What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from Steal Like an Artist
Coaches and mentors often present their frameworks and advice as if invented entirely from personal insight, quietly leaving out the other coaches, books, and mentors who actually shaped their approach. That habit can make the practice look more mysterious and less learnable than it actually is, which works against the very people the coach is trying to help.
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
Openly study and build on the work of people you admire
For a coach, this means telling clients plainly which mentors, books, or other coaches shaped your framework, rather than presenting it as a wholly original invention.
A coach builds their signature framework almost entirely from a mentor's teaching, adds a new name, and presents it to clients as an original system with no mention of its origin. When a client later encounters the mentor's original material elsewhere, the coach's credibility suffers far more than an open acknowledgment ever would have cost.
In your next client session or program materials, name at least one specific source or mentor behind a technique you teach.
Start making things now, before you feel ready or fully know your own style
A coaching approach sharpens through actually working with real clients, not through refining a framework alone until it feels complete.
A new coach delays taking on any clients for months, wanting to finish designing a complete methodology first. The methodology stays theoretical because it was never tested against a real person's actual situation, and the delay costs the coach the practical experience that would have improved it fastest.
Take on one client or practice session this month using your current framework as-is, and adjust it based on what actually happens.
Share your work and process regularly, not just the finished result
Clients trust a coach more when they can see some of the reasoning behind an exercise or piece of advice, not only the instruction itself.
A coach hands clients a polished worksheet each session without ever explaining why it's structured that way or where it came from. Clients follow it mechanically without understanding the underlying idea, and their engagement drops off once the novelty wears off.
Before your next exercise or assignment, spend two minutes explaining where the technique came from and why you use it.
Protect focused, unglamorous work time and treat limits as useful for finishing
The unglamorous work of preparing sessions, reviewing notes, and refining materials is easy to skip in favor of client-facing time that feels more urgent. Protecting a regular block for that preparation, and treating a limited number of sessions or a set program length as a useful constraint that forces the most important material to the front, is often what makes a coaching relationship actually effective rather than sprawling.
Naming your influences openly can feel at odds with a client's desire to believe they're getting something uniquely yours. The practical answer is that clients generally trust a coach more, not less, once they see that the coach has studied real sources seriously and can explain exactly what they've adapted and why.
Name one thing, honestly
Which part of your coaching framework have you been presenting as entirely your own that actually came from somewhere else, and what would it take to say so?
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 exercise or assignment, spend two minutes explaining where the technique came from and why you use it.