Indulge me for a beat while I presence a trope:
How do you lose weight? All together now, that’s right: “diet and exercise.”
This ostensibly trite and arguably overplayed goal, weight loss, is nice stand-in for virtually any endeavor we clients might be up to (and could use your coaching for). It illustrates how knowing what to do is often trivial compared to actual follow-through.
Much has been debated around how appropriate it is for coach to ever dispense with advice on what to do. But whether you ever do anything resembling prescribing as much to us clients, or keep to a style of coaching where your job is to guide us through an inquiry so that we can ourselves be the sole source of whatever we feel we ought to do, let us assume in whatever instance that your client has come to an understanding (of what to do) and they are genuinely enrolled.
In other words, they know what to do, and they are on board.
Knowing is nice.
When we clients come to that epiphany moment of clarity, it’s a great part of our session with you! The path ahead of us is laid out. We’re living into a new future, given by that path. Maybe the path is a surprising one, an unanticipated departure from what we were doing or even thought we were stuck having to do. It can be a wholly life-giving affair to see something new we didn’t see before. Odds are good we’ll thank you heartily, for that epiphany, and that’ll be that for the session; we’ve got our marching orders and we’re on our way. Talk to you next week.
But execution’s the game.
If what we now know to do falls by the wayside amid the usual din of life, when we’re away from you, our coach, and thus no longer in the space of creating bold, new futures? Well then, that knowing will have made no difference. But this will be our problem. By the time our “knowing” fades and execution has decidedly fallen through the cracks, we’ll have already had the warm fuzzies for you, the check will have already cleared, and any evaluator of that call will have already given you high marks for certification purposes, your competencies already well demonstrated.
But that doesn’t change the fact that only execution will have that “knowing” make a lasting difference. We have to do the work. Most coaches wash their hands of this part, and understandably so! Nobody wants to be a babysitter, and hey, we’re grown adults who need to be trusted to do our part.
But if execution’s the game (and if we care about real outcomes, it is), and if it’s super easy to shift the burden for execution fully to the client (and in the prevailing definitions of competent coaching, it is), the coach who can meaningfully support her client in that execution, in making that follow through just a little more certain to occur, will have a very strong differentiator going for her. And she will be able to tout that, and attract would-be clients, accordingly.
How do you meaningfully support clients in the execution of the “knowing” they get working with you? Well, over the last 13 years I’ve come up with a few ideas. That is to say, CoachAccountable itself.
I’m not talking about you actually doing the work for us, of course, but structures for accountability, follow-through, remembrance, knowing that we’re going to be called out (when things fall out), all that stuff; this is what you can do for us.
I don’t care how you do it. But please help us clients to actually execute. When you do, good things happen, for us and for you.
Knowing is nice, but execution’s the game.
Create an Action Plan, see it through with reminders and clear, sustained awareness of what’s done and what’s not.
Create one or more Metrics, setting in motion a regiment of tracking measures that matter and seeing how actual performance is stacking up against declared targets.
