What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Renata had just helped a client work through a tough career pivot, feeling clear and grounded, when she got home to a text from her partner calling her "incredible at helping everyone but him." An hour later he sent a long, affectionate message about how much he admired her work. She sat on her couch, still in her coaching clothes, trying to reconcile the two messages, and realized she could coach a stranger through uncertainty more easily than she could name what was happening in her own relationship. She'd spent years teaching people to trust their own read on a situation, to notice when something kept repeating instead of explaining it away each time. She wasn't sure anymore if she trusted her own read at all, and she didn't know who she'd even ask.
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.
0 of 5 selected
The core lessons, applied to you
Recognizing the pattern instead of reframing it away
Coaches are skilled at helping clients see patterns in their own lives; the same skill, turned inward, is exactly what this book asks for: naming a cycle of idealization and devaluation as a repeating pattern rather than a series of separate, explainable moments.
Not every rough exchange is part of a larger cycle, and a coach's habit of finding meaning in everything can overreach into seeing patterns that aren't really there.
Keep a brief, private note of when warmth followed criticism, and review it the way you'd review a client's log.
The self-doubt is not a professional credibility problem
A coach's authority rests partly on appearing grounded and self-assured, which can make relationship-driven self-doubt feel like a threat to professional credibility rather than what it is: an expected effect of sustained inconsistency from someone close.
Genuine professional growth sometimes requires real self-examination, so not every doubt is only about the relationship.
Before assuming a shaky coaching session reflects your skill, ask whether the doubt started at home.
Applying your own frameworks to your own life
Coaches already know how to guide someone through weighing real factors, values, resources, constraints, instead of deciding from hope alone. Turning that same structured approach on one's own relationship, honestly and without professional distance, can bring clarity without forcing a premature answer.
It's genuinely difficult to coach yourself through something this personal, and outside perspective matters more here than in almost any client situation you have ever handled.
Write down the real factors as if a trusted colleague, not you, were the one deciding.
Needing a coach of your own
Coaches spend their careers building other people's confidence and support systems and often underinvest in their own. Whatever a coach ultimately decides, rebuilding self-trust happens through outside support, a therapist, a peer coach, or both, not through applying professional tools to oneself in isolation.
The professional instinct to stay composed and solution-focused can compete with the slower, messier work of sitting with genuine confusion about one's own relationship; a coach can hold both by allowing themselves, in their own support relationships, the same uncertainty they would readily make room for in a client.
Name one thing, honestly
- Have I ever reframed my own relationship the way I'd gently reframe a client's blind spot? - Would I recognize this pattern faster in someone else's story than in my own? - Who do I turn to when I need to be coached rather than to coach?
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
0 of 3 selected
Run this for seven days
Write down the real factors as if a trusted colleague, not you, were the one deciding.