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Going quiet, over-preparing for every meeting, running hot. Justin Clark argues those read as a performance issue but are often the price of being different at that particular table.
A senior emergency medicine consultant arrived fearing burnout. He was describing a conference abroad when he said: “I was about to cheat on my wife. I was at the hotel room door with a colleague and had a panic attack. Then I got so drunk that I missed the next day of the conference. No-one knows.” Delegate more, protect the calendar, take the long weekend: none of that would have reached him. “The background processes keep running untouched, so the exhaustion is back within a fortnight,” says Justin Clark.
Clark is an executive coach based in the UK, accredited as an EMCC Global Senior Practitioner in 2026.
What Runs Underneath the Visible Job
The exhaustion has contents, and they are not tasks. “The cognitive drain is not overwork. It’s what I call the Background App Drain: the extra processing that is always running underneath the visible job, for executives who don’t get to walk into a boardroom as a single, settled self.” Itemised, that processing is what Clark calls the Identity Tax: “a constant scan for microaggressions or a shift in the room’s tone, code-switching to fit the dominant culture in that meeting, and a running calculation of the risk of being ‘too much’ or ‘too visible’ before you speak.” The cost lands on capacity. “All of it competes for the same capacity you need for strategy, judgement, and decisions that carry real weight.”
“Where organisations go wrong is diagnosing the output rather than the pattern,” Clark says. The output is a leader who has gone quiet in meetings, over-prepares for everything, runs hot, and arrives at the next review as a resilience question. “That vigilance is not a flaw in the person. It’s a rational response to a real cost of being visibly different at that particular table.” The wrong fix does not announce itself. “Fix the individual and leave the room unchanged, and the tax resets to zero for a month, then starts accruing again.”
Clark’s case is a finance director at a large private company. She had done well until the CFO role went to nobody: the vacancy stayed open and a fractional CFO came in. Behind that sat a consistent thread of feedback, not a team player. She was terrified of making a mistake, after years of feeling, and sometimes being, held to a higher level of scrutiny than her male colleagues, and the response had been to overperform on everything carrying her name. Almost nothing was delegated. The gap was visible and its cause was not, so the business read a manager who could not build a team.
The intervention was not delegation training. “Once the pattern was evident and its roots understood, she was able to interrupt her habitual behaviours and ensure she performed in ways that were aligned with the business culture, without feeling that she was leaving herself vulnerable,” Clark says. Six months later she opened the conversation with the CEO, and within the year she held the CFO title. The rule she was still obeying was fifteen years and three companies old. “What still surprises me in work like this is how easily intelligent and capable professionals find themselves playing by old rules that simply don’t apply any more,” he says.
What the Coaching Route Does Not Train a Practitioner to See
Two psychotherapy degrees and thirteen years of clinical practice came before the coaching qualification, and Justin Clark is specific about what the order buys. “With that background I am much more aware of unconscious processes, so how transferences may be playing out either in the client’s world, or between them and me in the moment. I’m also more attuned to recognising where there has been relational and developmental misses, unmet needs, or trauma in the past.” Any coach can name those when a client states them outright. His claim is about the rest of the time: “more often they are subtly present, not announced or even in the client’s immediate awareness.”
The payoff is which questions become workable. “Doing that with ‘how do I manage my diary?’ is honestly not very complex. Doing it with ‘why do I always feel I have to say yes?’ takes real psychological depth and understanding.” The first of those is now a search query: “I’m there to help them do something in ways that AI can’t reach.”
What Senior Leaders and the People Who Manage Them Can Take From This
There is no method to buy here, and Clark says so plainly: “There is no collective methodology, as every coaching engagement is unique.” What travels is the diagnostic order, and five moves carry most of it.
- First, inventory the second job before optimising the first one. Ahead of another productivity fix, list what is running underneath the visible work: the scanning of the room, the code-switching between meetings, the calculation about visibility that happens before anyone speaks. A calendar audit cannot find any of it, which is why calendar audits keep returning the same answer.
- Second, date the rule. The behaviour that reads as a management flaw is often obedience to a rule that made sense somewhere else. Establish who it came from and when, because a rule that outlives the conditions that produced it is still being paid for at the original price.
- Third, time the relapse. An intervention aimed at the person and an intervention aimed at the conditions look identical for the first few weeks, and separate after that. Diarise the check for six weeks out: if the improvement has decayed, the diagnosis was wrong, not the effort.
- Fourth, change the environment by enough to lower the entry fee. “The actual work for organisations is building around the pattern rather than the person: naming what the background processes are genuinely costing, and changing enough of the environment that vigilance stops being the entry fee for being in the room at all.”
- Fifth, let the measure come from the person rather than from the method. Clark takes the definition of success from the client at the start, in the client’s own terms, whether that is a promotion, a finished book, or less anxiety, and then has them scale it: they “scale that in ways that are meaningful to them which allow us to monitor and measure change.” A number chosen by the person carrying the cost is the only one that tracks whether the cost is falling.
When Clark Changed the Room Instead of the Person
He ran that fourth move himself as a service manager, on a team of therapists working with children who had been sexually abused. The change was not a resilience programme or a training day. He introduced regular unstructured time and protected it, so the team could talk, connect, and process the work with each other. “Morale, throughput, and feedback all improved, while staff turnover dropped to almost zero.” Nothing about the caseload had changed. What changed was what the room asked people to absorb alone.
For the leader who is functioning well on paper and privately running on empty, the advice is not calibrated for comfort: “take action, now. It’s not selfish to look after yourself and it never gets better on its own. A job is not worth destroying yourself for.”
Who Is Justin Clark?
Justin Clark is an executive coach based in the United Kingdom, accredited as an EMCC Global Senior Practitioner in 2026, who has coached roughly 150 people since 2012 and currently averages eight clients a month. He holds BACP Senior Accreditation, awarded in 2024 after accreditation with the body since 2015, and has been a UKCP registered integrative psychotherapist since 2022. Alongside the coaching he has supervised therapists for around 400 hours.
The route in came through theatre. Clark spent nearly six years as technical manager at Blackfriars Arts Centre, running lighting, sound, and scenery design, and left in 2001 for an acute assessment psychiatric ward, wanting to work more directly with people. What he saw there set the terms for everything after it. “Medication can do some incredible things, and moderate or even remove a great many symptoms. But that is all it can do. Nothing about the person has fundamentally changed.” The gap he found there is the one the practice has answered since: “what I witnessed was the almost total lack of treating patients as human beings, people with histories, relationships, and experiences which have, inevitably, shaped who they are now.”
A decade at Nacro followed, from front line support for 16 to 25 year olds through to service manager running supported housing and education projects. He managed Place2Be’s provision inside a primary school, then spent two and a half years at The Children’s Society as service manager, leading a team of therapists across Nottinghamshire. He took a BSc in counselling and psychotherapy at Coventry, a CPCAB Level 6 supervision certificate, and an MSc in integrative psychotherapy at Staffordshire University in 2021. He has been at Therapy Nottingham for thirteen years and is its Clinical Lead, a role he holds alongside the coaching practice he formed in 2025. Where coaching surfaces something belonging in treatment, he refers out: “If coaching highlights an additional need or role for therapy then I will refer that out, so therapy can then run in parallel to coaching.” He writes Executive Depth, a newsletter for executives that has run since 2025.
Twenty-five years on, the argument is the one the ward handed him. The person in the chair arrives with a history, and the exhaustion is what it costs to carry that history into a room built for someone else.
Justin Clark is an executive coach based in the United Kingdom, accredited as an EMCC Global Senior Practitioner in 2026, who has coached roughly 150 people since 2012 and currently averages eight clients a month. To connect with Justin or learn more, visit his LinkedIn Profile.
