A coach I’ll call Sam brought a client to supervision and opened with an apology. “I think I lost my nerve.” His client, a finance director, had spent the session dismantling a piece of feedback line by line. Sam had nodded, softened his next question, and quietly moved on. Two weeks later the same client arrived deflated and said she had never been good enough for the role. Sam spent forty minutes listing her strengths. The week after that, she cancelled.

Three sessions. Three different clients, it seemed. And one coach who felt he had been a different coach each time.

He had. So had she. But the pattern underneath had not moved at all.

The schema stays. The coping changes.

In schema work, a schema is the old lesson: I am not enough, people will leave, my needs come last. It forms early, when a core emotional need goes unmet, and it stays remarkably stable.

What changes is what we do about it. Schema therapy describes three coping styles, and they map neatly onto the oldest responses to threat. We freeze, we flee, or we fight.

• Surrender (freeze). We give in to the schema and act as if it were true. We agree too quickly, take the blame, accept what we should question.
• Avoidance (flee). We arrange life so the schema never gets touched. We change the subject, stay busy, cancel, keep it light.
• Overcompensation (fight). We act as if the opposite were true. We push, prove, argue, take control.

None of this was a mistake once. A child who goes quiet around an unpredictable adult is protecting herself. A child who becomes the achiever in a house that does not notice him is finding a way to be seen. The strategy made sense. The trouble is that it keeps running long after the house has changed, and every time it runs, it keeps the old lesson alive.

The finance director was not three clients. She was one person with one painful belief, fighting it, then believing it, then escaping it.

Coaches cope too

This is the part that rarely makes it into coach training. When a client presses on one of our own schemas, we reach for the same three moves. And because they feel like good practice from the inside, we almost never notice.

Here is how it tends to look in the coaching room:

• You defer. The client pushes back and you drop the topic, telling yourself you are “meeting them where they are”. That can be surrender.
• You give space. The client cancels and you do not follow up for three weeks, and you feel a small, guilty relief. That can be avoidance.
• You rescue. The client collapses and you fill the silence with reassurance, reframes and a list of their strengths. Kind, and often a fight against your own helplessness. That can be overcompensation.
• You win. The session becomes a quiet contest about whose reading of the situation is right. That is overcompensation meeting overcompensation.

Notice that each of these has a respectable name. Respect. Patience. Encouragement. Rigour. That is exactly why they are so hard to see.

What it costs

Coping styles in coaching rarely travel alone. They pair up, like dancers who have never discussed the steps. When the client fights and the coach freezes, the client’s defence wins and the real issue never lands. When the client freezes and the coach fights, the coach carries the work and the client stays helpless. When both of them flee, the sessions become pleasant and nothing changes.

The cost is not one bad session. It is months of coaching that feel busy and produce very little. It is the 360 that never gets discussed, the sponsor conversation that never happens, the big decision that is really an escape. And, for the coach, a slow tiredness that comes from working hard in the wrong direction.

The good news is that coping is exactly where coaching lives. Coaches do not treat schemas. That is therapy’s territory. But behaviour, choices and ways of responding are well inside the coaching contract. Change the coping, even slightly, and the person has a new experience. New experiences are what loosen an old lesson.

Five practices for the stuck moment

1. Track the pattern over time, not the moment. One confident session does not mean overcompensation, and one quiet one does not mean surrender. Look back across five or six sessions. Write down what the client did in each phase and, honestly, what you did. The pairing usually shows itself on paper before it shows itself in the room.

2. Ask four questions after any session that went flat. What triggered it, in them and in me? What did I actually do, described as behaviour, not intention? Which of the three was it? What would a grounded, adult response have looked like?

3. Do not swing to the opposite. A coach who discovers they have been deferring often overcorrects into confrontation. That is just the other coping style wearing a new jacket. The aim is the steady middle: present, honest, curious.

4. Have one sentence ready for each style. Instead of freezing: “I hear that you disagree with this. I’d still like to understand what might be true in it.” Instead of fleeing: “I’ve noticed we keep stepping away from this. What do you make of that?” Instead of fighting: “Before I say anything, I want to understand what this is like for you.”

5. Test big decisions, gently. When a client announces a sudden resignation or a dramatic new venture, it may be courage. It may also be avoidance dressed as courage. One question helps without taking sides: “If this old pattern weren’t driving things, what would you choose?” Your job is not the verdict. It is helping them make a choice rather than a reflex.

Where supervision comes in

No coach can see their own coping style from inside a session. It takes a second pair of eyes and a slower pace, which is exactly what supervision offers. I wrote about the supervisor’s side of this in an earlier article on the supervisor’s own schemas, and about how a session can mirror the client’s world in the parallel process.

Coping styles show up in supervision too. The coach who brings only easy cases. The coach who agrees with everything. The supervisor who needs to have the answer. Seeing these as old protective strategies, rather than personal failings, takes the shame out of the conversation. And without shame, change becomes possible.

This is the heart of my new book, Schemas in Coaching Supervision, out in December 2026 and available to pre-order now. It is also a core thread in the Schemas in Coaching Supervision training, ICF-accredited at AACS level, which starts on 11 January 2027. If you are an experienced coach thinking about supervising others, the coaching supervision pathway shows where each step fits.

A question to sit with

Think of the client you find hardest right now. When they press on you, do you freeze, flee or fight? And what would the steady middle look like in your next session?

An old lesson does not loosen because we understand it. It loosens when someone, coach or client, answers it differently, once, and then again.