What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from Advice for Future Corpses
Coaches and mentors spend their work holding space for other people's struggles, athletic setbacks, career doubts, personal growth, but rarely for the one struggle everyone eventually faces. Sallie Tisdale, a longtime palliative and hospice nurse, argues in Advice for Future Corpses that plain, unsentimental knowledge about dying is itself an act of care, the same instinct good coaching already runs on. When a client or mentee is caregiving for someone dying, or facing their own family's decline, the usual coaching toolkit of encouragement and goal setting can fall flat. Tisdale's clarity gives coaches and mentors a steadier way to be present for something that cannot be coached away.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Recognizing decline instead of reading it as failure
Dying generally follows a recognizable pattern, less appetite, less energy, systems slowing gradually rather than all at once. A coach who understands this pattern can recognize when a client's drop in focus or energy traces back to a family member's decline, rather than assuming it reflects motivation or commitment.
Coaches default to performance language, pushing harder, reframing mindset, when what a struggling client actually needs is acknowledgment that something outside the work is happening.
This week, if a client seems off, ask directly whether anything at home needs attention, and let the answer change the session's agenda.
Caregiving is not a mindset problem
A client or mentee caring for someone dying is doing physical, exhausting, unscheduled labor that willpower alone cannot sustain. No amount of goal setting substitutes for actual rest and support.
Coaches sometimes apply the same frameworks used for career or performance obstacles to caregiving exhaustion, which misreads a structural problem as a motivational one.
This week, ask a caregiving client what practical support they have in place, not just how they are coping emotionally.
You do not need answers, just better questions
Hospitals, hospice programs, and advance directives run on their own logic, and most clients navigating this for the first time feel lost. A coach does not need medical expertise, only the habit of helping someone form clear questions to bring to their care team.
Mentors sometimes try to offer reassurance instead of practical direction, which feels supportive but leaves the client no closer to the information they actually need.
This week, help one client draft three specific questions to bring to a physician or hospice coordinator, the same way you would prep them for a hard conversation.
Presence is the deeper skill you already teach
For coaches and mentors, this clarity extends the core skill of the work, being genuinely present with someone, into territory the field rarely names directly. Understanding what dying and caregiving actually involve lets a coach hold space for that reality instead of redirecting toward goals too quickly. That same steadiness, honest rather than falsely upbeat, is often what clients remember longest, well beyond whatever performance outcome prompted the relationship.
The instinct to keep a client moving toward their goals competes with a season that genuinely calls for rest and slower pace. Coaches often resolve this by quietly pushing the original plan forward anyway, assuming momentum is always the right answer. A better approach names the tension directly with the client, adjusting the goals themselves rather than pretending nothing has changed.
Name one thing, honestly
- Have you ever pushed a struggling client toward performance when what they needed was acknowledgment of a real crisis? - Where in your own life have you avoided naming grief or caregiving because your role calls for steadiness? - What would it look like to build space for mortality into how you coach, before a client brings it up first?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
This week, help one client draft three specific questions to bring to a physician or hospice coordinator, the same way you would prep them for a hard conversation.