What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Make It Stick
You run a session where a mentee or athlete executes a skill smoothly, over and over, and it looks like real progress — the form is clean, the answer comes quickly, everyone in the room can see the improvement in real time. The trouble is that a skill someone can perform smoothly while you're standing right there, cueing them through it, often disappears the moment they're on their own without you. Coaches see this constantly and mistake the smoothness of a supervised repetition for the durability of a learned skill, when those are two very different things.
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
Notice when a smooth session isn't a stuck skill
Repeating a skill until it flows without hesitation, with you right there correcting small errors as they happen, produces a session that feels like clear progress. But that fluency is often propped up by your presence and your cues — the fluency illusion here is mistaking performance with support for performance without it.
A coach runs a drill where an athlete performs a technique correctly ten times in a row with real-time correction, calls the session a success, and then watches the same athlete revert to old habits in the very next game, when no one is there to cue the correction mid-play.
At the end of your next session, remove your cues entirely and have the person perform the skill once, cold, with no correction — use that single unaided attempt as your real read on progress.
Make them retrieve the skill, not just execute it with you
Asking someone to perform a skill from memory, without your prompts, or to explain back why a technique works, reveals and builds far more lasting competence than another round of guided repetition, even though it produces more visible mistakes in the moment.
A mentor walks a mentee through a difficult client conversation step by step, coaching each line in real time, the mentee handles it well with support, and then freezes in the actual client meeting because they'd never once run the conversation without the mentor's prompts feeding them what to say next.
In your next session, have the person attempt the full skill unprompted first, let them get it wrong, and only then walk through what to adjust.
Space sessions out and mix what you drill
One long, intensive session on a single skill produces a version of that skill that fades within days without reinforcement, while shorter sessions spaced out over weeks build something that holds up. Drilling one skill exclusively until it's polished also leaves people unable to choose the right skill when several options are available in a real situation — mixing skills within a session builds that judgment.
A coach dedicates an entire week of sessions to a single technique until it's sharp, moves on to the next skill the following week, and finds the first technique has noticeably degraded a month later because it was never revisited or mixed back in with newer material.
In your next few sessions, deliberately bring back one skill from several weeks ago and mix it into practice alongside whatever is currently being drilled.
Connect new skills to what they already do well
A new skill sticks faster when you explicitly tie it to something the person already does well — showing how a new technique builds on a strength they already have, rather than introducing it as something entirely separate. When they make a mistake mid-practice, frame it out loud as useful information about exactly what to work on next, not as a step backward.
Spacing skills out and mixing them into every session can feel inefficient against the instinct to fully polish one skill before moving to the next, especially with a looming competition or deadline. A workable balance is to introduce a new skill with focused, undivided practice at first, then shift to spaced, mixed sessions once the basic movement is in place.
Name one thing, honestly
Which skill have you seen someone perform well only while you were right there coaching them through it, and how would you find out if it holds up without you?
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
In your next few sessions, deliberately bring back one skill from several weeks ago and mix it into practice alongside whatever is currently being drilled.