Why I Became a Coach After Accomplishing Everything I Set Out to Do
This is the question I get asked more than any other, usually near the end of a first conversation with a prospective client.
“Why coaching? Why now?”
It’s a fair question. I spent 30 years building a career in financial services — bond trader, risk officer, CRO, executive vice president. I worked for some of the most demanding institutions in the country. I managed portfolios measured in the hundreds of billions. I built risk frameworks that outlasted my tenure. I led teams through mergers, regulatory scrutiny, and a global pandemic.
And then I walked away.
Not because I failed. Not because I burned out. Not because I had no other options. I walked away because I had accomplished everything I set out to accomplish — and I realized, with some clarity, that the most valuable thing I could do next wasn’t to keep doing the same things in the same rooms.
It was to bring everything I’d learned into the room with someone who could use it.
What 30 Years Actually Taught Me
The technical skills I developed over three decades — risk modeling, portfolio management, regulatory navigation, enterprise-level strategy — those matter. They’re real. They give me a lens that most coaches don’t have when they sit across from a senior leader.
But the more I reflect on what actually prepared me for coaching, the more I come back to something less quantifiable.
I spent 30 years watching what leadership does to people. I watched brilliant executives plateau because they couldn’t get out of their own way. I watched technically gifted leaders fail to build the trust that would have multiplied their impact tenfold. I watched people who were genuinely trying to lead well — working hard, meaning well, getting results — quietly creating cultures that were grinding their teams down.
And I watched the opposite too. I watched executives who made the deliberate choice to develop themselves as leaders — not just as technical experts — become the people that entire organizations oriented around. The ones whose teams would run through walls for them. The ones whose judgment everyone trusted, not just their analysis.
The difference wasn’t IQ. It wasn’t credentials. It was intentionality.
I became a coach because I wanted to be part of that second story — to help create more of it.
The Choice Part Matters
I’m going to say something direct here, because I think it’s important: a lot of people fall into coaching.
They have a good career, they enjoy developing others, and coaching feels like a natural extension. There’s nothing wrong with that. But “natural extension” and “deliberate calling” are different things. The executives I work with can feel the difference — in how I show up, in the questions I ask, in the kind of partnership I’m offering.
I didn’t fall into this. I chose it — after accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish professionally, and after asking myself seriously what I wanted the next chapter to mean.
The answer I kept coming back to was this: I want to give back. Not generically. Not as a volunteer activity or a side interest. But as the central purpose of my work — using everything I’ve built and learned in service of the people who are in the middle of building theirs.
What “Giving Back” Actually Means
I think that phrase can sound vague, so let me be specific about what it looks like in practice.
It means that when I sit across from an executive who is trying to figure out why a technically correct idea keeps getting rejected in the room, I don’t just coach the interpersonal dynamic. I understand the organizational pressure they’re navigating. I’ve been in rooms like that.
It means that when a transition client tells me they feel completely unmoored after leaving an executive role they held for a decade, I don’t just offer frameworks. I understand the identity that gets bound up in a title and the grief that can come when it ends. I’ve been through my own version of that transition.
It means that when a mentoring client is trying to build a risk management capability inside an organization that doesn’t fully understand what they’re asking for — I know exactly what that feels like, and I know what it takes to build credibility from the inside.
Experience isn’t everything in coaching. But it’s not nothing. And 30 years of it, at the level where I operated, is the thing that lets me be not just a coach but a genuine partner.
The Honest Answer to “Why Now?”
Because now is when I can do it properly. Because I’ve done the work of building something so that I can give it away. Because the executives I work with deserve someone who chose this — not someone who settled into it.
That’s the answer I give when people ask.
And it’s the truest thing I know how to say about why I do this work.
About Steve
Steve Buisson, PCC is the Founder and CEO of Executive Balance LLC and a former Fortune 500 Chief Risk Officer. A Professional Certified Coach credentialed by the International Coaching Federation, he specializes in executive coaching, transition advising, and mentoring for senior leaders and business owners. Based in North Carolina, Steve works with a limited number of clients nationwide — by design.
Are you ready to end the “lifequakes” and create the on-purpose life you always intended?
Take the first step. Let’s talk.