What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Meditations
Marcus's dichotomy of control applies with unusual precision to coaching itself: you control the quality of your questions, your presence, and your honesty with a client — never whether they actually change. A coach who hasn't internalized this will eventually measure their own worth by client outcomes that were never fully theirs to guarantee.
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 you
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
The dichotomy of control, separating your input from a client's choice
Naming precisely what's yours — the quality of your questions, your preparation, your honesty — versus what's the client's — whether they act on what emerges, whether they actually change — protects against a coach absorbing a client's lack of progress as personal failure, when the actual controllable variable was the quality of the coaching itself.
A coach measures their own competence by whether a specific client changes, rather than by whether they showed up prepared, present, and honest — two different questions that get collapsed into one, unfairly, in either direction.
After a session with a client who isn't progressing, write down what you controlled in that session (preparation, honesty, quality of questions) separately from what the client controls (whether they act).
The view from above, offered to the client, not just held privately
Part of a coach's specific value is helping a client access the wider view Marcus describes — how a present crisis looks against a longer timescale — which means this practice isn't just personal discipline for you, it's a skill you're actively teaching, mostly by demonstrating it in how you respond to what the client brings you.
A coach models exactly the narrow, present-tense catastrophizing a client already brought into the room, rather than demonstrating the wider view that's part of the actual service being offered.
Other people's faults are not your excuse, with a resistant or repeating client
A client's repeated pattern, missed commitment, or resistance doesn't license frustration that leaks into the session — Marcus's discipline (expect imperfection, remember you also fall short of your own standards) is close to a professional requirement here, not just a nice-to-have.
Before a session with a client who's frustrated you before, name explicitly what standard of patience you're holding yourself to, independent of what they do in the room.
Memento mori, without despair, applied to a client's stated timeline
Reminding a client, gently, that time is genuinely finite can be one of the most useful and most delicate tools you have — used to motivate honest action, never to manufacture urgency or pressure that isn't warranted by their actual situation.
Caring about a client's outcome and accepting you don't control it are in constant tension for anyone whose work is measured, informally, by whether people change — and the resolution is holding yourself to the standard of the coaching itself, not the result.
Name one thing, honestly
Think of a client whose progress has frustrated you. Have you been evaluating your own coaching, or their choices — and are you clear on which is actually yours to answer for?
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
Before a session with a client who's frustrated you before, name explicitly what standard of patience you're holding yourself to, independent of what they do in the room.