Not a Coach. An Observer.

by Bruce Kasanoff

The professional support world has no shortage of options. Executive coaches. Therapists. Consultants. Mentors. Advisors. Each offers real value, and I respect the people who do this work. Many of them are my friends.

But there is a gap that none of them quite fills.

Here it is: most people have never been truly seen. Not evaluated, not diagnosed, not coached toward a set of goals. Seen. In all their complexity and magnificence.

That might sound soft. It isn’t. Being deeply seen is one of the most transformative experiences a person can have. And almost nobody is offering it.

I know, because for over fourteen years I’ve had deep weekly conversations with a small handful of entrepreneurs and professionals. I’ve had more than 250 conversations with some of these clients. And the thing that has mattered most—more than any strategy or framework or advice I’ve offered—is this: I see them. I reflect back their best qualities, their hidden patterns, their unacknowledged strengths. I help them see what they already know but haven’t fully recognized.

For a long time, I called myself an executive coach, because that’s the category that existed. But it never fit. And I’ve finally stopped pretending it does.

I’m an Observer.

The term “observer” didn’t come to me as part of a marketing or repositioning exercise. It wasn’t a calculated decision on my part.

It was a deep knowing, a moment in which I received what only can be called a download from the universe.

“I am an observer” came that voice, and the words resonated inside me. Only later did my brain enter the conversation and I started to identify the factual reasons why this is true. I’d been doing it all along, without having a word for it.

An Observer is someone who sets aside their own ego to be fully present with another person. Their role is to see the best in you and invite those qualities to come front and center.

An Observer tells you what they see. Not what to do.

This is a critical distinction. A coach helps you reach your goals. A therapist helps you process your past. A consultant solves a specific problem. An Observer does something different: they help you gain such clarity about who you are—your strengths, your patterns, your blind spots, your untapped potential—that you can solve your own problems and pursue your own opportunities with conviction.

Most people know how to navigate their lives once they gain clarity and focus. The obstacle isn’t a lack of knowledge or strategy. It’s a lack of being seen clearly enough to trust what they already sense about themselves.

Ninety percent of the human population is either brutally self-critical or lacking in self-awareness. Often both. Taken together, it is extremely difficult to have an accurate understanding of your best qualities, insights, and opportunities. You need someone whose only job is to see you—and to reflect that vision back.

Why Coaching Falls Short (for Some)

I want to be careful here, because I have tremendous respect for great coaches.

I’m friends with many of the top coaches in the world. Many are proud of being named the “#1 startup coach” or appearing on the “Top 50 Global Gurus” list. Their brands are built around their own expertise, their own frameworks, their own reputations. The implicit message is: I’m brilliant, and if you hire me, some of that brilliance will rub off on you.

This approach works when coaching top leaders, who often are also ego-driven. But it doesn’t work as well for those who are successful but still struggling to be seen.

As an Observer, the best moment in any engagement isn’t when the practitioner delivers a dazzling insight. It’s when the client has the insight themselves… when their inner locks click open, one after another, and their potential is suddenly visible. That moment requires the practitioner to get out of the way. To be in the client’s space, not their own.

This is where the Observer role diverges from coaching. Coaching, even when it’s done beautifully, tends to center on the coach’s methodology. The Observer focuses on the client’s unfolding. The difference is not subtle.

Transformational Listening

Every professional in the support world talks about listening. Active listening. Deep listening. Empathic listening.

Transformational listening is something different. It’s grasping what a person is saying at such a deep level that they feel seen, heard and understood at the very deepest levels.

It’s not “I heard what you said.” It’s “I see the real you, under all those layers.”

This kind of listening requires three things that are rarely combined in a single practitioner.

Presence. Not thinking about what you’re going to say next. Not categorizing the client’s words into a framework. Being fully, completely in the room with them. This is harder than it sounds, because most trained professionals have been taught to listen for something—a pattern, a diagnosis, a coachable moment. An Observer listens to someone.

Intuition. There are things a person communicates that never make it into words. The pause before they answer. The topic they avoid. The energy that shifts when they describe a particular relationship or ambition. An Observer notices what isn’t said as much as what is. This requires trusting your own perception—your gut, your felt sense, whatever you want to call it—and being willing to name what you notice.

Ego surrender. The hardest one. To listen at this level, you have to genuinely not need to be impressive. You can’t be thinking about your next coaching question or your proprietary framework or how you’re going to write this up as a case study. You have to be willing to disappear into the service of the person sitting across from you. The moment it becomes about you—your reputation, your insight, your cleverness—the listening dies.

When these three things come together, something remarkable happens. The client doesn’t just feel heard. They feel seen. And being seen is what unlocks change.

What an Observer Engagement Looks Like

An Observer engagement is shorter and more intensive than most coaching relationships. Think of it as a deep immersion, not a long-term retainer.

A typical engagement lasts about three months, with conversations every two weeks. Some clients continue at a monthly pace after that. The goal is not to create dependency; it’s to reach a point where you feel fully seen, perhaps for the first time, and you carry that clarity forward on your own.

During every single conversation, I have three words in my head: what matters most? My obsession with understanding what matters most to you substantially raises the odds that you will live in a manner that supports your priorities. It’s nearly impossible to tell another human being what matters most, week after week, without shifting your life to focus on those things.

Between conversations, there is homework. Not busywork. I use AI-powered interviews—tools I’ve built myself—to help clients go deeper between our sessions. One is an Ikigai Discovery process that uncovers the intersection of what you love, what the world needs, what you’re good at, and what you can be paid for. Another is a Life Vision assessment that walks you through every dimension of your life, challenges you to dream bigger than you think is realistic, and produces a present-tense vision statement for the life you actually want.

These tools aren’t replacements for the human connection. They’re accelerants. They help clients articulate things between sessions that would take months to surface through conversation alone. When they come back with that material, we’re already three levels deeper than where most coaching engagements ever get.

Who Needs an Observer?

The people who benefit most from an Observer are not broken. They are not struggling. In fact, they are often quite successful.

They’re the person who has achieved a great deal but can’t shake the feeling that something is missing. They’re successful, but not yet fulfilled. They’ve checked the boxes—the career, the income, the reputation—and they’re starting to wonder: is this it?

They don’t need advice. They don’t need a strategy. They need someone to see them clearly enough that they can finally see themselves. Someone who reflects back not the persona they’ve built, but the person underneath it.

This often describes individuals in midlife who have been extraordinarily competent at building careers, raising families, and showing up for everyone around them… while slowly losing track of their own desires and identity. It describes entrepreneurs who have poured everything into their companies and forgotten who they are outside of their work. It describes anyone who has spent years performing a version of themselves and is ready to meet the real one.

Why the Observer Role Is Emerging Now

We live in a world that is constantly telling people what to do. Every app, every algorithm, every piece of content is optimized to direct behavior. Coaching, at its worst, can feel like more of the same: here’s your action plan, here are your metrics, here’s what you need to change.

What people are starving for is the opposite. Not more direction. More recognition. Not another plan. A deeper understanding of who they are and what actually matters to them.

The Observer role is emerging because the need has become acute. The professional support industry is full of practitioners who are brilliant at telling people what to do. It has almost no one whose primary skill is simply, deeply, seeing people.

AI is making this more urgent, not less. As artificial intelligence takes over more of the analytical, strategic, and advisory functions, the distinctly human capacity to be fully present with another person becomes more valuable, not less. An AI can analyze your 360-degree feedback. It cannot look you in the eye and say, “I see something in you that you’ve been afraid to claim.”

The Future: A Community of Observers

I don’t intend to remain the only Observer.

This is bigger than one person’s practice. The world needs more people who know how to set aside their ego, listen at a transformational level, and reflect back what they see. The world needs practitioners who understand that their job is not to be impressive, but to be present. Who know that the most powerful thing you can do for another human being is to see them clearly and tell them what you see.

After years of doing this work myself, one client at a time, my intention is to train other Observers. Not to create a franchise or a certification mill. To cultivate a community of people who share a commitment to presence over performance, to the client’s unfolding over the practitioner’s methodology, and to the simple, radical act of seeing another person in their full complexity and magnificence.

The Observer role requires a specific set of capacities: the ability to quiet your own mind, a well-developed intuition, a genuine lack of ego in client interactions, and the kind of deep listening that most people have never experienced. These capacities can be developed. They are not magic. But they do require a level of inner work that most professional training programs ignore entirely.

I believe we are at the beginning of something. The coaching industry is mature and, in many ways, saturated. What’s missing isn’t more coaches. It’s a different kind of practitioner altogether, one whose power comes not from what they know, but from how deeply they see.

Nothing is better than being seen for who and what you are.

If you’re curious what that feels like, let’s talk.