Yannick’s Coaching Lab features guest coaches from a broad variety of approaches, who showcase how they work as part of a live 45min coaching session, followed by reflections and Q&A with the audience.
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Yannick’s Coaching Lab #75 — Emmy van Deurzen
Session Summary
Emmy van Deurzen worked with a client who is herself a coach and cultural-sector professional, holding several different roles and responsibilities. The client arrived with a sense of being pulled in too many directions, having “lost some motivation” and feeling that her energy was going into too many places. She also named a painful incongruence: as a coach, she supports others to live purposefully, yet felt she was not currently living her own life as fully as she hoped her clients might. Emmy and the client had not met before, apart from a brief email exchange, and the host explicitly framed the encounter as fresh.
The session began with the client describing busyness, loss of mojo, flatness, and a muted sense of joy. Emmy did not stay with the practical question of which role or project the client should prioritise. Instead, she followed the existential thread beneath the client’s dilemma: Where had her aliveness gone? What had happened to her inner fire? What had been lost? This led into a conversation about bereavement, the death of close friends and mentor figures, and the client’s sense that she had lost people who had believed in her, encouraged her, and stood “ahead” of her in life.
As the session unfolded, the presenting issue shifted from “What should I prioritise?” to “How do I receive and internalise what I have been given, rather than keep giving myself away?” Emmy helped the client see that she had perhaps tried to pass on the encouragement and generosity she had received without first allowing it to settle in herself. The client named this as being “out of kilter”, and began to recognise that her own replenishment was not selfish but necessary. By the end, the work had opened towards future themes: solitude without isolation, receiving the inheritance of the dead, and finding a more centred place from which to give.
The value of the session for observers was not only in what happened for the client, but in how Emmy worked: conversationally, directly, personally, and with a willingness to go towards grief, vitality, the body, meaning, and responsibility. The debrief made visible several live coaching tensions: how much to contract, how directive a coach can be, whether this was coaching or therapy, how to work with grief without flinching, and how to offer “pearls” without taking over the client’s responsibility.
Key Moments
The Illusion of Privacy
Before the coaching began, the host carefully contracted around recording, confidentiality, and the right of coach and client to request edits or deletion if the session opened something unexpected. He also invited everyone to turn off cameras, creating what he called the “beautiful illusion of privacy”. Emmy opened by naming the strangeness of the situation: “This is quite something, isn’t it?” — to open up while being watched and recorded.
This mattered because the public nature of the session never disappeared completely as an ethical concern. In the debrief, Emmy said she had been “very concerned from the start about it being so public”, having seen people hurt not necessarily by the session itself, but by what happens afterwards when their inner world has been made visible. At the same time, she reported that the host’s way of making the audience disappear worked well and that it soon felt like an ordinary Zoom session with a client.
For coaches, this was an important reminder that safety in demonstration work is not a technicality. It is part of the intervention. The frame made it possible for both coach and client to forget the audience enough to work, while still returning to the audience ethically afterwards.
From Busyness to Being
The client initially brought a practical and professional dilemma: too many roles, too many directions, too much energy dispersed across coaching, consultancy, board work, and creative/cultural commitments. Emmy listened for the existential structure beneath the content. Rather than helping the client sort tasks, she asked what it was like to think she was not living as fully as she wanted her clients to live. Was it accusation, envy, inauthenticity? The client found the word “inauthentic”, then “not congruent”, then a sense of mismatch.
Emmy reflected the image she was receiving: the client had tremendous energy and a desire to do something good with it, but the energy was disappearing into many channels. The client responded with the image that her energy was almost “bleeding” from her. Emmy sharpened this: the energy was going into doing, into tasks and possibilities, but not into “being and becoming more of what you want to be”.
This was a classic existential move. Emmy did not reject the practical problem, but she refused to mistake it for the whole problem. The question was not simply how to manage workload. It was how the client had become separated from her own vitality.
Who Is Ahead of Me Now?
The session deepened when the client mentioned several bereavements, including the recent deaths of older mentor figures. Emmy noticed the pattern: the client was not only grieving individual people, but the loss of a function in her life. These were people who had believed in her, encouraged her, and helped her feel that she could go on. The client’s phrase “who’s ahead of me now?” became a pivotal existential question.
Emmy did not rush to reassure. Instead, she explored the meaning of having someone ahead: “Do you need people to be ahead of you? Who is with you now? Are you now able to do that for yourself?” This moved the conversation from external support to internalised support, from the loss of mentors to the question of inheritance.
The coaching significance here lies in Emmy’s ability to hear the existential dimension inside ordinary grief. The client was not only missing loved people. She was confronting a shift in generational position, a loss of being championed, and perhaps a demand to become a source of wisdom for herself.
Inheriting the Magic
One of the strongest metaphors of the session was “magic”. Emmy asked how the client’s mentors had done “that magic” of believing in her, and then asked how the client might now do that magic for herself and pass it on. The client found this difficult and named feeling depleted. Emmy suggested that she had not yet “inherited” what those people had given her. She had skipped a stage: they had given to her, and she was now trying to give to others, but she had not yet learned how to give it to herself.
This led to a powerful realisation. The client recognised an inner pattern: “I must give, I must give,” particularly in a demanding leadership role where she was supporting many other people and their relationships. She wondered whether there was something about needing to be needed. Emmy did not pathologise this. She acknowledged that the client had done a lot for others and had done it well, while also helping her see that it was “out of kilter”.
The learning here is subtle. Emmy did not convert generosity into a problem. She distinguished between life-giving contribution and self-depleting duty. The question became not “How do I stop giving?” but “From where am I giving?”
Not Flinching from Grief
A key moment in the debrief came when the client reflected that Emmy had gone straight towards the bereavements rather than pulling back. The client said she appreciated this because many people, including coaches, can shy away from grief — either out of concern for the person or because they do not want to go there themselves. The client said, “we just flowed into it” and “I felt completely safe”.
Emmy added an important qualification. She reminded the group that the client had already done significant previous work around grief, which made it possible to go there. Had the grief been locked away, and had Emmy insisted on its importance, that could have been difficult. In this case, the client had already allowed the grief to be part of her life, so it became a natural progression rather than an intrusion.
This was a valuable ethical teaching point. Courage in coaching is not the same as force. Emmy did not flinch, but she also tracked readiness. The work was deep because both coach and client were able to stay with what was true.
The Smile as Evidence
Several times, Emmy noticed the client smiling and asked about it: “What made you smile there?” or “Same smile.” In the debrief, an audience member asked about this. Emmy explained that she always works with the body, informed by psychodrama, bioenergetics, Gestalt therapy and phenomenology. She was clear that she does not do “body readings” in a judgemental way. Rather, she brings the person back to their bodily experience constructively.
Because the client had spoken about losing joy, Emmy found it important to notice moments when joy appeared on her face. The smile was not incidental. It was data. Emmy saw laughter, insight, stimulation, imagination and possible enjoyment emerging in front of her, and brought that to the client’s awareness.
For coaches, this showed how embodiment can be used without becoming interpretive or intrusive. Emmy did not tell the client what the smile meant. She noticed it and invited the client to inquire into it. The body became a doorway back to aliveness.
Enough, Not Too Much
In the debrief, Emmy said there was much more she would have liked to do because the material was “so rich and so open and so possible”. Yet she emphasised time, limitation, and the need “not to try to do too much”. She warned that it is possible to give people too much in one session, so that the learning is not absorbed. With this client, Emmy suggested that one session could last six months because the client would continue working with what had emerged.
This was evident near the end of the session when the client raised the loneliness of needing to centre in herself. Emmy acknowledged that this was important, but said it would be “another ball game” and “not for today”. That was a significant act of containment. Rather than opening every door, she helped the client leave with enough.
The moment is a useful antidote to the coach’s rescue impulse. Deep work does not require exhausting every thread. Sometimes the skilful intervention is to stop while the work is still alive.
Coaching, Therapy, and Responsibility
The debrief returned repeatedly to the edge between coaching and therapy. In response to a question, Emmy said she had decided ahead of time to model “life coaching, existential coaching, rather than business coaching”. She said that even if the client brought business or career material, she intended to pull away from that towards personal issues, clearer meanings, personal direction and purpose.
The host then raised the issue of responsibility. Emmy’s style involved offerings, guidance, hypotheses and strong reflections. This was far from a purely non-directive stance. Emmy accepted this, saying, “I do take a lot of responsibility,” but drew a distinction between taking responsibility for her work and stepping into the client’s responsibility. She would give as much as she could from her work, but not tell the client what to do or how to feel.
This was perhaps the central professional tension of the Lab. Emmy’s practice challenges some coaching-school orthodoxies. She was active, experienced, sometimes forceful, and willing to bring an agenda of depth. Yet the client reported that it did not feel pushy; it felt like Emmy was listening to what she had already said. The question for coaches is not simply whether to be directive or non-directive, but whether our direction remains in service of what is emerging from the client.
Coach’s Reflections & Contribution
Emmy’s debrief made clear that what looked like natural conversation was underpinned by decades of practice. She described tracking the client’s pauses, thoughtfulness, self-correction and willingness to work. She noticed early that the client’s accomplished life was not the real subject; something underneath wanted to be unveiled. When the client brought grief, Emmy became “more cautious” and “more gentle”, while still staying with the material.
She also articulated several principles of her work: the importance of vitality or “energy of life”; the value of the body as a phenomenological resource; the need to work deeply without assuming sameness of experience; and the difference between offering strong guidance and taking over the client’s agency. Perhaps most importantly, she modelled an existential coaching stance in which meaning, mortality, freedom, responsibility, grief, vitality and practical life choices are not separate compartments.
Key Take-Aways
This session demonstrated the power of moving from the presenting problem to the existential structure beneath it. The client came with too many responsibilities and a loss of priority. Emmy helped reveal grief, inherited encouragement, self-depletion, and the need to receive before giving.
Coaches can learn from Emmy’s willingness to go towards the point of pain without making pain the whole story. The work with bereavement was not grief counselling in a narrow sense; it was a way of reclaiming relationship, inheritance and vitality.
The session also raised an important question about directiveness. Emmy offered interpretations, metaphors and strong reflections. For some coaching traditions this may feel risky. Yet the client experienced the work as organic, invitational and deeply attentive. The difference seemed to lie in Emmy’s responsiveness: she watered what had already begun to bloom.
Finally, the Lab showed the importance of enoughness. Not every thread was followed. Solitude, loneliness, affordability, future choices and ongoing grief all remained open. Rather than closing those down, Emmy left the client with material to live into. The work did not end with a neat action plan. It ended with a deeper question of how the client might “find back” her kilter, curate what she had inherited, and allow generosity to flow from replenishment rather than depletion.