Most coaching offers have a silent ally: the inner agency that is already tormenting the client. Psychoanalysis calls it the superego — the voice that demands, compares and is never satisfied. Those who come to me have usually long since optimised everything: the calendar, their sleep, their communication, themselves. And they are punished by the very agency that demanded all of it — for the fact that it still is not enough.

A coaching that responds with yet more discipline, better routines and another mindset reinforces the voice the client suffers under: it turns the inner taskmaster into the commissioning party. The client feels better for a while, because he is obeying again — and stands there six months later more exhausted than before, now with the added proof that not even coaching helps.

The real work begins one level deeper: with the question of who, exactly, is supposed to be satisfied here, since when — and what happens if, for once, they are not. That sounds like less efficiency. It is its precondition.

Behavioural trainings work. For two weeks, sometimes two months. Then the pressure rises — the deadline, the conflict, the slight — and the old pattern is back, as if it had been waiting next door. That is neither the client’s failure nor the trainer’s: it is regression, and regression is stronger than any seminar. Under strain, people do not reach for what they learned most recently but for what has proven itself longest — for the solution that once carried them through a difficult time, however expensive it has become.

This is why transfer fails so reliably at the moment of truth: the training reaches the behaviour, but not the reason the behaviour was once necessary. Patterns do not hand in their notice. They can only be understood — and then, over time, retired. Whoever grasps what his old solution was once good for no longer has to fight it; he simply needs it less often.

Nobody reacts to authority neutrally. Whoever leads therefore never leads only the real people in the room, but always their imported inner figures as well: the father whom nothing satisfied, the mother who could not bear conflict, the teacher who humiliated. And he is, in turn, led himself — by his own. Psychoanalysis calls this transference, and in everyday leadership it is not an exotic exception but normal operations: it explains why the same factual feedback reaches one employee and devastates another, and why some conflicts feel older than the company.

They are. Whoever knows his own transference situation — which roles he attracts, which he hands out — gains an unspectacular but considerable advantage: he can decline the roles pushed onto him, rescuer, rival, stern parent, and stay with the task instead. This is not people skills in the self-help sense. It is craft, and it can be learned.

The market treats decisiveness as a virtue in itself: deciders decide, everything else is weakness. But hesitation sometimes knows more than the decision. Whoever has been pushing an important decision ahead of himself for weeks, although all the arguments have long been on the table, does not have an information problem — he has an objection that has not yet found language. Something in him does not consent, and it may have good reasons.

You can drown that objection out: set a deadline, flip a coin, “just do it”. And then wonder why the execution stalls, sabotaged by yourself. Or you can question it — what does the postponing protect me from, what do I lose with each of the two options, whose voice is speaking in this hesitation? Decisiveness is not the absence of hesitation. It is the result of a hesitation that was taken seriously.

The objection suggests itself: psychoanalysis — is that not too slow for business? Its force rests on a confusion. The slowness is not a weakness of the method; it is a property of the problems it was built for. Everything fast is superbly served in the market: knowledge is in books, tools are in trainings, feedback is in every 360-degree survey. What remains — the repetition no training reaches; the decision that will not be made; the effect that has come apart from the intention — is not slow because the right technique is still missing, but because it has already successfully defended itself against fast solutions.

For precisely this residual class of problems, psychoanalytic thinking is the most precise instrument available. That I coach as an analyst does not turn coaching into therapy: frame, goal and scope remain coaching. It only means that a different ear is listening — one trained to notice, in what is said, what is not.