Scroll through LinkedIn for ten minutes and you'll find them. Coaches, mentors, trainers announcing in their headlines that they work with high talent. With executives. With founders. With leaders. The phrasing varies, the message doesn't.

It's framed as positioning. Smart marketing. Pick your niche, speak to your audience.

But look closer at what it actually says. Behind the language of focus, there are two categories now: those who deserve this kind of support, and everyone else.

The thing that troubles me isn't the commercial choice. It's the implicit claim that development work makes sense only for people who have already arrived somewhere.

Coaching and mentoring exist for a different reason. Their founding premise, the one repeated in every code of ethics from every major association, is that the work is with people, for the development of people. Not a selection of them. Not those already certified as talented. The bet is that every person carries something worth surfacing, and that a competent practitioner can make a difference in that surfacing.

The high talent filter inverts that bet. It says development is for the already developed.

My own experience says something else. I've worked with people who were, every single one of them, talented. Not because I curated the room. Because talent isn't a property held by a few. It's something most people carry quietly, often unrecognized, often unused, sometimes actively suppressed by environments that had no interest in finding it.

The real work isn't selecting for talent that's already visible. It's building the conditions where someone can recognize their own and decide what to do with it.

Whether they arrive pushed by an ambition or pulled by an obstacle changes nothing meaningful. What matters is the willingness to look. The talent is already there. The recognition isn't.

Which brings me back to the LinkedIn headlines. The discomfort isn't about competitors choosing a different audience. It's about a message that contradicts what the work is supposed to be. A practice built on the conviction that potential is widely distributed, marketed by people who openly filter for those who have already proved themselves.

You can call that strategy. You can call it positioning. What's harder is reconciling it with the values that the same professionals will, in another context, claim to represent.

Coherence between what you say you believe and how you actually decide who to work with is not a small thing in this field. It might be the thing.