What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from What My Bones Know
Raymond had coached youth basketball for fifteen years and prided himself on never losing his temper, no matter how chaotic practice got. Then an assistant coach yelled at a player over a missed pass, and Raymond found himself frozen, unable to intervene, chest tight. Later he replayed it, ashamed he hadn't stepped in. A friend, also a coach, asked whether the yelling reminded him of anything. It had. Raymond's own childhood coach had screamed constantly, and Raymond learned early to make himself small whenever an adult's voice rose. He still coached from a place of trying not to be noticed by anger, even his own, and wondered if he could teach kids to handle pressure if his body still froze at a raised voice.
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
Recognizing when a client's pain touches your own
A coach or mentor who freezes, overreacts, or feels unusually drained by a client's struggle is often just called empathetic or burned out. What My Bones Know suggests looking a layer deeper, in general terms: difficult or unpredictable experiences in one's own childhood can shape how an adult responds to conflict, distress, or authority for decades afterward, including in a coaching relationship. For a mentor, this might mean noticing that a strong reaction to a mentee's anger has roots reaching back much further than this session, without turning that noticing into a diagnosis of yourself or the person you're supporting.
Some reactions are simply appropriate empathy for genuine difficulty.
After a session, ask honestly whose history you were reacting to.
Why being a coach doesn't make you your own therapist
Foo's book describes trying several forms of therapy over years before finding an approach that genuinely helped her process complex trauma, not a single insight from her own training. Coaches and mentors, skilled at helping others reflect, sometimes assume that skill means they can work through their own significant patterns alone, without any outside support at all. Professional support for early adversity usually requires an outside perspective, tried patiently across different approaches over real time, that even a well-trained helper cannot fully provide for themselves, no matter how much expertise they bring to everyone else's process every single day of the week.
Many coaches work independently, without benefits making therapy easy.
If you catch yourself coaching through something old, that's a sign.
Modeling self-understanding instead of self-perfection
Coaches and mentors often feel pressure to appear fully resolved, as if struggling themselves would undermine their credibility with clients. What My Bones Know offers a different model: building an honest, compassionate account of one's own patterns instead of projecting flawlessness at every turn. For a mentor, this might mean recognizing that a reactive pattern with a client made sense given one's own history, without needing to hide that fact entirely, since understanding yourself this way tends to make you more useful to others, not less, because it replaces constant performance with real, grounded credibility over time and repeated practice.
Self-disclosure with clients has real limits; healing work belongs elsewhere.
After a reaction to a client, process it with your supervisor, not the client.
Even coaches need to be coached
The role of helper can quietly become a place to hide from needing help, especially when identity is built around supporting others. What My Bones Know points to connection, not self-sufficiency, as part of real healing, and that applies to coaches too. Supervision, peer consultation, or a mentor of your own can counter the isolation of always holding space for others, making your own patterns easier to notice instead of only tending to theirs.
Recognizing that a reaction to a client has old roots, and being compassionate about it, can tempt a coach to treat every hard session as proof of unresolved trauma rather than a hard day at a demanding job. But compassion without real outside support leaves the pattern intact, session after session. The two ideas hold together only when self-understanding becomes the reason to seek supervision, not an explanation that stops there: naming a pattern begins addressing it, it does not mean it's already addressed.
Name one thing, honestly
- Whose history are you reacting to when a client struggles a certain way? - Who supports you the way you support the people you coach?
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
After a reaction to a client, process it with your supervisor, not the client.