What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from More Than a Body
Marcus had been mentoring a group of young professionals for two years, and after one session he overheard a mentee apologizing for how tired she looked on their video call, before she'd said a single word about the project update she'd come to present. He almost brushed past it, then realized he did the same thing himself before every recorded session, adjusting his camera angle and lighting before he ever thought about what he wanted to say. He opened the next session differently, asking each person to share one thing they'd built that week before anyone said anything about how they looked doing it.
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
The apology before the update
Self-objectification in a coaching relationship often shows up as a mentee, or you, opening with an appearance apology or comment before addressing the actual work at hand. It signals that appearance evaluation has quietly become the default frame for the interaction. Noticing when a session starts this way, and naming it gently, opens space for the actual substance to lead instead.
Pointing this out clumsily can embarrass someone rather than help them notice the pattern themselves.
Open your next session by asking what someone built or solved this week, before any appearance-related small talk has a chance to set the tone.
Where this pattern gets reinforced
This habit isn't a personal insecurity unique to your mentee, or to you; it's trained by a media culture that treats appearance evaluation as a normal opening move in any interaction, professional or otherwise. Understanding that the habit is widespread and systemic helps you address it without treating it as a special flaw in the person you're coaching.
Treating it purely as external can miss the specific way your own coaching language reinforces it session by session.
Review how you've opened your last few sessions, and note how often appearance, rather than substance, set the tone.
Coaching toward capability, not presentation
Resilience in a coaching relationship means consistently redirecting feedback toward what someone did and built, rather than how they appeared while doing it. This is a language habit you can build deliberately: naming specific actions, decisions, and results instead of generic appearance-adjacent praise like "you looked confident."
Under time pressure, generic appearance-based praise is faster to give than specific, function-based feedback.
Replace one stock compliment you tend to give, like "you looked great presenting," with a specific note about what the presentation actually accomplished.
Extending it to how mentees see each other
The same habit shapes how mentees evaluate each other, particularly in group settings where appearance-based comparison can substitute for real feedback. A coach who models function-based language gives a group permission to evaluate each other's work on its actual merits instead.
The tension for a coach is that presence and presentation do matter in some professional contexts you're preparing people for, interviews, client meetings, and pretending otherwise would shortchange your mentees. Resilience doesn't mean ignoring that reality; it means being explicit about when presentation genuinely serves a goal and keeping that separate from the ordinary coaching relationship, where appearance shouldn't be the default currency of feedback. Naming that distinction to mentees directly teaches the discernment itself. If a mentee's self-monitoring seems distressing or compulsive rather than ordinary nerves, a therapist is a more appropriate referral than more coaching.
Name one thing, honestly
- How did your last coaching session actually open, with substance or with appearance? - Which stock compliment do you rely on that could be replaced with something more specific? - Where do you genuinely need to prepare someone on presentation, and where are you defaulting to it unnecessarily?
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
Replace one stock compliment you tend to give, like "you looked great presenting," with a specific note about what the presentation actually accomplished.