The Coaching That Starts With a Question, Not a Problem

Most coaching starts with a problem. Something is broken, or stuck, or underperforming. The goal is to fix it. That is a legitimate and useful model — and it has limits.

The work I do differently — generative coaching — starts somewhere else. Not with "what is wrong?" but with "what wants to emerge?" Not with diagnosis but with possibility. And it becomes relevant precisely when the remedial approach has reached the edge of what it can offer.

The word comes from a specific tradition developed by Robert Dilts and Stephen Gilligan, drawing on NLP, Ericksonian hypnotherapy, and systems thinking. It has been formalised into an ICF-aligned coaching methodology.

The core premise: the self is not a fixed object to be improved but a living system with generative capacity — the ability to create something new from within, rather than only optimising what already exists.

In this work, I do not bring answers or frameworks. I create a field in which the person can access their own intelligence more fully, think at a different level, and contact what they actually want to create — not what they think they should want.

Leadership transitions: a senior executive stepping into a larger role, a founder stepping back, a successor stepping forward. These are not skills gaps. They are identity shifts. And identity shifts require a different quality of conversation than skills coaching can provide.

Culture and systemic change: when the goal is not individual performance but the regeneration of an organisation's direction, values, and capacity — working at the level of collective meaning, not just individual behaviour.

When everything else has reached its limit: a leader who has done the work — therapy, coaching, workshops, 360s — and still feels something is not right. The conversation they have not yet had. In my experience, generative coaching is often that conversation.

"The question is not what is wrong with you. The question is what you are capable of that has not yet been lived."

Generative coaching is typically a sustained engagement: three to six months, individual sessions every one or two weeks, with defined intentions rather than defined problems. The person arrives with what they want to create, not what they need to fix.

My sessions are less structured than traditional coaching. There is more silence. More attention to what is happening in the room, in the body, in the quality of the relationship to one's own thinking. I hold the space rather than directing the content.

The outcomes are real and measurable: clearer decisions, more resourceful leadership under ambiguity, a different quality of presence in the team, transitions that land well rather than cost what transitions usually cost.

Generative coaching is a specific methodology, not a brand name. My coaching foundation is built on the Tony Robbins and Chloe Madanes Coaching Training — one of the most comprehensive behavioural and transformational frameworks available — extended through generative and systemic coaching practice.

I work with clients worldwide — in person in Provence and California, and by video across every time zone. Sessions in French, English, and Spanish. The first conversation is 30 minutes, free.