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

Most of us, at some point, have tried to change something about ourselves. Maybe it was the way we communicate, how we handle pressure or the way we show up in relationships and in rooms where something is really at stake. But the approach is almost always the same. We identify the behaviour we want to change, find a strategy for changing it, and we apply it with varying degrees of commitment until it either sticks or slides back into the old pattern.

And sometimes this works. But if you’re anything like me then you’ll have found yourself with a signature kind of frustration that comes when you’ve done everything right, read the books, had the conversations, made the commitments. Yet you still find yourself back in the same dynamic, with the same reaction and the same version of yourself you were trying to move past. Not at all because you lack the discipline or intelligence to change, but because the behaviour was never really the source of the problem.

This is where ontological coaching comes in. The word ontological comes from ontology, which is a  branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being. Not what we do, but what it means to exist as a particular kind of person in this world. And ontological coaching operates from a simple but significant premise. That who you are, your way of being, is not a fixed thing you were born with or a personality type you’re permanently inside of. It’s something that expresses itself constantly, in three interconnected ways. Through the language you use, the moods and emotions you operate from and the body you inhabit.

These three things aren’t separate. They’re always moving together.

The language you use isn’t just how you communicate, it’s how you construct reality. Spells you put out into the world (which is why they call it spelling). The stories you tell about yourself, the commitments you make and break, or the way you describe what’s possible and what isn’t. None of that is neutral. It’s generative and it creates the world you then have to live inside. Which means, that when someone says “I’m just not a confident person” or “I’ve never been good at asking for what I need,” they’re not describing a fixed truth. They’re making a declaration that keeps producing the same evidence.

The moods you operate from work in a similar way. Not the emotions that flare up and pass, but the background atmospheres you haven’t consciously chosen. These colour everything you perceive. Someone operating from a background mood of resentment will interpret a colleague’s silence completely differently to someone operating from curiosity. The external event is identical, but the experience of it is entirely different. Ontological coaching works with these background moods because they shape behaviour more powerfully than any strategy applied on top of them ever could.

And then there’s the body. The way you physically inhabit the world, your posture, your breath, the tension you carry and where you carry it, is all an expression of your being.

What ontological coaching proposes is that lasting change, the kind that doesn’t gradually dissolve back into old patterns, requires a shift at this deeper level. Not just doing something differently, but being someone different. And the work of a coach operating in this space is to help someone see their own way of being clearly enough that it becomes something they can actually work with, rather than something they’re simply living inside of without realising it.

Here’s the questions I think are worth pausing on. In the area of your life where you most want things to be different, are you working at the level of behaviour, or at the level of being? Are you trying to act differently, or are you genuinely curious about who’s doing the acting? Because those are very different enquiries to the self and they also tend to produce very different results.

But this is where I want to bring something else into the conversation. Because ontological coaching, as powerful as it is, can still leave something important unanswered. You can do the work. Maybe shift the language, loosen the moods, change the way you hold yourself in a room. You can become a more coherent, authentic, and even a more self-aware version of yourself and still wake up on a Tuesday morning wondering what any of it is actually for.

This is the question that meaning-based coaching, the philosophy at the heart of what we do at Logos, brings into the conversation. Not just how are you being, but towards what?

Frankl believed that human beings don’t just need to function well. We need to feel that our functioning matters. That there’s something in our  lives that is oriented towards a meaning that is so much more important than the immediate pressures of any given day. Without that orientation, even a well-structured, coherent, authentic life can still feel really hollow.

This isn’t an abstract philosophical concern. It shows up in really concrete ways. It could show up in the leader who has everything working and still feels like something is missing. Maybe in the person who has become impressively good at managing themselves but has quietly lost touch with why they were doing it in the first place. Or in the professional who is more effective than ever and less alive than they’ve felt in years.

The being needs an orientation. A direction. A sense of what it’s moving toward and why that matters. Which is why the most important coaching question isn’t just who are you being. It’s in who are you being, for what, and in service of what?

Think about the area of your life where you feel most like you’re going through the motions. Where the competence is there but the aliveness isn’t quite. Is that a behaviour problem, or is it something sitting further back than that?

Something about who you’re being in that space, and whether the being you’ve constructed there is still connected to anything that genuinely means something to you.

I love the questions that feel like a more honest starting point than just trying to change another behaviour in a life whose deeper direction hasn’t quite been examined yet.

Ontological coaching gives us a way to work with who you are. Meaning-based coaching gives that work somewhere to go. From my experience, I think we need both.

Thank you for reading.

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If any part of this resonated, it may be worth paying attention to the difference between changing behaviour and understanding the deeper way of being underneath it.

Sometimes the issue is not simply what we are doing. Sometimes it is the relationship we have with ourselves, our identity, and the meaning shaping the direction of our lives underneath the surface.

At Logos Coaching, much of the work we do begins around questions exactly like these. Questions about identity, meaning, narrative, emotional patterns, self leadership, and what it means to build a life that feels coherent internally as well as externally.

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:
• The Difference Between Coaching for Goals and Coaching for Meaning
• The Existential Vacuum: Why Capable People Feel Empty Despite Everything
• The Mind That Shapes the Story
• When Insight Stops Feeling Kind
• Love Without Agenda: Coaching as an Act of Care