You're sitting with a client. Someone accomplished and self-aware, having worked on themselves for years. They know their patterns. They've built real capacity. By any measure, the coaching has been successful.

And yet…..

There's something in their eyes. A weariness that isn't about the presenting issue. They say something like: "I thought I'd be further along by now." Or: "I keep working on myself, but something still feels... off."

You nod. You reach for your training. But somewhere in you, a quiet question stirs:

What if the model itself is the problem?

Most of us were trained in a paradigm we never consciously chose. It runs beneath our frameworks and tools like an operating system we forgot we installed.

The paradigm says: Your client is incomplete. Something is missing, broken, or underdeveloped. Your job is to help them find what's missing, fix what's broken, and build what's underdeveloped. Eventually, after enough sessions, enough insight, enough practice, they'll arrive. The gap will be closed. Fixed.

We don't say this out loud or this bluntly. But it's there. In the assessments that map gaps. In the development plans that target deficits. In the subtle orientation toward becoming that shapes how we sit with another human being.

What if that orientation is what's exhausting our clients?

Michelangelo reportedly said that David was already in the marble. His job wasn't to build David. It was to remove everything that wasn't him.

This isn't just a nice metaphor. It's a fundamentally different stance. I have found it changes everything.

In the deficit model, we help people add what's missing until they're finally whole.

In the remembering model, we help people uncover what's already there but forgotten, blocked, or buried.

Same conversation. Different gravity.

I've started noticing when this shift happens in my own work. The moment I stop trying to help someone become and start trusting that they already are, something changes in the room—the effort drops. A different kind of honesty emerges. The client stops performing something that represents progress and starts actually landing in themselves.

It's not that nothing happens. Often, more happens. But it happens the way a river moves—not forced, not engineered. Uncovered.

This isn't about abandoning your skills. It's about the ground you're standing on when you use them.

You stop listening for what's wrong and start listening for what's trying to emerge. The gap analysis quiets. Something more spacious opens.

This doesn't mean development stops. Skills still get built. Growth still happens. But it arises from a different source—not from fixing what's broken, but from freeing what's been blocked. The energy is generative rather than corrective.

You stop asking "what do you need to develop?" and start asking "what do you already know that you haven't been trusting?"

You notice your own urgency to fix, to move things forward, to demonstrate value—and you let it settle. You discover that your presence, unhurried and undistracted, is more potent than your interventions.

You begin to trust the pauses—the not-knowing. The moments when nothing seems to be happening but something is rearranging beneath the surface.

And perhaps most importantly: you stop holding yourself to the same deficit story. The one that says you should be further along as a coach. That you need another certification, another framework, another tool before you're really ready.

You start to sense that the consciousness your clients need from you isn't something you build.

It's something you remember, uncover, unblock, and come home to.

This applies beyond the coaching room, of course.

The same shift is available to any leader, parent, or friend who has ever sat with another person wanting to help them grow.

The question is the same: Are we trying to fix them into something better? Or are we creating the conditions for them to come home to themselves?

Not building each other into better versions. Not fixing each other's brokenness. Walking each other home—to what was never actually lost.

What if that's what our clients are actually longing for?

What if it's what we're longing for too?

I work with experienced coaches and others who sense they're at this threshold—skilled in their craft but hungry for a deeper ground to work from. If this landed and you want to explore what's next for your own practice, contact me.