When I raise this topic, there is shock. Listeners typically don’t hear it. They think I have momentarily confused myself, surely I must be asking the familiar question of the coach potentially harming the client!
No, I mean it: the client can harm the coach.
In my book Are You Listening (Penguin 2022) I give an example. I had been asked to assess three candidates for promotion. Over-estimating my power to affect the selection decision, one of the three made clumsy attempts at seduction and when this failed, told the employer that I was the one who had made the pass at him. I found this out only by accident a year after that project had been abruptly terminated with no explanation and the man himself had been dismissed for falsifying his CV and much else. I did get a kind of apology but I never got more work from that organisation.
Some other examples
A coach undertook an assignment to do some training in another country. He was one of only two men in the room. Throughout the first day he was challenged about ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘gender-offensive’ behaviour. That evening one of the participants posted his digitally altered photograph with ‘jokey’ pornographic content. On the second day he was met with a cardboard banner saying ‘British sexist go home or get educated!’ He left, deeply upset. Whatever the truth of his alleged ‘micro-aggressions’, the behaviour of those clients was appalling. The hurt caused to their target by the viciousness of their attacks was very long lasting.
An organization gathered feedback on their external coaches. It was not a sophisticated exercise, just a single 1-5 rating plus a sentence of explanation. A coach discovered that a client had given him a 2 on this scale. The organization never offered him work again despite his long record of positive feedback. Similarly, a coach learnt that her client had described her coaching as ‘a load of psychobabble’ all the while giving effusive compliments to her face. When success in coaching depends so much on word-of-mouth recommendation, this kind of poor-quality feedback and unthinking gossip can be very damaging.
You could encounter a fabulist. As they tell their story, your disbelief grows. Surely it is unlikely that so many disasters and heroic rescues could have happened to the same person? Yes, it is unlikely. You will have been trained to accept people’s stories as truth, but there will be the one client in a thousand who manipulates your openness. Trust your instinct. If you carry on, it can only end in frustration and the knowledge that you have been exploited.
A client may become fixated on you. They may interpret your professional curiosity and warmth as evidence of love. We don’t need the psycho-analytical concept of transference to explain how dangerous its extreme manifestations can be. If a client touches you inappropriately, holds eye contact too long and sends you flirtatious messages, you must end the relationship before it escalates into what could be physical as well as psychological or reputational harm.
A coach specialises in relationship coaching. She skilfully walks the line between therapeutic and coaching approaches and is highly valued by corporate clients. They send her their ‘difficult’ cases. A client decided to leave her marriage after it became clear that the husband was guilty of coercive control and physical aggression. They divorced. The husband began to harass the coach, blaming her for the breakdown of his marriage. She reported it to the police as stalking; he was given a warning and that was the end of it. But it caused her an agony of worry for some years: what if he started it again?.
Vengeful clients?
In my new book Fearless Coaching (Moon on the Water Press, 2026) I give another example. Virtually all clients come to me through personal contact but in this case it was out of the blue. I had the sense to meet the client in a public place. She was clearly wearing a heavy disguise and had given me what turned out to be a false name and bogus email address. The session centred on making a ’confession’ about a lifetime of minor wrongdoing, including theft and misrepresentation. She is the only client who has never paid her bill – so she stole my time and left me feeling like an idiot for having been scammed, despite my sense that her actual story was true in every respect.
There are clients who use vexatious complaining as a way of extracting revenge for some slight that has nothing to do with their coaching. In the UK, if you are banned by one accrediting body, you just join another. But I have US examples where clients have raised complaints with the ICF on essentially trivial or fabricated grounds. Although eventually cleared, these coaches have endured months of worry, especially if they rely on their accreditation to overcome initial barriers to corporate work.
Then there is malicious narcissism. Thankfully this is rare in coaching, not so rare in psychotherapy. What are the signs? At first the client appears confident, charming and plausible, creating fake rapport. They use any small moments of personal disclosure from you to gather evidence which will be used later to attack. You will suddenly be accused of ‘incompetence’ or that you have ‘gone too far’. An Australian coach working in the UK was told he had ‘a cute colonial accent’. Your personal appearance may be mocked, your fees declared ‘fraudulent’, or as once happened to me, that I was ‘cruel’ (I had suggested that the client might gather her own 360 feedback instead of my doing it for her). This kind of client is never serious about coaching. Their own ‘narcissistic wounds’ are deeply buried. They are in trouble; their defence is to strike in a bid for power. Something like this happened to me last year and I still don’t understand how the client did it. I only know that it left me in helpless tears, though somehow finding the strength to end the call – and the relationship.
How to protect yourself
Protect yourself by insisting on a rigorous ‘chemistry conversation’. Pay attention to any fleeting feelings of discomfort. If I had done this with the client I describe above, the coaching would never have started, but for reasons which seemed compelling at the time, I did not.
Where a coaching pipeline suddenly dries up, investigate: could there be some adverse feedback, justified or not, which the sponsor is reluctant to share with you?
Check ID: are people who they say they are? If you work alone and from home, make sure you have security systems: a video doorbell, another person who has access to your calendar, a vigilant neighbour. Keep your phone on and handy. Have a colleague who can respond to an agreed alarm signal.
The truth is that coaching is likely to matter more to the coach than it does to the client. It’s our profession, reputation is everything, whereas for the client it may be a small part of their lives. It’s easily abandoned if it doesn’t work out. Our visibility through social media and our need to get work may expose us to unstable or unscrupulous people.
To be clear, most instances of ‘harm’ – coach to client or client to coach – are minor, quickly forgotten. Some may sting, maybe for longer than they need. A very very few are troubling. Such incidents are rare. But take it seriously, coaches, be ready: it could happen to you!
Fearless Coaching is available from my website at £15.99 plus P&P. www.JennyRogersCoaching/books