What I perceive can add information. The decision still belongs to you.

Welcome to The Executive Energy Journal, where we explore a side of leadership few talk about: the subtle energy we have, live in, and how it impacts clarity, decision-making, and performance.

How EEJ works

• What's measurable: what research and observable mechanisms support 
• What's unknown: where evidence ends, and interpretation begins 
• What I do pragmatically anyway: the simplest reliable practice I use with clients 
• Your role: take what is useful and leave the rest

In this issue

A question I was asked recently made me realise there was an assumption about my work that I have probably not addressed clearly enough.

The question was: If I can sometimes perceive something in a client's situation that they have not consciously seen themselves, how can I trust myself to tell them what they should decide?

The short answer: I don't tell clients what to decide.

This issue looks at the difference between information and decision authority, what decision science says about values and good decisions, and how my evidence-based coaching training fits together with the energetic perception I bring into sessions.

1. Who gets to decide?

Someone recently asked me how I can trust myself enough to tell clients what they should decide.

The question caught my attention because it assumes a direct line from seeing something to thinking that also means knowing what another person should do about it.

I can understand why that assumption arises. If I say that I perceive subtle energy, patterns and dynamics that a client may not consciously perceive themselves, it is easy to imagine a session in which I look at the situation, see what is really going on, and give the client the answer.

That is not how I work.

I may tell a client that I perceive resistance somewhere in a situation, that two parts of what they are telling me do not seem to match, that their energy changes noticeably around one option, or that I see a dynamic they have not mentioned. We can then explore that information together.

Even when what I perceive turns out to be highly relevant, several questions remain open. What does it mean? How does it fit with the known facts? Does the client recognise it? What is important to them in this situation? What do they want to create from here?

Those are different questions from what I can perceive.

There is a useful concept in organisational decision-making called decision rights. It refers to who has the authority to make which decisions. Recent work from MIT Sloan applies the same idea to AI, asking how decision rights should be divided between humans and AI systems according to factors such as ambiguity and risk. The underlying distinction is useful here: being able to contribute something relevant to a decision does not automatically give the contributor rights to make the decision.

I think the same applies to my work.

2. Imagine that the perception is completely accurate

Take the uncertainty around energetic perception out of the equation for a moment.

Imagine that I perceive something in a client's situation and somehow they know with complete certainty that the perception is accurate.

Here are some typical situations:

• Maybe a particular professional role is constraining them.
• Maybe they are looking to a relationship for something, such as security, that is not actually present in it.
• Maybe part of them strongly resists an opportunity they are consciously excited about.

We now have better information about the situation, but we still don't have a decision.

A person may knowingly stay in a constraining professional role because stability matters greatly to them at this point in their life. Another person may decide that autonomy matters more and leave. Yet another person may find a way to actually expand their role, now that they have the information. 

The information can be identical while the decisions are different. This is where values enter the equation.

Decision research and current leadership discussion both recognise that information alone often cannot resolve an important decision, particularly when uncertainty and trade-offs remain. HBR has recently highlighted values as a practical guide in decisions where complete information is unavailable.

3. Evidence comes in

My training is in evidence-based positive psychology coaching, where values and strengths are used both in choosing goals and in developing strategies for reaching them.

That is relevant here because better information about a situation still does not tell us what is most important to the person making the decision.

Research on self-concordant goals supports this distinction. Goals that are more consistent with a person's own values and interests tend to attract more sustained effort and are more likely to be attained. 

Strengths matter for a related reason. Two people can want the same outcome and have very different viable ways of getting there. Someone who is strong at building relationships may approach an organisational problem differently from someone whose strengths lie in analysis, structure or decisive action.

So if I perceive something that changes our understanding of the situation, it becomes part of what we work with. The client's values and strengths help determine what they actually want to do with that information.

4. Better support does not require taking over the decision

There is an interesting parallel in healthcare decision research.

A large Cochrane review covering more than 107,000 adults found that decision aids can improve people's knowledge, understanding of risks and participation in decisions, while helping choices reflect what matters to them. 

Healthcare decisions are obviously different from coaching decisions. The principle is still useful because it shows that support can improve both the information available and the quality of the decision process. Ownership of the choice stays with the person who is living the life.

5. Energetic information enters the same process

Energetic perception adds another kind of information to my work.

Sometimes it reinforces what the client already knows. Sometimes it points towards something they have suspected without being able to articulate. Sometimes it brings something into the conversation that neither of us had been consciously discussing.

I take that information seriously, and I also examine it.

What exactly am I perceiving? What interpretation am I putting on it? What state am I perceiving it from? Does the client recognise what I describe? Is there other information that supports or contradicts the interpretation?

I have written recently about how I test some subtle perceptions by grounding myself and looking again. If my own reaction drops away and the perception remains, I have learned something useful about the stability of the perception. I still have interpretation to do.

The same discipline applies to client work. 

Suppose I perceive very clearly that a client's energy contracts around one possible direction. That is interesting and definitely something to look at more closely.

We might explore what happens when they imagine taking that direction. The possible reactions they have may be a feeling of fear, excitement, or even relief they didn't think they were allowed to feel. They may realise that something about the option conflicts with an important value. They may even discover that the contraction actually stemmed from an old experience and doesn't have very much to do with the current choice.

If I moved directly from "I perceive contraction" to "you should not do this", I would have skipped most of the useful work.

6. Seeing something the client cannot see creates responsibility, not ownership

There is an ethical issue here that becomes more important the more confidence a practitioner has in their perception.

If you repeatedly perceive things that clients recognise as accurate, it would be relatively easy to slide from:

• confidence in perception and process 

into 

• confidence about what other people should do. 

These are two very different areas.

My practitioner philosophy has increasingly centred on creating enough space for irrelevant information to fall away so that something more truthful can become visible. What emerges may be cognitive, emotional, somatic, relational, intuitive or energetic. 

The hypothesis is that sometimes change becomes possible when what interferes with a person's own knowing and reorganisation has been reduced.

Taking over the person's decision would work against that process.

There is a difference between having expertise in a process and claiming expertise over another person's life.

7. Information, values, strengths, options, choice

If someone brings me an important decision, several things can happen in a session.

• We can establish what is already known about the situation and look at what may have been missed. 
• I can bring in patterns or energetic information that I perceive and we can examine whether they add anything useful.
• We can explore what actually matters to the client. 
• Values can clarify why two superficially similar options do not carry the same weight. 
• Strengths can change the range of strategies available. 
• Practical constraints, responsibilities and consequences matter too.

From this groundwork, different paths may open up.

Sometimes the client becomes clear very quickly, but sometimes what seemed like one decision turns out to contain several smaller ones. Or maybe the useful result of a session is recognising that they simply do not have enough information yet.

The client still decides.

That is partly an ethical boundary and partly a practical one. If I tried to make the choice for them, I'd have substituted my weighting of the situation for theirs. Even if my perception of the situation is excellent, I cannot manufacture their values, choose their acceptable trade-offs, or live the actual life on their behalf.

8. The question behind the question

So how do I trust myself to tell clients what they should decide? I don't need to.

What I do need is enough trust in my perception to say what I see when I think it may be useful. I also need discipline to examine what I perceive rather than presenting interpretation as fact, and respect for the person in front of me to leave the final choice with them.

There is a wider topic to explore here, too. Decision rights can drift.

For example, a manager's opinion can become more authoritative than we consciously intended, or a partner's preferences can gradually determine which options feel available. As a recent development, AI can generate a recommendation that is designed to feel like a decision already made.

Similarly, even intuition can acquire too much authority if every strong internal signal is treated as an instruction rather than information to examine.

So perhaps the actual question is wider than who should make a decision for a coaching client.

When you are making an important decision, 

who and what currently has a voice in it, and how much decision-making authority have you given each one?

The information may come from many places, but the choice is still yours.

Until next Sunday,

Niina

References

• Corbu A., Peláez Zuberbühler MJ, Salanova M. (2021). Positive Psychology Micro-Coaching Intervention: Effects on Psychological Capital and Goal-Related Self-Efficacy. Front Psychol. 2021 Feb 11;12:566293. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.566293.
• Kauffeld, S., et al (2020). Positive Psychological Coaching Definitions and Models: A Systematic Literature Review.
• Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482–497.
• Stacey D. et al (2024) Decision aids for people facing health treatment or screening decisions. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2024 Jan 29;1(1):CD001431. 
• Harvard Business Review. (2026, April 27). To aid decision-making, clarify your core values. Management Tip of the Day.
• MIT Sloan. (2026). A framework for determining when AI can make decisions. September 22, 2026.