Charmain Bogue | What I Learned From the Clients Who Left

 

Charmain Bogue in a meeting

Endings are data. I started paying attention to what they were telling me.

The professional development content almost nobody writes is the ending. We write about starting coaching relationships, building trust, the early breakthroughs. We do not write much about the client who wraps up without getting where she intended, the engagement that ends before the change takes hold, or the leader who finishes the work and goes back to every habit she said she wanted to leave behind.

I have had all of those. And I have learned more from them than from the ones that went well.

The patterns I kept seeing

Some endings are genuinely successful and complete. The leader set a goal, did the work, changed the behavior, and the coaching relationship served its purpose. Those are good endings and they feel like them.

But there is a category of ending that looks like completion and is not. The client wraps up the engagement politely, says the right things about what she learned, and within a few months is operating exactly as she was before. I used to attribute this to something about her readiness or her situation. I have come to think the fault is more often mine, for not naming what I saw early enough or directly enough.

What the departures taught me about directness

The clients who leave before the work is done almost always gave me signals I did not act on fast enough. A pattern of rescheduling. Answers that sounded good but had no specifics attached to them. Agreement in the session and no follow-through between sessions. I knew what those patterns meant. I did not always name them when I should have.

The fear, which I will name because it is real, is that naming what you are seeing will end the relationship. That the client will feel criticized and disengage. What I have found is the opposite. When I name the pattern directly, "I notice you keep describing what you want to do differently, but the behavior in your examples has not changed, can we talk about that," the conversation gets more real. Sometimes it ends the engagement faster. It also produces more actual change, because the thing we were avoiding gets put on the table.

The standard I hold myself to now

I try to have the hard observation by the second or third session if the pattern is there. Not as a confrontation, but as a question I am genuinely curious about, because I am. The client who is avoiding the real issue is not doing it to be difficult. She is doing it because the real issue is hard, and she hired me to help her get to it, not to make the meetings pleasant.

The clients who left taught me that the kindest thing a coach can do is not to manage the discomfort. It is to stay in the room with someone while they deal with it.

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