Inspired by finding more simplicity, I spent the weekend clearing out my office. Boxes I hadn’t opened in years, folders of old client notes, training materials from when I first began building qualifications. Going through pages I’d half-forgotten writing, I kept noticing the same idea showing up, described in slightly different language each time, but unmistakably the same tool. It was a tool I learned through my first coaching company and it has been fundamental to the way I work (and live) throughout that time. Nearly every coaching engagement I have worked on, we’ve either begun with context or most certainly addressed it.
I hadn’t set out to look for any tools during this time, but you know what it’s like when you’re going through old memorabilia or documents. It’s impossible not to dive in. Seeing context written again and again in every single client file made me realise despite being one of the simplest tools I know, it has been the thread running underneath most of my work for two decades.
I’ve worked with one client for almost fifteen years now. Over that time, she’s sat as chair, held non-executive director positions across several boards, weathered more equity turns in her businesses than I could count, and moved through phases in her personal life that would have knocked most people sideways. When I look back at the arc of our work together, this one tool keeps showing up, again and again, underneath everything else we’ve done.
It’s context. What that means specifically, is it’s the ability to ask, at any given moment: what is this actually about? What is this phase, this role, this decision doing for me? And how do I need to show up inside it?
That sounds almost too simple to be useful but it isn’t. We were always told many things in coaching are simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy.
Context takes everything, all the detail, the noise, the competing demands of a particular time, and lifts you above it long enough to see the shape of the whole. Once you can see the shape, you have an anchor. And once you have an anchor, decisions that felt impossibly complicated start to resolve themselves quickly. The decisions themselves get easier when you finally know what you’re deciding factor is.
I have another client at the moment whose entire context, across every part of his life today, is simplicity. If something doesn’t make his life simpler, whether that’s a business decision, a family commitment, or a way of spending a Saturday, he doesn’t do it. That single sentence has become the filter he runs almost everything through, and it’s become a working tool he applies to nearly every decision he makes.
Neuroscience helps to explain why context works this well. The brain is constantly trying to reduce the sheer volume of information coming at it, and it does that by building frames, mental shortcuts for what matters and what doesn’t in a given situation. Without a clear frame, everything registers as equally important, equally urgent, equally worthy of your attention. That’s exhausting, and it’s a large part of why decision fatigue sets in so fast when you don’t know what you’re actually optimising for. Context is what gives the brain permission to filter. It tells your nervous system what to pay attention to and what to let go of, which is why getting clear on it makes decisions feel faster and lighter almost immediately.
Another client puts it more plainly than any neuroscience I could offer. He’s told me more than once that he has all the content he needs. He can read, listen, and download material on leadership and strategy for hours if he wants to. What coaching offers him is somewhere to get clear on his context, build one that’s actually going to serve him, and then test whether he’s genuinely committed to it once decisions get hard. Knowing your context and living inside it under pressure are two different skills, and most of the work happens in the gap between them.
He’s also said something else that’s stayed with me: having the same person alongside him for many years, someone who’s watched the last three boards come through, understood his challenges in becoming a parent, watched the last five reinventions, makes it easier to see his bigger picture than starting fresh with someone new each time would. I think that’s true of context generally. It’s easier to hold when someone else has been holding it with you.
Context isn’t limited to a career or a decade. You can place it against almost anything. A single meeting has a context. So does a conversation, a relationship, a phase of life, a specific business decision, a team going through a restructure. The question is always the same, but scaled differently: what is this actually about, and what does that mean for how I show up?
I started asking that question of my own coaching relationships. What is the context of this particular relationship, right now, in this phase? Coaching itself lives in the cracks of a lot of things, but my job is fairly simple. I hold context for clients. I’m the person who remembers what this phase is meant to be about when the day-to-day makes it easy to forget.
Do you have someone holding context in your life? And if not, do you know how to build one for yourself?
It’s a simple concept. Simple ones are often the ones with the most depth to them, and clearly this is one I’ve been leaning on for twenty years and it pays dividends every time.
If you don’t have a context for the phase you’re in, decisions get harder than they need to be. If you do, even the hard ones get easier to make.
Reach out if you’d like to talk through how context could sharpen the decisions in front of you right now.
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