Is everyone actually coachable?

I get asked this a lot. And I get why, We all know someone who will not take feedback. Ever. It's never them, never their fault, and usually everyone else is wrong. You feel the energy coming off them before they've even opened their mouth. And if they've had success in the past, forget it. They have zero reason to listen to anyone.

It might make them intolerable to some degree, but does that make them uncoachable?

No. It doesn't. But it does mean the approach has to be completely different.

Think about Michael Phelps. The most decorated Olympian in history. 23 gold medals, 28 in total. The greatest swimmer who has ever lived, and almost certainly the greatest there will ever be. Do you think he didn't have an ego? Of course he did. He'd earned it. But he had a coach. Bob Bowman worked with Phelps from the age of 11, and was still in his corner at the Olympics in Rio. At the peak of his career, at the absolute top of the sport, Phelps still had someone in his corner telling him what he couldn't see himself.

In sport, that's just how it works. There's always a coach. It's never been any other way. Nobody looks at a world-class athlete and asks why they need one.

In leadership and business, it's different. And the reason it's different is that it's personal in a way sport rarely is.

You can train for 10,000 hours at a sport and see your performance improve. The feedback loop is clear. The goal is scored or it isn't. The time goes down or it doesn't. Your effort is validated by something measurable and external to you.

Leadership doesn't work like that. We don't get the same chance to train and practice in a safe environment. We also tie success so closely to our identity that the two become almost impossible to separate. And a lot of what makes someone a good leader, their personality, their instincts, how they make people feel, it's intangible. You can't score it in training. You can't run it on a stopwatch. It's emotional. For the leader, and for everyone being led.

So when someone has had success, they get validated. I did X and Y happened. I'm right. Why would I change anything? That makes complete sense. The ego is just that logic taken to its conclusion.

But here's the thing about closed-minded leaders. They either don't last, or they run businesses where people don't want to be, but stay because they need the job. Everyone else gets blamed. And somehow they're still making money, which just confirms everything they already believed about themselves.

That's the trap. Success without feedback becomes evidence that you don't need it.

What these leaders actually need isn't a softer approach or a different framework. They need a coach who can hold their energy. Someone who doesn't flinch, doesn't get pushed around, and isn't trying to make them feel better. Someone who can sit in the room with a big ego and not need to win, but also not back down.

The right coach doesn't shrink the ego. They redirect it. They find the gap between what the person believes about themselves and what's actually happening, and they work in that space. Carefully, directly, and without apology.

So yes. Anyone is coachable. Even the ones who seem completely unreachable. They just need the right coach, and most of the time, they haven't found one yet.