Professional identity formation, with its focus on the development of professional values, actions, and aspirations, is the ideal goal of medical education. Medicine is a community of practice, and medical education is a socialization process by which novice trainees become full community members. The authors believe coaching provides an ideal means for promoting this socialization process to develop a learner's identity as they engage in the community. Coaching involves an orientation toward growth and development, valuing reflection and nurturing continuous reflection, and embracing failure as an opportunity for learning. Competency-based medical education has provided clear outcomes (competencies) for medical education and programs of assessment around these competencies. Yet, there is a tension in medical training between professional identity formation (the process of socialization into the profession) and the formal assessment process. The ideal of multiple low-stakes assessments and written evaluations, intended as formative assessments, are perceived by residents as high-stakes evaluations with significant consequences for their future. The authors present a resident story that highlights this tension. They outline Goffman's theory of impression management, postulating that medicine's assessment system encourages residents to stage a performance for evaluators that displays their competence and conceals their perceived weaknesses. This performance hinders the formation of an appropriate professional identity. Coaching, the authors believe, provides a model that aligns assessment and professional identity formation. The authors propose several questions to contemplate when integrating coaching into medical education to facilitate the goal of professional identity formation.