Coaching Language, Explained: What Do Coaches Mean by 'Strategy'?
- Paul@DifferentKeys.Online
- Oct 10
- 8 min read
Updated: Oct 14
Discover what 'strategy' really means in coaching. Learn how your behaviour patterns develop, why they make sense, and how coaching helps you choose which strategies serve your future self.
Cutting Through the Coaching Fog: Why Clear Explanations Matter
Let's address the elephant in the room: coaching language can sometimes sound like it was invented by a committee of management consultants who've been locked in a corporate wellness retreat for far too long.
When we read about 'leveraging our adaptive capacity to optimise congruence and enhance self-efficacy through the intentional reframing of our growth-oriented paradigms', what are we supposed to be doing, exactly?
Here, the language can act as a barrier, creating distance between coach and client when connection should be the goal. Dense terminology can leave newcomers feeling like outsiders peering through a window at conversations they're not equipped to join. But — if I strip out the verbal gymnastics and wordy window-dressing — if I just said, 'it's about working out what you could do differently to get better results', the meaning becomes immediately accessible. Suddenly, what seemed mystical becomes practical, and what felt exclusive becomes inviting.
This type of linguistic complexity tends to emerge naturally within professional communities. Like any specialised field, coaching develops its own vocabulary as practitioners refine their understanding and share ideas with colleagues. Terms evolve within training programs, professional bodies, and peer networks — creating a shared language that can feel precise and meaningful to those on the inside. This isn't inherently problematic; it's how human communities develop deeper ways of thinking about their work.
The challenge arises when this insider language becomes the default mode of communication with newcomers. When coaches forget to translate their professional shorthand, they risk creating barriers exactly where they should be building bridges. What was meant to demonstrate expertise can inadvertently signal exclusivity.
This is why clarity matters. Coaching concepts aren't mystical secrets requiring initiation — they're practical frameworks that work best when understood clearly. My aim with this series is to take the most common coaching terms and make them genuinely accessible, not by dumbing them down, but by explaining them in plain language that honours both their sophistication and their practical value.
Strategic Thinking: From Battlefields to Developing Brains
The word ‘strategy’ comes with some weighty associations. It conjures images of war rooms and corporate boardrooms, places where serious people in sombre suits make decisions that ripple across continents. International defence strategies, global marketing campaigns, carefully-crafted political alliances — all of these sound impressively consequential.
However, not all strategies involve so many people and so many countries. Strategies can be individual and human too. You may not recognise it as such, but you have been a strategist your entire life — and you started almost immediately after you were born. Crying, you discovered, was an effective way to get food. Later, learning how to walk, how to sit down, how to go to the toilet, pushed you to explore new movements and different ways of doing things, and your brain developed more complex strategies that allowed you to get these things done.
When you learned to smile sweetly and say ‘I’m sorry!’ after breaking something as a child, that was strategy. When you discovered which route to work avoids the morning rush, that's strategy too. When you instinctively know not to mention politics at family events with certain relatives — well, you're practically a strategic genius.
In coaching, strategy isn't about outmanoeuvring opponents or conquering markets. It's about the patterns — some conscious, many not — that you've developed to meet your needs and navigate your world. Every behaviour, every habit, every way you've learned to cope: they're all strategies. The question isn't whether you're using strategies at all, but whether the ones you're using are serving you well.
Maslow and the Architecture of Human Need
Every strategy begins with a need. This insight isn't particularly revolutionary — Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist who fundamentally shifted how we understand human motivation in the mid-20th century, mapped it out decades ago when he suggested our needs form a kind of hierarchy, from basic survival requirements up to our hunger for meaning and self-actualisation. But it's worth revisiting because it reframes behaviour in a fundamentally compassionate way.
Consider this: you don't notice your needs when they're met, any more than you notice your breathing when it's effortless. Needs form the invisible architecture of daily life. But when something's missing — safety, connection, recognition, autonomy — we adapt. We reach for whatever might fill that gap.
That reaching is strategy in action. Sometimes it's straightforward: eat when hungry, rest when tired, call a friend when lonely. Sometimes it's more complex: work excessive hours to feel secure, withdraw from social situations to avoid rejection, develop a razor-sharp sense of humour to deflect serious conversations.
None of these responses happen in isolation. They're shaped by your context, your resources, your past experiences, and what seemed possible at the time. Viewed this way, behaviour becomes less about personal failing and more about human ingenuity — even when that ingenuity has led you somewhere you'd rather not be.
When Strategies Serve and When They Don’t
Here's where coaching gets practical. Not all strategies age well. Some that once protected you might now be holding you back. Coaches often distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive strategies — terms that sound clinical but are actually quite liberating.
Adaptive strategies are those that genuinely help you meet your needs while supporting your long-term wellbeing:
• Reaching out for support.
• Sharing feelings rather than bottling them up.
• Setting boundaries that protect your time and energy.
• Being present for others.
• Finding humour in challenge.
• Learning new skills or perspectives.
These don't eliminate life's challenges, but they help you navigate them sustainably.
Maladaptive strategies are different. They're patterns that once made perfect sense — perhaps they were your lifeline during difficult times — but now they create more problems than they solve:
• Rumination — replaying worries instead of resolving them.
• Avoidance — steering clear of situations that cause anxiety.
• Suppressing emotions — "keeping a lid on things" to stay in control.
• Blame or lashing out — deflecting pain by directing it outward.
• Numbing stress with distraction or unhealthy habits.
Two particularly common examples are people-pleasing and masking. People-pleasing might once have secured vital approval, but when it becomes automatic, it can leave you chronically overcommitted and disconnected from your own needs.
Masking — the practice of camouflaging your authentic self to fit in — is especially prevalent among those who grew up neurodivergent or LGBTQ+ in environments where difference wasn't acceptable. In hostile or unwelcoming contexts, learning to blend in represents adaptive brilliance, not character weakness. But when you find yourself in safer spaces where authenticity is welcomed, continuing to mask can become the very barrier to the genuine connections you're seeking.
The key insight? Maladaptive strategies aren't evidence of weakness. They're often signs of intelligence and creativity applied to environments that couldn't meet your needs adequately. The work isn't about self-criticism, but recognition: acknowledging when old patterns have outlived their usefulness and beginning to experiment with alternatives.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Most strategies develop without conscious deliberation. You don't sit down at age seven and think, "Right, I shall now develop a tendency to perfectionism as a means of securing parental approval." Instead, you notice what works, and you do more of it.
Only later — sometimes much later — do we construct explanations for our patterns. Psychologists call this post-hoc rationalisation, and Jerome Bruner, writing in his influential work Acts of Meaning (1990), argued that we're fundamentally storytelling creatures. We don't just process information; we weave it into narratives that help us understand who we are and why we do what we do.
For people discovering later in life that they're neurodivergent, this reframing process can fundamentally reshape their understanding of themselves. Behaviours that seemed like personal failings suddenly make sense through a different lens. Procrastination wasn't laziness; it was executive dysfunction. Emotional outbursts weren't moral weakness; they were a nervous system overwhelmed by stimuli it couldn't process. Substance use or compulsive behaviours weren't character defects but urgent attempts to self-regulate in a world that offered little support.
This recognition often brings a complex mixture of relief and grief: relief because your experiences finally make sense, but grief for the years spent thinking you were fundamentally flawed, for opportunities missed because your strategies were misunderstood, for the exhaustion of constantly adapting to environments where you couldn't be yourself.
The experience of reframing past strategies becomes even more complex when additional identity factors are involved. Race, class, religion, neurodivergence, and LGBTQ+ identity can all add layers of complexity to this process. For LGBTQ+ individuals who grew up in heteronormative environments, for instance, recognising the adaptive strategies they developed — the hypervigilance around personal disclosure, the careful code-switching between different social groups, the perhaps unconscious tendency to form intense but 'safe' friendships rather than risk romantic vulnerability — represents intelligent adaptation to often hostile environments. But unlike neurodivergence, which increasingly has scientific models to explain brain differences, many aspects of identity still navigate territories where moral judgments persist alongside growing acceptance, making the journey from shame to self-compassion particularly challenging.
How Coaching Helps: Curiosity Over Judgment
This process of examining and potentially shifting your strategies is where working with a professionally trained coach becomes valuable — someone who can help you understand your patterns on your own terms, without judgment, drawing on your unique lived experiences.
Rather than labelling your patterns as good or bad, coaching invites curiosity. It asks you to become a compassionate observer of your own life, examining your strategies without the weight of moral judgment.
Working with a coach, you might explore questions like:
• What strategies have I been using to meet my needs?
• How have they served me — both in the immediate moment and over time?
• Which ones are still helping me move toward the life I want to live?
• What might I experiment with instead?
The aim isn't to erase your coping mechanisms with shame or willpower. It's about expanding your repertoire. Maybe rumination could sometimes become problem-solving. Perhaps avoidance could occasionally become gradual exposure. Emotional suppression might evolve into emotional expression within safe relationships.
This isn't about sudden dramatic transformation — it's about a conscious choice to gradually shift towards more effective behaviours that align with your goals. With awareness comes the possibility of flexibility, and with flexibility comes the chance to respond with intention rather than merely reacting.
Strategy as Self-Compassion
So when a coach asks about your strategies, they're not criticising you or testing your self-awareness. They're offering an invitation to examine your patterns with the same compassion you might show a close friend.
Strategy, in coaching terms, is simply a way of understanding that all behaviour has purpose — even when that purpose is no longer serving you well. It's a framework for recognising your own resourcefulness while staying open to growth.
Perhaps most importantly, it's permission to see yourself clearly without harsh judgment, and from that clearer vision, to begin making choices that align more closely with who you're becoming rather than who you had to be to survive.
Your strategies have brought you this far... and now, with greater awareness and understanding, you get to choose which ones will shape your future. That's the real power of understanding strategy in coaching terms — not forcing transformation through sheer willpower, but conscious choice built on compassionate self-awareness and acceptance.
What resonated with you?
If this post has sparked recognition or curiosity about your own patterns, I'd love to hear from you in the comments. Which strategies do you recognise in your own life? What questions has this raised for you? Your insights often help other readers feel less alone in their experiences.
Feel free to share this post if you think it might help someone else make sense of their own strategic patterns — sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer each other is a new way to understand our behaviour.
Ready to explore your strategies more deeply?
If you're curious about examining your patterns with professional support, I offer a free 30-minute consultation where we can explore whether coaching might be helpful for you. No jargon, no pressure — just an honest conversation about where you are and where you'd like to be. You can book directly through my website or drop me a message.
Coming soon in 'Coaching Language, Explained'
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Strengths
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