What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from Show Your Work
Coaches and mentors often present their guidance as settled expertise, hiding the fact that their own methods are still evolving through practice with real clients and mentees. That can make the people they guide believe expertise is static, and it hides the ongoing craft of coaching itself from other coaches who could learn from 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
Share your process and work-in-progress regularly, not just the polished result
A coach's own frameworks and methods are themselves a body of work-in-progress, and showing how they're evolving models the same growth mindset a coach asks of their clients.
A coach quietly refines their approach to a difficult recurring client situation over years, uses the improved version privately, and never shares the evolution of the method with peers who face the same situation.
Once a quarter, write up how one part of your coaching approach has changed over the past year and share it with a peer group of other coaches or mentors.
Be generous with what you're learning — teach and share it, not just the finished outcome
Coaches accumulate hard-won, generalizable insight through repeated practice, and sharing that insight — stripped of any identifying client detail — helps the wider field without compromising anyone's confidentiality.
A coach notices a pattern that trips up many clients in a particular type of situation, develops a reliable way to address it, and keeps the insight entirely to themselves, leaving other coaches to work it out independently.
Turn one recurring, anonymized pattern you notice across your work into a short teaching piece — a technique, a reframe, a exercise — and share it publicly or with peers.
Share thoughtfully, adding real value rather than promoting yourself relentlessly
What a coach shares publicly should demonstrate real thinking about the craft, not just testimonials about their own success as a coach.
A coach's public presence consists mostly of client success stories with no detail on method, so it reads as an advertisement rather than something a prospective client or peer can actually learn from.
When sharing a success or a lesson publicly, include the specific technique or reasoning behind it, not just the fact that it worked.
Handle criticism and stay consistent over the long haul
Sharing an evolving method invites disagreement from peers who coach differently, and the coaches who benefit most treat that friction as a chance to sharpen their thinking rather than defend their approach as final. Consistency also matters directly to the people being coached — a mentor who visibly keeps learning and refining their own craft, steadily over years, models the exact behavior they're asking of others. That modeling is often more persuasive than any single piece of advice.
The instinct to protect client confidentiality can feel like a reason to share nothing about your process at all. In practice, the two aren't in real conflict: what's genuinely useful to share is almost always the pattern or technique, fully separated from any identifying detail, which lets you teach generously while keeping every client's specifics private.
Name one thing, honestly
What's one pattern in your coaching practice you've noticed repeatedly but never written down or taught to anyone else?
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
When sharing a success or a lesson publicly, include the specific technique or reasoning behind it, not just the fact that it worked.