Power of the Re-Promise – The CoachAccountable Perspective

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As coach, good things are happening if you are sparking ambition in us clients.

Symptoms of sparked ambition include:

making bold plans to get things done,
setting by-when dates for completing those things,
taking on things that may otherwise never have been taken on, and
promising by-when dates that are the stuff of stretching beyond the predictable.

Assuming this process of action planning isn’t mere posturing, such plans and by-when dates are a promise, to you and themselves, that they’ll follow through timely.

With best and most sincere intentions, we clients sometimes will over-promise in this regard.

Symptoms of over-promising include:

Missed deadlines,
Running ragged trying to keep up,
Checking out / pretending they didn’t make those promises, and
Making the coaching process wrong.

Here’s how to handle this: create for them the Power of the Re-promise™¹.

At the start of your working relationship, and when they make plans that you perceive to be particularly bold and ambitious, create for them the following:

Their action plans are always a matter of what they’re giving their word to.
To produce results, it is essential that they honor their word in their work with you.
Sometimes honoring their word means not doing it, but instead re-promising.

Each of these assertions usually take a beat to really get, but Number 3 is for many outright counter intuitive.

Number 3 is the Power of the Re-promise. What do I mean by that?

It means if you said you’d do X by 5pm on Tuesday, and since making that plan…

life has come at you with other obligations, or
X turned out to be harder and more time consuming than you realized, or
you forgot that Y also was vying for your time,

then sometime before 5pm on Tuesday you say “Hey, I know I said I’d have X done by 5pm, turns out I won’t” and you either declare you’ll have it done by some later time OR you declare you’re not gonna do it after all.

The key is you do this before 5pm that day.

When you do it before, you show you’re not asleep at the wheel.
You didn’t let a deadline just slip willy-nilly.
You’re aware of what you said.
You’re aware of the plan you made.
And you’re aware that what you said matters.

All of these things are upstream of taking just a minute or less to re-promise around X. And EVEN THOUGH X still isn’t done by 5pm on Tuesday as originally promised, those things make all the difference in how you’re showing up.

This is the Power of the Re-promise.

Let your clients know that it exists, and that they can (and should!) use it whenever is needed along the path of accomplishment in working with you.

And it will be needed, more often than most people are comfortable with. And it is OKAY.

Let them know that, too.

When actions are planned out with CA, it’s easy for your client to keep aware of what’s due and when, and make whatever edits to due dates as needed.

If you like, you as coach will be notified of these changes via text or email. This makes it simple for you to be aware AND offer a note of encouragement with a quick reply.

Reminders can be sent automatically to your clients in the lead up to an Action’s due date. To these reminders they can reply to mark it done, OR reply to push that due date back (when timely completion is not feasible). No login required.

Via text or email, it’s re-promising made easy.