What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Will I Ever Be Good Enough?
After a session where her client finally broke through a months-long block, Renata felt the familiar letdown arrive within minutes, a quiet voice noting she could have asked a sharper question at the right moment. Clients regularly told her she'd changed their trajectory, and still she filed every session under room for improvement rather than evidence of real skill. In supervision, a senior colleague asked what it would take for Renata to simply feel satisfied with good work. Renata realized she didn't actually know, and traced the blank feeling back to a household where effort was met with the next expectation rather than acknowledgment. She had built a career helping others feel capable and worthy, while privately operating from a standard that made those same feelings unreachable for herself. That contradiction was worth sitting with rather than coaching herself past it.
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
Naming the pattern in your own history
Recognizing narcissistic parenting as a repeated dynamic, conditional attention or approval used consistently rather than one hard day, helps a coach understand their own drive to over-deliver and under-credit themselves. This insight serves your own clarity, not a diagnosis to apply to a parent, a client, or a client's family.
This framework explains a personal pattern, but it should never be used to casually diagnose a client's parent during a session.
After a strong session, name one specific thing you did well before your mind moves to what could have been better.
Why self-trust lags behind real skill
The book links this pattern to chronic self-doubt and difficulty trusting one's own judgment, which explains why experienced coaches with strong client outcomes can still feel privately unqualified. That gap is a traceable effect of an inconsistent approval history, not an accurate measure of your actual competence.
Ongoing skill development still matters, so the goal is calibrated confidence, not an end to all self-assessment.
Keep a short record of specific client breakthroughs to review when self-doubt outpaces the actual evidence in front of you.
Grieving the acknowledgment you didn't receive
Many coaches notice, while celebrating a client's progress, how rarely their own effort was acknowledged growing up. Letting yourself grieve that gap, without needing to resolve exactly how you feel about the parent involved, allows you to receive genuine appreciation from clients and colleagues instead of deflecting it automatically.
This grief can surface mid-session if a client's story resembles your own, so keep separate space for processing it.
The next time a client thanks you sincerely, pause and let the acknowledgment register before responding.
Coaching from a settled sense of worth
The steadiest coaches operate from a sense of worth that holds regardless of any single client's outcome or feedback that day. Building that foundation separately from any parent's past approval means your presence with clients becomes less anxious and more genuinely available, since you are no longer quietly using their growth to settle an old account of your own.
The instinct to keep proving your value through client results can conflict with the slower work of grieving what earlier acknowledgment was missing, since one rewards constant output and the other asks for stillness. Holding both means letting good coaching remain meaningful without also expecting it to resolve an old family pattern.
Name one thing, honestly
- What would change in your coaching if a client's outcome no longer felt like a referendum on your own worth? - Whose approval are you still quietly working to earn through the people you help?
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
The next time a client thanks you sincerely, pause and let the acknowledgment register before responding.