What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women
Guiding someone through a hard problem, a career decision, a skill they are struggling to build, means being cast as the person with the answers even when your own path there was messy. The gap between how settled you appear to a client and how unsettled you actually felt getting here can grow into a quiet fear that you are one hard question from being exposed. Valerie Young's work on impostor feelings gives that fear a name coaches and mentors can work with.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The rule that real coaches always have the answer ready
An unspoken rule says a competent coach or mentor should have a confident answer prepared for any situation a client brings. This rule ignores that good coaching often involves sitting with uncertainty alongside the client rather than resolving it immediately.
Manufacturing a confident answer you do not actually have teaches a client that not knowing is something to hide, which undercuts the honesty the relationship depends on.
The next time a question stumps you, say so plainly and turn it into a shared exploration, then notice that trust often deepens rather than breaks.
Recognizing your own coaching pattern
Some coaches lean Expert, holding back from taking clients until they feel fully qualified in every relevant area. Others lean Perfectionist, treating one client's setback as their own failure, or Superhuman, trying to be endlessly available to everyone at once.
An Expert pattern that delays offering a genuinely useful perspective until you feel completely qualified means a client goes without help they needed now.
Offer a partial, honest perspective this week even without full certainty, and name it as such, for example saying "here's one angle, though I don't have the full picture."
Where these standards actually come from
Coaching and mentoring culture markets certainty and polished frameworks as the mark of real expertise, hiding the actual mess of trial and revision behind most practitioners' methods. Coaches newer to the field, working outside a formal credentialing body, or the first in their circle doing this kind of work can feel that polish as a personal verdict rather than a marketing convention.
Comparing your visible uncertainty to another coach's polished online presence sets up a comparison that was never fair to begin with.
Ask an experienced coach directly how their early sessions actually went, and notice how much uncertainty they usually admit to in hindsight.
Coaching competence as something built through practice
Real coaching competence is rarely a finished credential a person either has or lacks. It is built through sessions that go well, sessions that go poorly, and honest reflection on both, repeated across every client relationship. Treating a hard session as ordinary data about a genuinely difficult craft, rather than proof you are not cut out for this work, turns private shame into a workable problem, one that eases with practice, not one dramatic proof.
You might feel Perfectionist guilt over a client's setback in the same week a new client's intake requires describing your own qualifications with confidence. Handle the nearer deadline first, describing your genuine strengths honestly, then return to the setback once that pressure has passed.
Name one thing, honestly
- Which part of coaching or mentoring, giving direct advice, sitting with uncertainty, or marketing yourself, brings out your sharpest self-doubt? - Is there an experienced peer you could ask about their own early struggles instead of assuming they never had any? - How would your view of a hard session change if you judged it by honesty rather than by a perfect outcome?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Ask an experienced coach directly how their early sessions actually went, and notice how much uncertainty they usually admit to in hindsight.