On “Motivated Mere Mortals”, i.e. Your Typical Clients

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I’d like to acquaint you with a type of person you are apt to coach, the “Motivated Mere Mortal”.

They are distinct from the another variety of person you might get to work with, what I call the “A-Students of Coaching”. Like the Motivated Mere Mortals, the A-Students of Coaching believe in the work they’re doing with you, but moreover they are the types that reliably follow through on the plans you craft with them, because they know how to carve out space on their busy calendars to do whatever they gave their word to. For the A-Students of Coaching, such self-management is a natural self-expression.

It’s super fun to work with A-Students of Coaching. You create a plan together during your session, they dutifully execute over the days and weeks that follow, and you reconvene with either much to celebrate, or at very least valuable lessons learned.

Motivated Mere Mortals? They, too, believe in your coaching, and thus are motivated to rise up and do the work to realize the great outcomes with your partnership. But as mere mortals, without deity-level time management skills and follow through ability, they will come up short in putting brilliant coaching insights into practice. Probably a lot. Maybe even every single session. Making coaching work often a “two steps forward, one step backward” proposition.

And therefore they could use a little help.

And to be clear, I’m not saying anything derisively about Motivated Mere Mortals from on high. Because, dear reader, early enough in my “being coached” career I realized that I am a Motivated Mere Mortal. I was gung-ho about the program and the coaching, really in for stretching myself to be more and get all there was to get from my coach, yet I was rubbish about putting things into my calendar so that I’d actually do the whatever by when I said I would. I simply didn’t have those soft skills.

So when I speak of Motivated Mere Mortals, it’s more accurate to say that we could use a little help.

Giving this help isn’t as hard as it might sound. You don’t need to babysit us; you don’t need to become our time management tutor. Instead, you do it by checking our plans with a few pointed and timely questions. If we plan to do X by the next session, and X seems a little bold, or confronting, or time consuming, check in and ask us, dead level to our eyes: “When exactly do you see to do that between now and next week?” “How will you remember to do that if you (predictably) get busy around that time?” Give that pause to let us grapple with coming up with a good, solid answer. You in turn might reply with a call to action that turns our answer into a solid, can’t fail plan, like “Great, put that in your calendar now.” or “Great, set that timed reminder for yourself now. I’ll wait”

Train us to do these things the first few times, and you’ll gradually turn us into A-Students of Coaching. Your need to do this will diminish over time.

This may seem a little weird. And, out of the blue, yeah, such rigorous, nitpicky guidance probably would be. To get us on board with this sort of nuanced training, I recommend starting with this practice not until the very first time your client comes back to a session having NOT fulfilled on something they said they were going to do. And then, at that first time, give them a little pep talk, something that rhymes with:

The point of these practices is so that you can have power with your plans, i.e. so that you know yourself as one who actually follows through, rather than one who merely talks a big game. The former will build you up. The latter will slowly, invisibly poison your confidence. My job is to have you know yourself as more powerful then you ever have known yourself before. Thus, I’m going to be really picky about you doing what you said you would do from session to session. Thus, my calling on you to intentionally carve out time and reminders to ensure that you do.

You can use this verbatim, or find the words that are more you. But this is what we need to know. This is what sets the tone.

As you might have guessed, in the general population, A-Students of Coaching are a much rarer than the Motivated Mere Mortals. For obvious reasons, they are far easier to get results with. If you can attract and be selective enough to only work with A-Students of Coaching, congrats!

But that’s a pretty narrow band. And both types, by definition, want to work with you.

If you can effectively work with Motivated Mere Mortals, that’s a much broader audience you’ll be able to serve¹.

Moreover, if you can attract Motivated Mere Mortals, have it resonate when you speak to your ability to help us reliably stretch to higher levels, growing our confidence as doers, rather than as mere dreamers?

That’s a pretty attractive value proposition.

It was my very own realization that I was rubbish at follow through the plans I made out of being coached that led me to realize I was probably not the only one, and that therefore probably A LOT of people could get more out of being coached, if only they had some sort of supportive system to help them follow through on those earnest ambitions.

Thus my initial reason to create CoachAccountable.

So CoachAccountable’s Action planning functionality, with a clear account of plans made and by when, and automated timely reminders that keeps the plan present for us coachees, is quite specifically crafted to help all of your Motivated Mere Mortal client keep things moving forward between sessions, i.e.when you’re not there.