead of correcting, she teaches leaders and coaches to stay genuinely curious. Ask, “What are you trying to achieve here?” or “How can I support you with this?”

    That approach removes the threat and replaces it with real partnership. It invites reflection instead of defensiveness, and it turns even difficult conversations into genuine moments of growth.

    How Can Leaders Shift Into a Coaching Mindset?

    Shifting from expert to coach can feel genuinely awkward, especially for leaders used to being the one with the answers. The first step is simple: name the shift directly. “Let people know,” Dr. Reynolds suggests. “Tell your team: I’m learning a new way to lead. I want your support.”

    Being transparent about your own growth builds real trust. It creates genuine permission for others to grow too, and it signals that leadership isn’t about control, it’s about co-creation. Leaders who coach well model exactly the mindset they hope to inspire in others. “It’s okay to feel awkward,” she adds. “But when you name it, you create trust.”

    What Should Coaches Understand About Their Own Growth?

    For many coaches, the hardest lesson is that coaching isn’t about performance. It’s about presence. Coaches often arrive from “telling” professions, teaching, therapy, consulting, and the first internal shift is learning to stop proving and start genuinely listening instead. “The first shift is into coaching presence. The second is into mastery, where you let go of technique and fully show up,” Dr. Reynolds explains.

    Mastery isn’t about perfection. It’s about being real, genuinely grounded, and willing to stay in the discomfort of growth, both yours and your client’s. “You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be present.”

    Coaching mastery doesn’t come from having the right technique. It comes from presence, from being genuinely willing to slow down, stay curious, and show up real, in the discomfort, alongside the person you’re actually there for.

    Resilience Coaching for Gen Z and New Leaders

    • 72% of Gen Z report at least one burnout symptom, the highest of any generation currently in the workforce, compared to 62% for Gen X and 38% for Baby Boomers.
    • Resilience isn’t about toughening up. It’s about becoming more self-aware, grounded, and able to pause and choose a response rather than react automatically, and that’s a coachable skill, not a fixed trait.
    • Traditional feedback often backfires with new leaders because it triggers a genuine stress response. Curiosity-based coaching questions work better than critique.

    They’re talented. They’re purpose-driven. They want to lead, but they’re doing it during a period of genuine, sustained uncertainty.

    Gen Z and early-career professionals are entering management roles at an accelerating pace, with promotion rates rising faster than other generations over the same period, according to ADP Research. At the same time, a growing share of Gen Z workers are actively opting out of management altogether to protect their wellbeing, a trend Business Insider has described as “conscious unbossing.” Both things are true simultaneously, and it’s worth naming directly: some Gen Z professionals are moving into leadership faster than ever, while others are deliberately declining it, often for the same underlying reason, genuine concern about what leadership currently costs.

    Either way, this generation isn’t just asking for support. It’s offering something back: a genuine rethinking of how organisations work, lead, and sustain people over time. Their expectations around mental health, purpose, and authenticity aren’t a weakness. They’re a real call to evolve, and a genuine opportunity for every generation to reflect on what leadership should actually look like now.

    What Gen Z Leaders Are Up Against, and Why It Matters

    Young leaders aren’t just managing tasks. They’re navigating pressure from every direction: expected to lead with confidence, communicate across generations, manage both up and down, and perform at the pace of constant change, all while asking genuine internal questions. What does leadership even look like in a world this uncertain? Is success worth it if it costs real wellbeing to get there? How do you lead in a way that feels authentic rather than performative?

    The mental health picture is serious and getting more precisely documented. A 2025 Seramount Burnout Survey found 72% of Gen Z workers report at least one burnout symptom, exhaustion, loss of motivation, or emotional detachment, compared to 62% for Gen X and 38% for Baby Boomers. Separately, Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found 40% of Gen Z feel stressed or anxious most or all of the time, with a substantial share of that stress tied directly to their work environment. SHRM’s 2025 research found 61% of Gen Z workers would strongly consider leaving their current role for one offering meaningfully better mental health support.

    Coaching isn’t a nice-to-have for this generation. It’s a genuine resilience intervention.

    Why Building Resilience Isn’t About Toughness

    One of the most common mistakes organisations make is expecting younger leaders to simply toughen up, to lead the way previous generations did, to develop a thicker skin. But resilience isn’t about becoming harder. It’s about becoming wiser, more self-aware, more genuinely grounded, and more able to pause and choose a response rather than react automatically.

    That’s precisely where coaching makes the real difference. A skilled coach helps young professionals move from anxiety to genuine agency, from reacting to actually reflecting, and that shift changes far more than it might first appear to.

    Practical tip: start with a genuine resilience conversation, not a performance review.

    Teach Resilience as a Skill, Not a Trait

    Resilience isn’t something you’re simply born with. It’s something you build, yet most emerging leaders have never had it genuinely broken down for them, let alone measured. Resilience Institute’s own research frames it as spanning focus, recovery, energy, empathy, adaptability, emotional regulation, and a clearly articulated sense of purpose, measurable, trainable human capacities rather than vague aspirations.

    Structured assessment tools let young leaders see directly where they’re genuinely strong, where they’re actually at risk, and how to grow with real intention. Coaching works best paired with this kind of insight. Resilience becomes concrete once it’s visible.

    Why Traditional Feedback Often Doesn’t Land

    Feedback triggers a genuine stress response. It puts people on the defensive, and instead of encouraging growth, it can trigger withdrawal instead. Executive coach Dr. Marcia Reynolds put it directly on the Resilience Podcast: feedback triggers a stress response not unlike seeing a police car pull up behind you.

    Curiosity works better than critique. What are you trying to achieve here? What do you want to do differently next time? How can I actually support you? These land very differently from a verdict handed down after the fact.

    Practical tip: stop telling them how they’re doing. Start helping them think more clearly instead.

    Coaching Emerging Leaders Through the AI Shift

    The last time the world changed this quickly, it was called the Industrial Revolution. For emerging leaders, AI brings genuine opportunity alongside real uncertainty: what happens to a career built on skills that might be automated within a few years? NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has put the reframe simply: you’re not going to lose your job to AI, you’ll lose it to someone who uses AI well.

    This is where resilience coaching earns its place directly. The capacities AI genuinely can’t replicate, emotional agility, presence, intuition, real trust-building, are exactly the ones organisations will rely on most as more routine work becomes automated.

    Practical tip: ask directly, “what strengths do you want to double down on, because no machine can genuinely do them for you?”

    How Coaching Builds Genuine Psychological Safety

    Emerging leaders don’t want to pretend they have all the answers, and they don’t trust people who act like they do either. Coaching offers a genuinely rare kind of space, one where they don’t have to perform, where they can think out loud, and where they can be real without it reading as weakness.

    Psychological safety isn’t just a culture buzzword. It’s a real condition for growth, and coaches function less as mirrors and more as genuine guides through uncertainty.

    The Development Gen Z Actually Wants

    Forget outdated leadership pipelines. The next generation is asking for something genuinely different: development that’s real, not performative, not perfection-driven, not productivity for its own sake. They want real space to grow, tools that actually work, and coaches who meet them where they genuinely are.

    This isn’t about lowering the bar. It’s about raising the relevance. The organisations that understand this will be the ones that attract, retain, and grow the leaders everyone will need in the years ahead.

    Gen Z isn’t asking leadership to get easier. They’re asking it to get more honest, and resilience coaching is exactly the tool built for that shift.