Existential coaching: A coaching model for uncertain times

What if you knew there was a coaching model which is supremely comfortable amidst themes of complexity, uncertainty and concern.

Step forward existential coaching. If ever a Western-originating model suited today’s challenges, existential coaching offers that possibility amid growing global complexity and paradox.

If you have encountered the thinking of Viktor Frankl, Dostoyevsky, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Nietzsche or Martin Buber, you will have connected with some of the names associated with existential reasoning and practice.

At the annual Coaches’ disco, existential coaches step out to Johnny Nash’s “There Are More Questions Than Answers,” emerging from the bright shadows of GROW and positive psychology to show a different way of dancing as a coach.

What is existential coaching?

Along with Gestalt-informed coaching, existential coaching is a transfer of theory from the therapy world.

Like Gestalt, existential coaching focuses on what emerges in the moment and pays deep attention to the here-and-now experience (phenomenology) of everyone involved.

Existentialism is sometimes mistaken as being focused on negativity, despair, and death. But in fact, it takes the things which show up in every human life - so-called "givens", because they are a natural consequence of being alive - and faces them squarely. Existentialism sees these realities as opportunities to understand our life experience and to make meaning and purpose for ourselves.

So, an existential coach welcomes a client’s exploration of givens such as living with uncertainty and anxiety, finding their fundamental meaning and purpose, and themes such as freedom, conflict, oppression, the certainty of death, and the very consequences of being alive as a human.

And in practice, a coach will start with data and experience leading to meaning making, rather than starting with fixed frameworks and presumptions.

Practical examples

An existential approach could help if your client is interested in what motivates them, or what makes life feel worthwhile, or how they live their values. Existential inquiry helps people make meaning from their experience of being human in relationship to themselves, other humans and the world around them.

Take for example a client who is reporting that the leadership model they’ve used in the past isn’t working in a different culture, country or organisation. From an existential perspective, the client’s dislocation or disorientation in this situation is an opportunity to explore what inner conventions or frameworks or beliefs (‘worldview’) are now being exposed.

In this place of discomfort, there is the potential for the client to choose to modify that worldview - to change it, update it, expand it - in a way that can bring deep transformation. The disruption and anxiety the client is experiencing at work is not perceived as a problem or as a negative. Instead, the anxiety can open a path to new growth.

Or take for example a client reviewing their sense of world citizenship, after arrest and trial for an environmental protest. What is now to be their life journey? How do they carry forward their concerns, whilst also recognising the need for recovery and looking after themselves.

Or a client who is doing personally meaningful work but in an organisational system behaving in a way offensive to the client’s values. What meaning is to be made of this experience? Beyond ‘Should I stay or should I go’, are the client's reflections about life purpose as evidenced in their day-to-day choices at work.

Or someone who sees the beauty and fragility of our home and its life support systems - the biosphere which supports us and all living things. Amidst their fear, anger, grief and hope, lie questions which seem hidden in day-to-day life: what does it mean to be a responsible, aware human? What work is mine to do? How do I make sense of the certainty of my death, as part of a wider chain of life and vitality which stretches across millennia?

Is existential coaching for me?

“We want [our clients] to have their eyes as fully open as possible, and to face life’s challenges courageously and authentically” Yannick Jacob, Existential Coaching, Animas 2017 (p32).

Not all coaches will feel motivated by the human givens, with their implications for tensions and uncertainty - in themselves, let alone in their clients. For some coaches, though, the potential to offer a holding, supportive space for these questions enables coaching to become a place of liberation: a place for reshaping and freedom.

We can never truly understand another person’s experience and the meaning they place on their experience. But of course, that is not the point of coaching. The point is to give our clients the space to make that meaning for themselves.

Take it from here...

• Notice what resonates or has energy from this article's description of existential coaching. How far does the description resonate with how you yourself think about your own life's journey?

• Further inspiration: The Handbook of Existential Coaching Practice by Monica Hanaway (2020. Routledge); and check out writings by and interviews with Ernesto Spinelli, Emmy and Sasha van Deurzen and Yannick Jacob.
• Join a lunch and learn with John Gray, including a demonstration of existential coaching: Friday 27 March 2026. Find out more and register here.