What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Coaches and mentors are trusted to help people confront hard truths about their goals, habits, and limits, yet the subject of mortality rarely enters the conversation directly, even though it often sits underneath a client's stalled ambitions or vague sense of urgency. Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes describes a culture built to keep death at a comfortable distance, handled by professionals so no one else has to think about it, and argues that this distance leaves people less equipped to make honest decisions. For coaches and mentors, that same avoidance shows up when clients chase goals without ever naming what they are actually racing against, and the coach never asks.
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 coaching room trained to stay upbeat
Just as funeral culture removes a body from view quickly, coaching culture often removes hard, mortality-adjacent questions from view quickly, redirected toward action steps and positive framing before the real question gets named. This can train both coach and client to treat urgency as a vague feeling rather than something concrete and worth naming directly.
A coach senses a client's underlying fear about wasted time or aging but redirects to goal-setting language instead of naming it plainly.
This week, in one session, ask a client directly what they are afraid of running out of, and let the answer sit before moving to solutions.
Sitting with a client's hard truth instead of managing it
Doughty found that direct engagement with a hard reality produces more honest processing than distance from it. A coach willing to sit with a client's genuine fear or grief, rather than quickly reframing it into a positive action step, often helps the client reach a more honest and lasting decision.
Coaches move too fast from a client's raw admission to a tidy framework, because sitting in discomfort feels unproductive or outside the coach's role.
The next time a client raises something heavy, wait an extra beat before offering a framework, and ask one more open question first.
Your coaching model is not automatically aligned with the client's actual need
Doughty shows how funeral homes can steer grieving families toward decisions that serve the business more than the family. Coaching methodologies, packages, and certifications can quietly steer sessions toward what fits the coach's model rather than what the client actually needs in a given moment.
A coach applies a standard framework to a client's mortality-driven urgency because it is familiar, rather than pausing to ask if it actually fits.
Before your next session with a client wrestling with a big life question, ask yourself whether your usual framework fits this specific need or is just convenient.
Memento mori as a coaching foundation
Doughty frames regular awareness of mortality, memento mori, as a habit that clarifies present priorities rather than a grim indulgence. For a coach, quietly holding that awareness can sharpen the questions asked in every session, since much of what clients call urgency is really an unspoken relationship with finite time. Coaches comfortable naming that plainly tend to help clients make clearer, more honest choices than those who keep the conversation at a safe distance.
The pull toward sitting with a client's raw discomfort can conflict with a coaching model's structure and pacing, especially in short or outcome-focused engagements. The resolution is not abandoning structure, but recognizing when a client's real need is presence rather than the next framework, and adjusting the session accordingly.
Name one thing, honestly
- What unspoken fear about time or mortality might be underneath a current client's stated goal? - Where do you personally redirect from discomfort toward tidy solutions too quickly? - What would change in your practice if mortality were an ordinary, nameable topic?
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 your next session with a client wrestling with a big life question, ask yourself whether your usual framework fits this specific need or is just convenient.