What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Decisive
People who guide others professionally — coaches, mentors, advisors — spend much of their time helping someone else decide, which means the traps Decisive describes show up twice: once in the client's thinking, and once in the coach's own read of the situation. It's easy for a coach to let a client's framing of "should I do this or not" go unquestioned, to trust their own read of a client's situation without checking it, and to let one dramatic session color a much longer relationship. Decisive gives coaches and mentors a set of questions to bring into the room, not just a private discipline.
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
Ask what the client hasn't put on the table
Clients usually arrive with a decision already narrowed to two options, because that's how the problem feels from inside their own head. Part of the coach's job is to gently ask what else was considered and set aside, and why — often surfacing options the client dismissed too quickly.
A client presents a decision as "take the promotion or turn it down," and the coach helps them weigh those two thoroughly, without ever asking whether negotiating different terms for the same promotion was ever raised.
In any coaching conversation about a stuck decision, ask directly, "what's a third option, even a strange one, that you haven't said out loud yet" — and sit with the silence until an answer comes.
Don't let your own read replace their reality
A coach can form a strong internal theory about what's really going on with a client based on limited sessions. It's worth deliberately checking that theory against more direct, outside evidence — what the client's behavior actually shows over time, or what a client's own stated experience says, rather than trusting your own interpretation as fact.
A mentor becomes convinced a mentee's stalled progress is about confidence, based on one conversation, and spends months coaching around that theory, when a more direct question would have revealed the real issue was a lack of time, not confidence.
Before acting on your own theory about what's driving a client's situation, ask them directly whether your read matches their own experience, and be genuinely open to being told it doesn't.
Don't let one dramatic session set the whole direction
An unusually emotional session — a breakthrough, a breakdown, a big reveal — can feel like it should reshape the entire coaching relationship, when it may really just be one data point in a longer pattern.
After a client has an emotional session about a career fear, a coach shifts the entire engagement's focus around that one moment, without checking in later sessions whether it reflected an ongoing pattern or a passing state.
After an unusually intense session, wait until the next session before making any lasting change to the coaching plan, to see whether the theme holds up once the emotional charge has settled.
Prepare the client for being surprised by their own future
Because no client (or coach) can fully predict how a chosen path will actually unfold, it helps to build in explicit check-in points from the start — specific moments to revisit the decision honestly against what's actually happening, rather than assuming the initial plan was correct and only reacting once something visibly goes wrong.
Widening a client's options and honoring their urgency to decide can pull against each other — a client under real pressure doesn't always welcome a coach slowing them down. The practical move is to name the tension directly: acknowledge the time pressure, then ask for just a few extra minutes to generate one more option before they commit.
Name one thing, honestly
Think about a client or mentee you're currently working with — is there a theory you've formed about their situation that you haven't actually checked with them directly?
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
After an unusually intense session, wait until the next session before making any lasting change to the coaching plan, to see whether the theme holds up once the emotional charge has settled.