12 Coaching Questions for a Strategic Leadership Reset
The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.
— Parker Palmer
You know you need a reset. Something is off — maybe not dramatically, but persistently. The kind of misalignment that doesn't announce itself with a crisis but shows up as a low hum of exhaustion, a growing distance between your effort and your energy, or the quiet recognition that you've been operating on autopilot longer than you'd like to admit.
Most leaders I work with don't need someone to tell them that something needs to shift because they already sense it. What they need is help getting specific about what kind of reset their leadership actually requires. Because "I need a reset" is a starting point, not a strategy — and one of the best ways to move from vague awareness to focused action is to sit with the right questions.
These twelve coaching questions are designed to help you clarify more about what type of reset you need, from the inside out — beginning with awareness of what's happening beneath the surface, shifting into alignment with what needs to change, and arriving at small action steps to move forward.
1. Where in your body do you feel the weight of your current leadership demands — and what is that signal trying to tell you?
Use this when: You've been "thinking through" your stress without checking in with how you physically feel.
As Bessel van der Kolk demonstrates in his influential work The Body Keeps the Score, our bodies record the impact of stress in ways our conscious minds often overlook or override. While van der Kolk's research focuses on trauma, the underlying principle extends to leadership: the body is constantly processing information that the thinking mind hasn't caught up to yet. Persistent tension in your shoulders, disrupted sleep, a clenched jaw during meetings, changes in appetite or energy — these are not minor inconveniences to push through. They are signals.
Emerging research on somatic intelligence in leadership suggests that leaders who develop interoceptive awareness — the ability to sense and interpret internal bodily states — gain an early warning system for stress, misalignment, and depletion that cognitive analysis alone can't provide. Your body often registers that something needs to shift well before your mind is ready to acknowledge it.
2. What have you been calling "just how things are" that might actually be a signal that something specific needs to shift?
Use this when: You've normalized conditions that are quietly depleting you.
Our brains are designed to filter out constant stimuli — a basic neuroscience principle known as habituation. It's the reason you stop noticing background noise or the hum of an air conditioner. But the same mechanism applies to chronic stress: when a pressure has been present long enough, your brain stops flagging it as noteworthy.
For leaders, this means the very conditions draining your capacity may have become invisible to you — absorbed into the background as "just how this role works" or "the cost of leadership." This question invites you to reexamine what you've stopped noticing, because when stress becomes the water you swim in, your brain stops registering it as stress — and that's precisely when it becomes most costly.
3. What two stressors in your leadership are fueling each other right now?
Use this when: You keep addressing individual problems but the overall pressure isn't easing.
Christina Maslach's foundational research on burnout identifies six key areas of work-life — workload, control, fairness, community, reward, and values alignment — that interact to create chronic stress.
Our biggest stressors rarely have a single driver. More often, it's several pressures in a subtle overlay: capacity strain compounded by relational disconnection compounded by values misalignment. Leaders who look for the interaction between stressors rather than trying to solve each one in isolation often find more effective leverage points. Getting curious about the overlap gives you far more to work with than searching for a single root cause.
4. If you had to name the specific kind of fatigue or misalignment you're experiencing right now, what would you call it?
Use this when: You know something is off but keep describing it in vague terms like "burned out" or "stuck."
Research on emotional granularity — a concept developed by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett — shows that the more precisely we can name what we're feeling, the better equipped we are to respond effectively. Barrett's work demonstrates that people who can distinguish between "frustrated" and "depleted," or between "disengaged" and "misaligned," are better at regulating their responses and taking appropriate action.
The same principle applies here: a leader navigating a career transition needs something different from a leader managing chronic overextension. Getting specific about the type of emotional exhaution you're experiencing is itself a form of progress.
5. What story are you telling yourself about your leadership that you've never questioned out loud?
Use this when: You sense that an old version of yourself is driving decisions the current version of you wouldn't make.
Narrative psychologists have long studied how the stories we tell about ourselves shape our identity and behavior. Researcher Dan McAdams refers to these as narrative identities — the internalized stories we construct to make sense of who we are. Some of these narratives are earned and useful. Others are inherited from earlier seasons, former mentors, or organizational cultures we've since outgrown.
The most powerful dimension of a leadership reset often involves noticing which scripts are still serving you and which have calcified and formed into constraints. Sometimes all a reset needs to do is surface one belief you've carried so long you forgot you could question it.
6. What story are you telling yourself about your leadership that you've never questioned out loud?
Use this when: You're exhausted by a standard you set for yourself that no longer fits your reality.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck's research on mindset demonstrates that our beliefs about our own capabilities profoundly shape our behavior and resilience. When leaders hold rigid, fixed expectations about what "good leadership" looks like — expectations often shaped by earlier seasons or cultures they've outgrown — those beliefs can operate invisibly, driving overextension, perfectionism, or a reluctance to delegate.
Naming the expectation is the first step toward loosening its grip.
Renewal requires opening yourself up to new ways of thinking and feeling.
— Deborah Norville
7. What really honest conversation about your leadership have you been avoiding — and who would you trust to have it with?
Use this when: You've been resetting (or struggling) in isolation and haven't let anyone in.
Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler's research on social networks and behavior reveals that our behaviors, emotions, and even health outcomes are profoundly shaped by the people closest to us — and that influence flows in both directions. For leaders, this has a practical implication: change is easier and more durable when it happens alongside people who can reflect back what they're seeing with honesty and care.
There's an important difference between having people around you and having people who can genuinely push your thinking forward.
8. Who in your life is positioned to challenge your thinking right now?
Use this when: You've been making decisions in a feedback vacuum and something feels stale or circular.
Adam Grant draws an important distinction between your support network — people who encourage you — and your challenge network — people who push your thinking by questioning your assumptions and offering honest, constructive pushback. Most leaders have plenty of supporters. Far fewer have cultivated relationships with people who will tell them what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear.
The leaders who reset well don't do it alone — they do it in conversation with people who see what they can't.
9. What is one thing you could stop doing this week that might free up more energy than you expect?
Use this when: you've gained clarity on what's draining you and are ready to make a strategic subtraction.
Research on behavior change — from BJ Fogg's work on tiny habits at Stanford to James Clear's writing on the power of small, consistent actions — consistently demonstrates that sustainable change begins with small, deliberate moves rather than dramatic overhauls. Fogg's Behavior Design model shows that when you make a change small enough, you bypass the motivational resistance that derails bigger plans.
For leaders, this is counterintuitive: the instinct is to overhaul everything. But the most effective resets often begin not with adding something new, but with one intentional removal. What feels like a small move can release a surprising amount of energy and focus.
10. Where is the smallest shift that would relieve the most pressure in your current season?
Use this when: you're ready to act but don't want to create another overwhelming plan.
Greg McKeown, in his work on Essentialism, makes a compelling case that the disciplined pursuit of less — not more — is the path to greater contribution. Not every problem requires a big solution. Sometimes the highest-leverage move is the smallest one: adjusting a recurring meeting, renegotiating a single deadline, or simply naming a commitment that's no longer serving you.
The best question isn't always What should I overhaul? Instead ask: Where is the friction that a small, focused shift could ease?
11. What is one small experiment you could run this week to test a different way of leading, working, or showing up?
Use this when: You've been waiting for the perfect plan instead of trying something and learning from the result.
Stanford's d.school approach to design thinking is built on a core principle: prototype before you perfect.
The best ideas emerge not from planning but from testing — trying something small, observing what happens, and iterating from there. Most leaders are trained to plan, execute, and deliver results. But a reset requires a different posture: one of curiosity and willingness to try things without certainty about the outcome.
Not every experiment will work. What matters is the openness to approach your own leadership patterns as something you can redesign, not just endure.
12. What would your leadership look like one month from now if you made one intentional change this week?
Use this when: You've done the reflection but need a compelling reason to actually move.
Richard Boyatzis's research on intentional change theory suggests that one of the most powerful catalysts for sustainable growth is envisioning a compelling future self. Not a five-year strategic plan, but a vivid, felt sense of who you want to be on the other side of this season. When leaders connect a single concrete change to a picture of who they're becoming, the motivation shifts from pressure to pull — from I should to I want to.
Join the 30-Day Strategic Reset
A Four-Week Group Coaching Lab for Women in Leadership
What would shift in your leadership if you gave yourself a structured pause to recalibrate?
In the 30-Day Strategic Reset, you'll move from awareness to intentional action. Guided by a research-informed framework — Sync, Stop, Start, Sustain — you'll clarify what matters most, disrupt what's draining you, and design sustainable rhythms that fit your real life.
Together, we'll build your personalized reset — from a Core Leadership Atlas that maps your values and energy patterns to a Resilience Plan that makes your best strategies stick.
Spaces are limited to allow for more individualized attention. Registration closes on March 27 or when spots fill.
