The Difference Between Coaching for Goals and Coaching for Meaning

I’ll be honest with you. When I first started thinking seriously about coaching, I thought it was just about goals. Helping people get from where they are to where they want to be. Clearer targets, better strategies, more accountability.

And to be fair, that’s what most people think coaching is and if you’re new to coaching then don’t let me confuse you, it is, it’s what most people come looking for.

But the uncomfortable thing I’ve come to understand, and I say uncomfortable because it took me a while to fully accept it, is that a person can achieve every single goal they set and still feel like something essential is missing. The promotion arrived or the relationship improved. That healthy habit that they really wanted finally stuck. Yet there’s a version of themselves standing on the other side of all that achievement wondering why it doesn’t feel the way they thought it would. Is that a failure? I think it’s actually a very precise diagnosis of what kind of coaching was happening.

Goal-focused coaching, which is the dominant model in most corporate and performance contexts, works at the level of doing. What do you want? What’s stopping you? What will you do differently? All genuinely useful questions. But they all share the same assumption underneath them, which is that the person asking them is already fully formed, and just needs better strategies or clearer direction to get where they’re going.

Coaching for meaning starts from a completely different place. It asks not what do you want to do, but who are you in this? Not what are you trying to achieve, but what kind of person are you becoming in the pursuing of it? So instead of what’s the goal, or the thing that’s been prescribed to you by your environment as the thing you need to do, but what’s the meaning underneath the goal, and is the life you’re building actually oriented toward something that matters to you in a way that goes deeper than the achieving of it?

These feel like really subtle shifts in the questions. But they really aren’t. They produce completely different conversations and they tend to surface completely different things. I think about it sometimes like the difference between renovating a house and examining whether you actually want to live there. Goal coaching helps you renovate beautifully. Meaning based coaching asks whether this is the right house.

If you’re renovating a house you were never really meant to live in, all the work in the world won’t make it feel like home.

Nick Bolton, whose work through Animas has shaped a lot of how I think about transformational coaching, talks about the difference between first order and second order change. First order change is doing something differently within the same structure. Second order change is a shift in the structure itself. The way you see. The way you relate. The way you interpret what’s happening to you and what’s possible for you. Goal coaching tends to produce first order change. Coaching for meaning reaches for the second.

And this is where meaning enters the conversation in a way I think is pretty underexplored in mainstream coaching culture.

Because even meaning-level work, the ontological stuff, the work with narrative identity and self-concept and the way we construct our experience, can still leave a person more coherent but not necessarily more oriented.

You can become a so much more clearer, authentic and self-aware version of yourself and still not know what you’re in service of. Still not feel that you have a direction that genuinely matters.

This is the question logos coaching tries to ask, in many different ways. Not just who are you being, but toward what? What is the meaning that your being is moving in the direction of? Because without that, even the deepest coaching can produce a person who is impressively developed but feels adrift. Like you’re in a dingy, moving but no paddles to adjust.

Think about the goals you’re currently working toward, or the ones you’ve recently achieved. Were they yours in the deepest sense, or were they the logical next step in a life that accumulated rather than one that was chosen?

Underneath those goals, what’s the actual hunger? Not the strategic objective, but the human need that the objective is trying to meet?

I’m not suggesting goals aren’t important. I’m suggesting they’re a language, and like all languages, what matters isn’t just what’s being said but what’s trying to be expressed underneath it.

The most interesting coaching conversations I’ve ever been part of, on either side of that dynamic, were never really about the goal. They were about the person. Who are they becoming. What are they discovering about themselves in the pursuit of the goal. What were they finally willing to admit mattered to them.

When we ask at the beginning of a coaching session, something along the lines of “what would you like to get from today’s session?” Maybe the goal is just the way in and meaning behind it is where the truth of what the person really want could really come to light.

Thank you for reading.

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If any part of this resonated, it may be worth paying attention not only to the goals you are pursuing, but to the deeper direction those goals are quietly shaping inside your life.

Sometimes achievement alone is not enough to create meaning. Sometimes the more important question is whether the life we are building still feels connected to who we actually are beneath performance, momentum, and expectation.

At Logos Coaching, much of the work we do begins around questions exactly like these. Questions about meaning, identity, fulfilment, self leadership, narrative, and what it means to pursue success without slowly disconnecting from yourself in the process.

If you’d like to explore any of the ideas in this piece further, or speak with the writer about coaching through Logos Coaching, you can get in touch here.

Related Reflections:
• Ontological Coaching: Working With Who You Are, Not Just What You Do
• The Existential Vacuum: Why Capable People Feel Empty Despite Everything
• Ikigai, Positive Psychology and Meaning
• The False Summit
• When Contribution Matters More Than Confidence