What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Stolen Focus
She has eleven minutes between one client call and the next, just enough time to jot down notes from the session that ended while it's still fresh, and instead she opens her phone to check a message that turned out not to matter. She scrolls a little further than she meant to, replies to something unrelated, and looks up to find only two minutes left before the next call starts. The notes from the last session never get written, and she walks into the next one slightly unmoored, still half-thinking about the message she just answered rather than the person waiting on the call. She wonders, not for the first time this month, whether she is simply becoming a less attentive coach than she used to be. What's coming is a more accurate account of where that attention actually went.
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
Feeling less present with clients isn't necessarily a sign you're losing your gift
A coach who notices herself drifting mid-session is not necessarily losing the ability that made her good at this work; an environment full of notifications and back-to-back scheduling actively works against the sustained presence coaching requires, for anyone.
A mentor assumes he has simply gotten worse at listening after a stretch of distracted sessions, without noticing that his calendar has quietly filled with back-to-back calls and no buffer, leaving no time to reset between one client's concerns and the next. Practice: Before concluding you have lost your presence, check whether your schedule currently leaves any room at all for the reset that presence actually requires.
Before concluding you have lost your presence, check whether your schedule currently leaves any room at all for the reset that presence actually requires.
Checking a message between sessions costs the next session, not just the gap
A quick check during the gap between clients does not stay contained to that gap; attention takes real time to fully leave the last thing it touched, so the next session can start with a coach who is still partly elsewhere.
A coach answers what seems like a two-minute email during her only break of the day, then spends the first ten minutes of the next session only half-present while her attention finishes disengaging from the email thread. Practice: Treat the gap between sessions as reserved for the session that just ended and the one about to start, not for anything else, even briefly.
Treat the gap between sessions as reserved for the session that just ended and the one about to start, not for anything else, even briefly.
The reflection time coaching depends on has to be scheduled, not hoped for
The between-session thinking that makes coaching genuinely effective, connecting patterns across clients and preparing for what's next, rarely happens by accident in a full schedule; it needs a deliberately protected block treated as part of the actual work.
A coach means to review her notes and plan for each client weekly but never blocks specific time for it, so the review only happens in scattered, rushed moments right before each session, and patterns across clients go consistently unnoticed. Practice: Block one recurring stretch each week solely for reviewing client notes and planning ahead, protected the same way a paid session would be.
Block one recurring stretch each week solely for reviewing client notes and planning ahead, protected the same way a paid session would be.
The space you protect between clients will keep getting squeezed
Even a coach who successfully builds in real buffer time between sessions should expect that space to come under pressure again. A busier season adds more clients into the same hours, a new communication channel invites faster replies between sessions, and a protected gap that took real effort to establish can quietly disappear during a demanding month. Protecting the presence that coaching depends on is not a fixed decision but an ongoing negotiation with a schedule that keeps asking for more.
Recognizing that the environment works against sustained presence can tempt a coach to accept a packed schedule as simply unavoidable. But the two ideas work together: understanding the pressure removes the guilt of a distracted session, while a defended buffer between clients remains the actual fix available this week. Use the first to be kinder to yourself, then use the second to change next week's calendar.
Name one thing, honestly
What would your clients notice differently if you protected even five minutes of real buffer before and after each session?
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
Block one recurring stretch each week solely for reviewing client notes and planning ahead, protected the same way a paid session would be.