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# What a Mental Performance Coach Notices in Business
- URL: https://www.altiusjournal.com/what-a-mental-coach-sees-in-business/
- Published: 2026-07-15T11:55:55.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T13:14:52.000Z
- Description: Business measures outcomes very well. It is often less precise about the mental conditions under which those outcomes are produced. A mental-performance lens looks at the behaviour before the result.
- Author: Giani Boldeanu
- Tags: Human Performance, Leadership, Decision Making, Psychology

Business often measures the result long after the decision process that produced it has disappeared.

Revenue moves. A project succeeds. A senior hire fails. A team loses someone important. A strategy is changed. Then the organisation looks backwards and tries to explain what happened. The numbers are visible. The behaviour that produced them is often much harder to reconstruct. This is one reason I find business interesting from a mental-performance perspective. In sport, the link between preparation and execution is difficult to ignore. The athlete has to perform in front of you. Attention, decision making, emotional control, fatigue and response to error become visible quickly.

Business gives people more places to hide the same problems. A poor decision can take six months to become obvious. A leader can remain highly productive while judgement is deteriorating. A team can look aligned because nobody is willing to challenge the person with the most authority. A manager can speak confidently and still be uncertain about the problem they are trying to solve. The mental-performance lens does not replace business expertise.

It asks a different question. **What happens to the person doing the work when the pressure, ambiguity and consequences increase?**

## The first thing I look for is the gap between knowing and doing

Most senior people are not short of information. They have read the books. They know that they should listen. They know that difficult decisions should not be rushed. They know that feedback matters. They know that sleep, recovery and concentration influence performance. They know that disagreement can improve a decision. The interesting part begins when the pressure rises.

Does the person still behave according to what they know? That gap is familiar in sport. A footballer knows they should scan before receiving the ball and stops scanning when the game speeds up. A tennis player knows the tactical plan and abandons it after losing three points. A young athlete knows that one mistake should not determine the next action and still carries the error for five minutes. Business has the same gap.

A leader who believes in delegation starts controlling small details when uncertainty increases. A manager who values openness becomes defensive when challenged. A normally patient decision-maker suddenly wants an immediate answer because the board is waiting. The knowledge has not disappeared. Access to the behaviour has changed. That is a performance problem. Confidence has value. It helps people communicate, decide and act. But visible confidence is not the same as good functioning. A leader can sound decisive because they understand the problem. They can also sound decisive because uncertainty feels uncomfortable. From the outside, those two states can look almost identical. This is where observation matters. How quickly does the person close down alternative explanations?

Do they ask for contradictory evidence? Do they become more certain when challenged, or more curious? Does their communication become sharper when pressure increases? Do they begin speaking more and listening less? Do they change the criteria after seeing the result they prefer? These behaviours are more interesting to me than whether the person “looks confident”. In performance work, confidence is useful when it supports execution. It becomes dangerous when it protects the performer from information.

## Attention is a leadership variable

Leadership is often discussed as strategy, influence, communication and culture. Before any of those, there is attention. What does the leader notice? What do they ignore? What stays in working memory? What gets displaced by the last meeting, the last conflict or the loudest person in the room? This matters because attention changes under load. Repeated switching leaves people continually reconstructing context. Unfinished tasks can leave attention residue. Long periods of cognitive demand can change how much effort people are willing or able to invest in another decision.

A leader can therefore be present in a meeting and still be cognitively somewhere else. The body is in the room. The attention is on the investor call from twenty minutes earlier. Or the argument at home. Or the message from the chair. Or the decision that has not yet been made. None of this automatically means the leader is unfit, weak or psychologically unwell. It means human attention is limited.

A performance approach asks whether the environment recognises that limitation. One of the easiest mistakes in leadership development is to treat every poor decision as a personal weakness. Sometimes the system is badly designed. A high-consequence hiring decision is placed after six meetings. A difficult negotiation begins without transition from the previous issue. A senior team reviews complex strategy in a ninety-minute slot after spending the morning on operational detail. Then people are surprised when the thinking becomes simplified.

I do not believe every important decision has to be made in the morning. There is no universal timetable for good judgement. But the sequence matters. The state of the decision-maker matters. The amount of cognitive load accumulated beforehand matters. This is why I think about decision architecture before decision stamina. Before asking a person to “handle more”, ask whether the organisation is spending their attention well.

## Coaching is not consulting

This distinction matters in business. A management consultant may be hired to analyse the market, redesign a process, examine costs, build a strategy or recommend an organisational structure. That is not what I mean by mental performance coaching. I may ask questions about the decision. I may challenge how the person is thinking. I may help identify repeated behavioural patterns under pressure.

But I am not pretending that expertise in human performance makes me the expert on the client’s industry. The leader should know more than I do about their business. That is appropriate. My job is not to win the argument about the market. It is to help improve the quality of the person entering that argument. What are they noticing?

What are they assuming? Where are they rushing? What happens when they feel challenged? What behaviour appears under pressure that does not appear when the stakes are low? This is a different kind of work.

Coaching has often been marketed with spectacular return-on-investment claims. I would avoid building the case that way. The stronger argument comes from controlled research. A 2023 meta-analysis by Nicolau and colleagues examined 20 executive-coaching studies using controlled pre-post designs. Across outcomes, executive coaching showed a moderate overall effect, with larger effects for behavioural outcomes than for attitudes. The study also reported positive effects on measures such as goal attainment and self-efficacy.

Another 2023 meta-analysis by de Haan and Nilsson reviewed 37 randomised controlled trials involving 2,528 participants and found a statistically significant overall effect of workplace and executive coaching across leadership and personal outcomes. These findings matter. They support coaching as a legitimate developmental intervention. They do not prove that every coach is effective. They do not establish that every approach works equally well. They do not justify claims that coaching automatically produces a particular financial return.

The evidence supports a more disciplined conclusion: **well-designed coaching can improve important behavioural and personal outcomes at work.** That is enough.

## What I am actually trying to observe

When I work with a performer, I am interested in patterns rather than isolated moments. The same applies in business. I want to know what changes when the pressure changes. Does the person become faster or slower? More controlling or more avoidant? Do they ask fewer questions? Do they stop delegating? Do they become preoccupied with how they are being perceived?

Do they interpret disagreement as useful information or as resistance? Do they begin solving problems before they have defined them? Do they make the same decision differently depending on who is in the room? These patterns tell us more than a personality label. They show how performance changes in context. And context is where leadership actually happens. Business is full of reflection exercises that never reach behaviour. People complete assessments. They receive feedback. They discuss strengths. They identify values. Then Monday arrives and nothing changes. The interesting question is not whether someone can describe themselves accurately in a coaching session. It is whether they behave differently in the next difficult meeting. That is why I prefer behavioural specificity. Instead of: “I need to listen better.”

I want: “In the next senior-team meeting, I will not give my view until two other people have spoken.” Instead of: “I need to be less reactive.” I want: “When I feel challenged, I will ask one clarifying question before defending the position.” Instead of: “I need better focus.” I want: “The first forty-five minutes after lunch are protected for the decision paper, with messages closed.” The change has to become visible.

Otherwise the coaching remains interesting conversation.

## Leaders need somewhere to think without performing leadership

Seniority changes conversation. The more authority someone has, the more other people have reasons to manage what they say. That does not mean every direct report is dishonest or every board is political. It means incentives exist. People consider consequences. They choose timing. They soften disagreement. They protect relationships. The leader does the same. This can make genuine reflection difficult.

One useful function of coaching is to create a space where the leader does not have to perform certainty. They can say: “I do not know.” “I think I may be wrong.” “I am avoiding this conversation.” “I am more concerned about how this looks than I should be.” “I have already decided, and I am pretending I am still evaluating.”

Those statements are useful because they reveal the actual problem. But the coach should not romanticise this role. A coach is not automatically the only honest person around a leader. Good colleagues, boards, mentors and teams can provide powerful challenge. The aim should be to improve the leader’s access to honest thinking, not make the coach indispensable.

Some performance issues are not located inside one person. They are produced by the group. A team may have technically strong people and still make poor collective decisions because members do not challenge assumptions, information is unevenly shared or disagreement is punished. Research on team reflexivity is useful here. A 2024 meta-analysis found that team reflexivity — collectively reviewing objectives, strategies and processes and adapting where necessary — was positively related to performance, although the benefits varied with factors such as team size and tenure. The analysis also highlighted psychological safety as an important condition through which leaders can support greater participation and reflection.

This moves the conversation beyond “fix the leader”. Sometimes the leader’s job is to create conditions in which other people can think better too. That is a different definition of performance.

## Mental performance is not mental health treatment

Another boundary matters. Mental performance coaching is not therapy. It does not diagnose depression, anxiety disorders, trauma or other clinical conditions. A leader can have a performance problem. A leader can have a mental-health problem. They can also have both. The role of the coach is to know the difference well enough not to pretend competence they do not have. Performance coaching can work on attention, decision habits, preparation, communication, self-regulation and behaviour under pressure.

Clinical care belongs to appropriately qualified mental-health professionals. That distinction protects the client. It also strengthens coaching, because the work becomes clearer. Business has borrowed the language of elite sport badly in one respect. It likes the phrase **peak performance**. Sport contains peaks because it also contains structure. Matches end. Competitions end. Training load changes. Recovery is planned. Business often asks for peak output indefinitely. That is not peak performance. It is continuous demand. For leaders, I find **sustainable function** a more useful idea. Can the person continue to think clearly?

Can they make good decisions after difficult conversations? Can they communicate accurately when tired? Can they recover enough to do the next day’s work without carrying every unresolved issue into it? Can they maintain judgement across a month, not merely produce one impressive day? The goal is not permanent calm. It is reliable function under changing conditions.

## The useful question comes before the result

By the time the business result appears, much of the interesting performance information has already gone. The meeting happened. The assumption went unchallenged. The leader rushed. The team stayed quiet. The decision was made. Weeks later, the organisation sees the consequence. A mental-performance perspective tries to move upstream. What did the person notice before the decision? What state were they in?

What changed under pressure? What behaviour repeated? What did the environment reward? Where did the process become weaker? This is not a replacement for strategy, finance, operations or management expertise. It is another layer of performance. Business measures outcomes very well. It should become better at observing the human behaviour that creates them. That is what I notice first.

## ALTIUS Note

This article discusses mental performance and executive coaching as developmental practices. It does not present coaching as therapy, organisational consulting or a substitute for clinical mental-health care. Evidence for coaching is positive overall, but outcomes vary by intervention, practitioner, context and measure.

## Research References

- de Haan, E., & Nilsson, V. O. (2023). **What Can We Know about the Effectiveness of Coaching? A Meta-Analysis Based Only on Randomized Controlled Trials.** *Academy of Management Learning & Education.* [https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2022.0107](https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2022.0107?ref=altiusjournal.com)
- Nicolau, A., Candel, O. S., Constantin, T., & Kleingeld, A. (2023). **The effects of executive coaching on behaviors, attitudes, and personal characteristics: a meta-analysis of randomized control trial studies.** *Frontiers in Psychology, 14*, 1089797\. [https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1089797](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1089797?ref=altiusjournal.com)
- Wang, Q., Lai, Y.-L., Xu, X., & McDowall, A. (2022). **The effectiveness of workplace coaching: a meta-analysis of contemporary psychologically informed coaching approaches.** *Journal of Work-Applied Management, 14*(1), 77–101\. [https://doi.org/10.1108/JWAM-04-2021-0030](https://doi.org/10.1108/JWAM-04-2021-0030?ref=altiusjournal.com)
- Schippers, M. C., et al. (2024). **A meta-analysis of team reflexivity: Antecedents, outcomes, and boundary conditions.** *Human Resource Management Review, 34*(4), 101042\. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2024.101042](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2024.101042?ref=altiusjournal.com)

## Related from ALTIUS

- [What Is Decision Making?](https://www.altiusjournal.com/what-is-decision-making/) — How judgement changes with context, pressure, information and cognitive state.
- [Decision Fatigue Is More Complicated Than a Depleted Brain](https://www.altiusjournal.com/your-brain-is-not-running-out-of-fuel-the-new-science-of-decision-fatigue/) — Why sustained decision demand is more complicated than the old willpower-battery model.
- [The Cost of Always Being Right](https://www.altiusjournal.com/the-cost-of-always-being-right/) — How certainty can interfere with feedback, judgement and adaptation.

## Further reading

- [What Is Leadership?](https://www.altiusjournal.com/what-is-leadership/)

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