What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Irresistible
Between sessions, the coach has eleven minutes before the next client logs on, just enough time to review notes from the last call. Instead the phone comes out and a video platform opens, and one short clip about productivity habits leads to another, then another, each one autoplaying before there's a real choice to make about whether to watch it. The eleven minutes are gone, notes unread, and the next client appears on screen mid-sentence about their own struggle to stop checking a game app during work hours. The coach nods along with practiced empathy, offering the standard advice about willpower and boundaries, while the video platform's tab sits open in the background, one more autoplay away from starting again the second the call ends. The advice has always sounded solid. Saying it out loud today, it sounds thinner than usual.
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 the pull as engineered, in yourself as much as your clients
The apps filling your gaps between sessions were built by teams whose job is maximizing time spent, the same as the apps your clients describe struggling with. The mechanism is identical whether it shows up in a coaching conversation or in your own eleven-minute break.
A coach tells a client that missed goals reflect a lack of commitment, while privately losing the same short gaps between calls to an app with an identical reward design, never connecting the two as the same underlying pull.
Before advising a client on app use, name the specific mechanism at work in your own recent screen habits first, so the advice comes from an honest, shared starting point.
Distinguishing the mechanism a client names from the one actually at work
An unpredictable reward, a visible social count, and an endless feed pull differently, and a client who says "I'm addicted to my phone" may be describing any one of the three, so the useful coaching question is which one specifically.
A coach recommends a generic screen-time limit app to every client who mentions phone struggles, without asking which specific feature, an endless feed, a like count, an unpredictable message, is actually driving the behavior, so the same generic fix succeeds for some clients and fails for others without anyone knowing why.
Ask clients to name the exact moment and feature that pulls them back in, not just the app, before recommending any specific countermeasure.
Helping clients change their environment, not just their intentions
Since these mechanisms are engineered to beat willpower, the coaching conversation that changes a client's physical or digital environment tends to outperform one that only strengthens their resolve.
A coach and client agree on a goal to "use the app less" with no specific environmental change attached, and the client returns the following week having tried and failed the same way, because nothing about where or how the phone is kept during vulnerable hours actually changed.
End every coaching conversation about app use with one specific environmental change, like where a phone charges overnight, not just a renewed intention.
The mechanisms your clients describe will keep shifting
The specific apps and features your clients bring up in sessions will change year to year as platforms compete for attention with new techniques. What stays useful across that shift is your grasp of the underlying mechanisms, unpredictable reward, social validation, no natural stopping point, rather than familiarity with any single current app.
Naming the engineered pull can risk letting a client off the hook entirely, treating every lapse as the app's fault with no room for their own agency. The tension resolves by acknowledging the design honestly while still asking the client to choose one concrete environmental change they can control this week.
Name one thing, honestly
The last time you gave a client advice about their phone use, would that same advice have held up if you'd applied it to your own last free eleven minutes?
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
End every coaching conversation about app use with one specific environmental change, like where a phone charges overnight, not just a renewed intention.