Meaning Based Coaching: The Philosophy Underneath the Practice

What meaning based coaching actually is

Meaning based coaching rests on a single reversal. Conventional coaching asks what you want and how to get there faster. Meaning based coaching asks what would make it worth wanting in the first place.

That sounds like a philosophical nicety until you notice how much of adult life is spent pursuing outcomes nobody ever consciously chose. Careers are usually entered sideways, through a summer job that turned into a role, a subject someone happened to be good at aged sixteen, a parental expectation absorbed so early that it never presented itself as an opinion.

So, the goals get achieved. Whether they were the right goals never gets asked, because the machinery of achievement is loud and shiny enough to drown the important question out. Whats the meaning to it all?

I tend to work at the level just below the goal. The presenting issue might be a job decision, a difficult relationship at work, a sense of drift after a success. Underneath it sits a more structural question about what this person takes their life to be for, and whether their days are arranged in any relationship at all to that answer.

Where the approach comes from

Most modern coaching inherits its language from sport and management. The vocabulary gives it away. Vernacular like performance, targets, accountability, marginal gains, smart goals. That lineage has produced some really useful practice and, as a business owner, I use most of it. It also carries an assumption underneath that nobody examines, which is that the person in front of you already knows what they want and simply needs help getting there efficiently. Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe in unconditional positive regard being a non-negotiable when it comes to working with my clients. But let me explain.

Meaning based coaching simply draws on a different family of ideas.

Existential philosophy which asks what it is to live a human life under conditions nobody chose. Kierkegaard on anxiety and choice, Heidegger on the way we fall into ready made versions of ourselves, Camus on how to carry on once you accept that the universe offers no built in answer.

Logotherapy, developed by Viktor Frankl, puts the search for meaning at the centre of human motivation and treats meaninglessness as a condition in its own right rather than a symptom of something else.

Narrative identity theory, associated with Dan McAdams, studies how we construct an internal life story to hold ourselves together across time.

Humanistic psychology, particularly Carl Rogers, insists that people grow in conditions of regard rather than pressure.

Coaching psychology supplies the empirical discipline, the academic literature we all know and love, telling us what actually helps and where practitioners are flattering themselves.

Put them together and you get a practice with a different starting question, a slower pace, and a tolerance for material most coaching moves past.

Meaning is three things, and we usually confuse them

Psychologists working on meaning in life, notably Frank Martela and Michael Steger, have argued that what we lump together as meaning is really three separate components. Coherence is the sense that your life makes sense, that events hang together in a way you can follow. Purpose is the sense of direction, of aiming at something. Significance is the sense that your existence matters and that it would register if you were not here.

Most people arrive at coaching saying they have lost their sense of purpose. Quite often that is not the part that has failed. Someone who has come through a redundancy, a bereavement or a divorce frequently has plenty of direction and no coherence at all. They know exactly what they are doing next, and they cannot explain to themselves how they got here or what the last decade was about. Handing that person a purpose exercise is answering a question they never asked.

Someone else has coherence and purpose in abundance, a life that reads clearly from the outside, and no felt significance whatsoever. They can tell you why the work matters in the abstract and cannot locate themselves anywhere inside that description.

So the first useful move is diagnostic rather than motivational. Which of the three has gone missing? It is worth asking yourself now, before you read on. Is it that your life does not make sense, that it is not going anywhere, or that it does not seem to matter? They feel almost identical from the inside and they need entirely different work.

Below are the seven ideas the whole approach rests on.

One: we are oriented toward meaning before happiness

Frankl’s central claim was that the primary human motivation is the search for meaning, and that pleasure and power are what people reach for once that search has stalled.

Research has since put some unexpected detail on this. Roy Baumeister and colleagues looked at what distinguishes a happy life from a meaningful one and found that the two come apart in specific ways.

Happiness allows us to track whether our needs and wants are being met right now. Meaning is often spread across time, so a sense of connection between what you did, what you are doing and what you are working toward. Happiness is associated with taking, meaning is associated with giving. Raising small children reliably lowers moment to moment happiness while reliably raising reported meaning.

Read that again, because it undoes something most of us know, but we very rarely say it out loud. When was the last time you had a conversation centred around the things that were orientating you towards meaning? Now think about how many conversations you have had in the past week that were in some way geared towards what was going to bring happiness.

Happiness and meaning are two different goods rather than two names for the same warm feeling, they respond to different inputs, and it is entirely possible to build a life optimised for one that quietly starves the other.

There is a second asymmetry worth sitting with. Happiness adapts. The research on hedonic adaptation shows that improvements in circumstance produce a lift that fades back toward a baseline with remarkable consistency, which is why the salary increase you were certain would change everything registers as normal within a season.

Meaning tolerates discomfort, survives inconvenience, and tends to deepen with familiarity rather than fade. Nietzsche said it perfectly, and Frankl was fond of quoting it, that a person with a why can bear almost any how.

Which suggests an uncomfortable little audit. Look at the last three significant decisions you made about your time. Were you optimising for the thing that adapts, or the thing that accumulates?

Two: meaning is discovered, never installed

This is the pillar that gets misunderstood most often, including by coaches. If meaning matters that much, the temptation is to supply it, to tell the client what their purpose is, or to run a framework in the office that produces a purpose statement by four o’clock in the afternoon.

Frankl was clear that meaning has to be found rather than given, and there is a hard practical reason for that. Meaning somebody else installed in you will not hold weight when things get difficult, because you have no relationship with it. You didn’t arrive at it, so you can’t return to it. The statement on the wall in your bosses office does nothing at two in the morning.

Frankl also mapped where meaning is actually found, and honestly his three routes are more useful than most modern purpose frameworks. Meaning arrives through what we create and contribute, through what we receive from the world in encounter with beauty, love and other people, and through the stance we take toward suffering that cannot be changed.

Notice that only the first of those is about output. Almost every purpose exercise in circulation, every ikigai diagram and mission statement template, searches exclusively in that first category. So anyone in a season of receiving rather than producing, or a season of pure endurance, concludes they have no purpose at all, when they have simply been looking in one of the three available places.

Meaning also resists direct pursuit, in the way that sleep and spontaneity do. Frankl called it hyper intention, where trying hard at something that only ever occurs as a side effect actively prevents it. The person who sets out to have a meaningful year the way one sets out to have a productive one is usually further away in December than they were in January. Meaning arrives obliquely, through absorption in something outside yourself.

So the coach’s job is structurally strange. You are helping someone find something you are not allowed to give them. That takes a particular discipline: asking rather than telling and obviously staying with a question long after it has become uncomfortable, and resisting the urge to resolve things early on the client’s behalf. Every good instinct you have to be helpful has to be held back a little.

Three: the shortage is coherence, not information

People rarely come to coaching short of facts about their own lives. They know what happened, they know their options, and they usually know roughly what they should probably do. What they cannot do is fit the pieces together into an account that holds.

The narrative identity research is instructive here. McAdams and colleagues have shown that we build internal life stories to create continuity across time, and that the shape of those stories relates to wellbeing in measurable ways. People whose accounts of difficulty contain what researchers call redemptive sequences, where the bad thing leads somewhere, report greater purpose. People whose accounts run the other way, where good things reliably turn sour, do worse across the board.

The most beautiful evidence of this in my mind comes from a really unexpected place. James Pennebaker’s expressive writing studies found that writing about difficult experiences produced real improvements in health and functioning, and the obvious explanation was catharsis, the value of getting it out. When his team analysed the language of the people who improved most, catharsis was not what distinguished them. What predicted benefit was actually an increase in causal and insight words across sessions, terms like because, realise, understand. The people who got better were the people whose account of the event changed shape. The benefit was in the construction rather than the expression!

That sits underneath a great deal of meaning based coaching. Two people live through the same restructure and walk away with different selves. One reads it as evidence of inadequacy, the other gains evidence they had outgrown the role. The facts are identical, the story is very different, and it is the story that governs what they attempt next.

The lesson? Careful, honest, unhurried work on the story is the practical work rather than a soft addition to it.

Which raises some interestingly powerful question stacking. I would put to you directly. What is the account you give of the hardest thing that ever happened to you? When did you last check whether you still believe it? Where in your life does that belief no longer serve you?

Four: being comes before doing

You cannot separate what a person does from how they are constituted as an observer of their own life. Two leaders facing the same restructure will see different options, because they are not looking at the same situation. They are looking through different histories, assumptions, fears and convictions about who they are permitted to be.

This is the ontological strand of the work, and it explains why behaviour change so often fails to stick. You can hand someone a technique for having difficult conversations, and if they hold a deep conviction that conflict makes them unlovable, the technique will sit unused in a drawer. The behaviour is downstream.

Robert Kegan’s work on adult development gives the most interesting version of this. He distinguishes brilliently between what we are subject to and what we can hold as object. What we are subject to runs us invisibly, because we can’t see it, we’re actually looking through it.

What we can hold as object, examine and turn over, loses that grip on us quite quickly. On this account, development is the movement of things from subject to object, from something you are to something you have, rather than the accumulation of more knowledge or better tactics. Which makes a coaching conversation the slow business of making visible the assumptions someone has been standing on for thirty years without noticing they were assumptions at all.

Change the observer and the options change on their own. If this wasn’t a blog, I would put a brain explosion emoji here.

Five: freedom lives in the space between what happens and what you make of it

Frankl described the ability to choose your attitude in any given circumstance as the last of the human freedoms, and he made that claim from inside a situation where almost every other freedom had been removed.

The coaching application is more ordinary and no less demanding. Much of what shapes a life arrives unchosen: the family you were born into, the market conditions, the illness, the redundancy, the timing. What remains available is your response, and the interpretation you place on the thing that happened.

I believe that is actually where the best version of this work becomes far less comfortable than it sounds in training, because emphasising freedom means emphasising responsibility, and responsibility is heavier than blame.

That inversion catches people out. Blame feels like the harder emotion because it runs hot, and it is actually the easier position, since it locates the problem elsewhere and asks nothing further of you. Responsibility is cooler and considerably more expensive. It leaves the facts exactly where they are, accepts that you did not cause them, and then asks what you intend to do now.

A person can be entirely blameless for their situation and still be the only one who can respond to it, and holding both of those at once, without collapsing into either self reproach or grievance, is one of the harder things anyone does. Good coaching holds that question open with just enough warmth that it can be faced within a psychologically safe relationship.

Six: suffering is a site of meaning rather than an obstacle to it. The darker side of the work.

Coaching has a tendency to route around pain. The client mentions grief or failure or a period they would rather not revisit, and the conversation moves swiftly forward to solutions. Future focusing work or a swift referal to therapy.

Frankl’s position, which he called tragic optimism, was that meaning remains available even in suffering that cannot be removed, and that this availability is what allows people to endure.

Research on post traumatic growth, developed by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, has given the idea empirical shape. A significant proportion of people who go through severe adversity report changes afterwards they regard as valuable: closer relationships, clearer priorities, a revised sense of what they can withstand.

I think It’s probably worth saying that this literature is contested, and that measures relying only on retrospective self report tend to show larger effects than studies that track people prospectively. But growth after adversity is real and may not always be automatic, but I still think that any coach who promises growth as an outcome has misunderstood the material in my opinion.

For me, the underlying mechanism is the interesting part. Ronnie Janoff Bulman’s work suggests that traumatic events do their damage by shattering a set of assumptions we never knew we held, that the world is broadly benevolent, meaningful, and that we are worthy of good outcomes. Growth comes from the labour of rebuilding those assumptions into something that can accommodate what happened. So the growth was never in the event. It was in the reconstruction, and reconstruction is work somebody has to actually do rather than wait out.

Practically, this reverses the usual instinct. When a client brings something painful, the useful response is to slow down rather than accelerate. The material people most want to move past is frequently the material carrying the most meaning.

Seven: the relationship is the method

The final pillar is the hardest to write into a framework, or an explanation of any kind. But it’s also probably the most important.

Martin Buber distinguished between meeting another person as an object to be handled and meeting them as a subject in their own right, and wrote that all real living is meeting. Carl Rogers argued that unconditional positive regard is a precondition for growth rather than an indulgence. Simone Weil described attention as the rarest and purest form of generosity.

They are pointing at the same thing, and the empirical literature has arrived there by a completely different road. Decades of psychotherapy outcome research, summarised in the common factors tradition associated with Bruce Wampold, has consistently found that the alliance between practitioner and client predicts outcome more reliably than the specific method being used. Approaches with sound rationales tend to produce broadly comparable results, and even without that, we all know that the relationship keeps turning up as the active ingredient, obviously.

But I think this is so much more radical than it first appears. The relationship is not the container the intervention arrives in. The relationship is the intervention.

People do not open up because they are managed well. They open up when they feel safe enough to be honest, and honesty is the raw material this entire practice runs on. Without it you get a well conducted conversation about a version of someone’s life that they tidied for public consumption long before they walked in.

What this looks like in an organisation

Everything above applies to one person in a room, and it scales in ways I did not expect when I started understanding these conceptualisations about coaching, because organisations run on meaning far more than they admit.

Engagement surveys try to measure it sideways, culture decks attempt to declare it, values posters name it in language nobody uses in an actual meeting. Meanwhile every individual is working out privately whether what they do all day connects to anything they care about, and the answer to that private question drives retention, discretionary effort and the honesty of the conversations happening in the building.

Two findings should reshape how leaders think about this. The first comes from Christina Maslach’s research on burnout, which identifies a values mismatch between person and organisation as one of the strongest predictors of the condition. The exhaustion is real and it is rarely caused by hours alone.

People sustain remarkable workloads when the work means something and buckle under modest ones when it does not. Frankl had a term for the state of feeling that nothing much matters, the existential vacuum, and a good deal of what gets labelled burnout has exactly that shape.

The second is more challenging. Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden, researching meaningful work across a range of occupations, found that leaders were far more capable of destroying meaningfulness than of creating it.

Meaningfulness arrived in episodes, often unexpectedly, and was frequently personal and impossible to schedule. What leaders could reliably do was cancel it, through unnecessary bureaucracy, unfair treatment, disconnection from outcomes, and asking people to do work they considered pointless.

That reframes the whole exercise. The leadership task is not to inspire meaning into people, which is installing it under another name. The task is to stop breaking it.

Amy Wrzesniewski’s studies of job crafting show what remains possible. In her research on hospital cleaners, some described their work as a set of tasks completed while others described themselves as part of the care of the patients, and that second group organised their work differently, altering their own routines to serve that account. Same job title, same duties, different work entirely.

All of which makes this a leadership question rather than a wellbeing initiative, and it starts by asking leaders what their own work is for before asking them to inspire anybody else.

The question underneath all of it

A well maintained life and an inhabited life look almost identical from the outside. Both have the roof repaired and the accounts in order. The difference is whether anyone is living in the rooms.

Meaning based coaching is something other than a technique, and something other than therapy. It is a way of taking a life seriously enough to ask what it is for, and then staying present while someone works out an honest answer they can stand behind.

If any of this has landed, set aside for a moment what you are doing and how well you are doing it, and ask instead what it is all in service of. If the answer arrives quickly and sounds borrowed, that is worth noticing too.

Most people already know where the incoherence sits in their lives. They have simply never had a space in which saying it out loud was safe.

Frequently asked questions

What is meaning based coaching? Meaning based coaching is an approach that works with what a person’s life and work are for, rather than only with goals and performance. It draws on logotherapy, existential philosophy, narrative identity theory, humanistic psychology and coaching psychology, and it starts from the question of what would make an outcome worth pursuing in the first place.

How is meaning based coaching different from executive or performance coaching?

Performance coaching generally assumes the goal is settled and works on the route. Meaning based coaching examines the goal itself, the story the person is telling about their life, and the assumptions they are looking through. The two work well together, and the meaning question usually needs answering first.

Is meaning based coaching the same as therapy? No. Therapy typically works with psychological distress and its history. Meaning based coaching works with people who are functioning and want that functioning to be connected to something they value. A responsible coach refers on when clinical support is the appropriate route.

What is logotherapy and how does it apply to coaching? Logotherapy is the approach developed by Viktor Frankl, built on the idea that the search for meaning is the primary human motivation. In coaching it translates into helping people locate meaning through what they create, what they encounter, and the stance they take toward what cannot be changed.

Who is meaning based coaching for? People who have achieved what they set out to achieve and feel unexpectedly flat, leaders carrying responsibility for other people’s sense of purpose as well as their own, and anyone at a transition where the old account of their life no longer fits.

If any part of this resonated, it may be worth paying attention to the areas of your life or your leadership that function well on the surface and feel disconnected underneath.

At Logos Coaching, much of the work begins around questions exactly like these. Questions about meaning, coherence, identity, narrative, leadership and what it takes to build a life and an organisation that feel inhabited rather than simply maintained.

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

Related Reflections:

• The Web of Needs

• Ontological Coaching: Working With Who You Are, Not Just What You Do

• When the Broken Becomes Beautiful: Kintsugi, Kintsukuroi and the Architecture of Change

• The Existential Vacuum: When Life Feels Empty

• Paradoxical Intention: The Strange Cure for Fear