There’s a Warren Buffett truism regarding investing: “to make money you must first survive”1Cited by Nassim Taleb in Skin in the Game, chapter 19..
This is self-evident logic, and thus easy to overlook. But let’s take a beat to look into it, and see how this translates into a certain kind of value you as coach can easily provide for us clients.
If you get wiped out (as an investor, i.e. you’ve lost everything), obviously that’s it, it’s game over. You have to still be in game in order to have the chance to win at that game. Same as in business, out-surviving your competitors is an oddly effective strategy.
It’s the same deal with goals and ambitions; with whatever plans for action. All of these are ideas, ideas which are apt to be generated during our coaching sessions with you. The first step to succeeding with any such idea is for those ideas to simply survive. Said another way for you as coach helping us clients: if we have a game to play, keeping it in existence is a surprisingly effective way for us to get a leg up.
Will the ideas surrounding our ambitions survive? Well, it is far easier to talk than to actually do. So it is naïve to assume the survival of practically any ambitious idea. This is as much the case when casually throwing ideas around with a friend as it is with a client doing creative work with you. In either scenario, non-survival is that talk turning out to have been idle spit-balling and nothing more. A forgotten notion, never revisited and certainly not acted upon.
I’ve done this from time to time in my coaching calls, how about you?
Neither you nor the speaker will know this at the time, of course; and in fact as coach it’s practically your job to be encouraging, and thus relate to us clients as being totally serious when we speak bold futures into existence. When it feels like idle talk, to a friend you can lovingly say “Yeah, you’re full of it: you’re never going to actually do that.” But as a coach, you’re less likely to call out what is probable BS2Can you imagine a coach who did? That would be refreshingly frank, but that’s an essay for another day..
Whether credible or not, the survival of an idea is something you can trivially help us with. Just write it down. Just set us some reminders. Just ask about it weeks later to see how it’s going. Just have it staring us in the face in some way, reliably and regularly as the days, weeks and even months go on. Doing so will regularly turn a merely good idea into something we’ll actually execute on.
Why do we need this help? Because we (all) super overestimate how memorable a good idea is going to be. That if we have that magical moment of epiphany, we assume we’ll definitely remember it and take according action. That if we have a super compelling future of who we want to be or where we want to go, we think we’ll totally remember that’s what we want and to take strides towards it.
Nope. Most coaches go along with these assumptions, just as we have them, and blithely leave it all up to us. The A-students of coaching will of course reliably execute, but the rest of us motivated, mere mortals? Less likely. You can do us a huge favor by giving us a little help. You can compensate for that overestimation that we typically do.
Help our ideas to survive. Because the first step is to survive.
- Action Plans with reminders and real due dates.
- Metrics to track the trajectory and target of an important measurable
- Session notes to document discussions and capture Key Insights
- Worksheets that invite clients to do and capture important thought work
All of these things create a living record of what got created during a session, and in turn turn into a record of accomplishment. Whatever gets created in these structures, survives. It all sticks around, ripe for revisiting and acting upon.
Notes:
- 1Cited by Nassim Taleb in Skin in the Game, chapter 19.
- 2Can you imagine a coach who did? That would be refreshingly frank, but that’s an essay for another day.
