Leigh ShermanCoaching, outside the realm of sport, is designed to help people build awareness - but it fails at engineering mastery.
The business coaching industry has exploded to $20 billion globally by selling a compelling illusion: that awareness alone creates transformation. This drives a reality where, even with dedicated coaching, the majority of business leaders will incremental improvements at best—and at worst, reinforce contradictory beliefs that undermine their actual goals.
Unlike athletic coaching where exponential performance gains can be engineered predictably, business coaching rarely produces transformational results. This isn't because of insufficient effort or commitment. It's because most coaching models target the wrong outcome—conscious awareness rather than unconscious mastery.
"The difference between random improvement and engineered performance isn't insight—it's Unconscious Competence. Structure is simply the pathway to get there."
After two decades in both elite athletic performance and founder development, I've observed the pattern: Business coaching predominantly operates at the level of awareness—helping you see what you don't know. This has value but cannot deliver sustainable performance transformation.
The Four Stages of Competence: The Missing Map in Business Coaching
To understand why conventional coaching approaches fall short, we need to examine the four-stage competence model that underpins all high-performance development:
- Unconscious Incompetence – You don't know what you don't know
- Conscious Incompetence – You become aware of what you don't know
- Conscious Competence – You know how to perform, but it requires focus and effort
- Unconscious Competence – You've integrated the capability so deeply it becomes automatic
The business coaching industry has mastered moving people—executives, managers, and founders alike—from stage 1 to stage 2, creating awareness of gaps and opportunities. Some exceptional coaches guide their clients to stage 3, where new skills are performed with deliberate attention.
But virtually no coaching methodologies in business are designed to systematically develop stage 4—unconscious competence—the way elite sports have engineered over the last two decades. This fourth stage is where true performance breakthroughs occur across every level of business leadership.
The Structural Problem with Business Coaching
The International Coaching Federation (ICF)—the world's largest coaching accreditation body—defines coaching as "partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential."
Here's the fundamental flaw: the ICF explicitly prohibits directive teaching, mentoring, or structured skill development. Their code of ethics mandates that coaches must not position themselves as experts or solve problems for the client.
This approach frames coaching as a reflective, non-directive process—perfectly designed for creating awareness but structurally incapable of engineering mastery.
This explains coaching's explosive growth as an industry:
- Low barrier to entry
- No requirement for expertise in performance development
- Optimized for selling insight, not engineering mastery
This structure perfectly aligns with Level 2 of the Four Stages—Conscious Incompetence—where the client becomes aware of what they don't know.
The typical marketing of coaching services lives here: "You're stuck because you don't know what you don't know... work with me to see more clearly."
Coach's Note: The journey to unconscious competence requires not just practice, but practice within a structured system that creates neurological pattern recognition and performance automation. This is precisely what's missing in conventional business coaching.
Why Unconscious Competence Is the Only Sustainable Competitive Advantage
In today's business environment, especially with AI acceleration, operating from unconscious competence isn't just advantageous—it's essential for sustained high performance.
When your leadership competes with infinite data availability but limited attention bandwidth, only unconscious competence allows you to:
- Make accurate intuitive judgments under pressure
- Recognize patterns too complex for conscious analysis
- Execute with precision without depleting cognitive resources
- Maintain strategic clarity amid overwhelming information noise
These capabilities aren't extras—they're fundamental requirements for sustained performance. Yet the startup ecosystem treats them as mystical talents rather than trainable skills.
Why? Because developing unconscious competence requires turning abstract business concepts into measurable performance frameworks with reliable feedback systems—exactly what's missing in conventional coaching approaches.
From Arbitrary Business to Structured Sport
Elite athletic coaching works because sports have concrete structures. The boundaries are visible, the rules are clear, and performance can be measured objectively. A tennis player doesn't debate whether the ball was in or out—the line creates observable reality.
Business lacks these concrete structures. Consider these common questions with no clear answers outside of a performance framework:
- Is a 15% margin good or bad?
- Does a 3-week sales cycle indicate strength or weakness?
- Should you prioritize product development or market expansion?
This ambiguity explains why most business coaching remains stuck in awareness rather than mastery. Without clear structure, coaches and founders can't create the consistent feedback loops necessary for developing unconscious competence.
Does your current coaching relationship create undeniable alignment around measurable performance, or does it revolve around interpretations and opinions?
The Three Layers of Performance: Where Conventional Coaching Falls Short
To develop unconscious competence in business leadership, we must address three integrated layers of performance—all of which conventional coaching typically neglects:
Layer 1: The Company Model Framework
This layer provides essential structure to the "sport" of business by mapping three fundamental pillars:
- Leadership (Health): Strategy, alignment, and execution capacity
- Market (Fitness): Engagement, monetization, and customer activation
- Business (Skill): Product impact, operational systems, and capital structure
While traditional coaching might focus on isolated components, the Company Model Framework transforms abstract business questions into a measurable performance sport through its integrated structure.
Layer 2: The Level 10 Leadership System
Within your company's structure, your leadership system becomes the mechanism through which performance is expressed:
- Strategy: The first-principles logic for decision-making
- Alignment: The precision language that connects strategy to execution
- Execution: The rhythmic structure for consistent action and assessment
Unlike traditional leadership coaching that focuses on personality or mindset, this systemic approach creates clear processes that can be practiced until they become unconscious.
Layer 3: The Athlete Model
The deepest layer addresses your capacity as a human performance system:
- Focus
- Physiology
- Language
The distinctive power of the Hillspeed approach is how the Athlete Model integrates with the Level 10 Leadership System, creating a feedback loop that develops unconscious competence through measurement and repetition—not just reflection.
The Hillspeed Protocol: Engineering Unconscious Competence
The Hillspeed Protocol integrates these three layers through four fundamental principles:
- Frame the Thinking: Apply first principles to establish clear structural boundaries
- Build Alignment: Create precise language systems that eliminate ambiguous interpretation
- Focus the Work: Implement performance cycles with deliberate constraint management
- Discuss Performance as an Integrated System: Recognize how all three layers interact
Unlike conventional coaching that separates business strategy from leadership development from personal performance, the Hillspeed Protocol creates an integrated system where improvement in one layer automatically enhances the others.
This is how we transform general coaching insight into specific performance mastery—by providing the structure that conventional coaching lacks.
"In a world of infinite information and advice, unconscious competence isn't just a competitive advantage—it's the only sustainable form of expertise."
The Constraint Paradox: What Elite Coaches Understand
Here's where traditional coaching fundamentally misunderstands performance: constraints aren't always problems to be solved—they're often the precise mechanisms through which performance accelerates.
Elite athletic coaches understand this intuitively. They don't just remove obstacles; they strategically introduce constraints to force adaptation. They create training environments that make proper form the path of least resistance.
In business coaching, constraints are almost always treated as problems to overcome. This misalignment creates the illusion of progress while preventing true performance development.
Are you working with coaches who identify constraints only to remove them, or with performance engineers who leverage constraints to drive mastery?
From Awareness to Mastery: Your Path Forward
If you've experienced the frustration of coaching that created awareness without transformation, the problem wasn't your commitment. It was a structural misalignment between coaching methodology and the mechanisms of high performance.
True performance development requires:
- Clear Structure: A framework that transforms abstract business into measurable performance (Company Model)
- Integrated Leadership: A system that develops decision-making at both conscious and unconscious levels (Level 10)
- Personal Performance: A methodology for optimizing your focus, physiology, and language (Athlete Model)
- Systemic Protocol: A process that integrates all three layers into a coherent whole (Hillspeed Protocol)
The difference between traditional business coaching and the Hillspeed approach isn't just philosophical—it's structural. We've built a comprehensive system for developing unconscious competence across all dimensions of business leadership.
Next Steps: Begin Your Journey to Unconscious Competence
Transforming your performance begins with establishing the right structure. Here's how to start:
- Download our Company Model Framework to see how we transform abstract business concepts into measurable performance structures
- Complete the Performance Baseline Assessment to identify where you currently operate on the four stages of competence
- Book a Pathway Call to explore whether the Hillspeed Protocol aligns with your performance goals
True mastery isn't about having more conversations—it's about having the right structure for developing unconscious competence in every aspect of your business leadership.
Download our free Company Model Framework to begin your journey from awareness to unconscious competence.
In our next article, we'll explore what it means to "Own The Game" and why defining your game metric transforms how you approach business growth.