What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from The Artist's Way
Coaches and mentors spend their working hours helping other people unlock ideas, solve problems, and move past their own doubts — and can go a long time without applying any of that same attention to themselves. It's easy to become excellent at drawing out someone else's best thinking while your own sits untouched, and to mistake being helpful for being fulfilled.
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
Start each day with a few minutes of unfiltered, unedited writing to clear mental clutter
A coach's day is often front-loaded with other people's problems before there's a chance to process any of the coach's own. A short daily habit of writing without editing, before the first session, clears out mental noise that would otherwise seep into how present the coach can be with a client.
A coach walks into a morning session still preoccupied with an unresolved personal matter, and finds themselves only half-listening, offering generic advice instead of the tailored insight the client usually gets.
Before the first session of the day, spend five minutes writing whatever is on your mind, unfiltered, so it's been acknowledged on the page rather than quietly running underneath the day's conversations.
Schedule regular solo time doing something that sparks curiosity, with no goal beyond refilling your own inspiration
Coaches give their attention outward all day, which can leave nothing in reserve for their own curiosity — the very quality they're often trying to help clients rediscover. A weekly outing alone, doing something interesting purely for its own sake, replenishes the coach's own resource before it runs dry.
A coach books back-to-back client sessions six days a week for over a month, and starts noticing their own advice sounding stale and repetitive, because nothing new has entered their own thinking in weeks.
Block two hours once a week, protected the same way a client session is protected, for something that interests you with no connection to coaching or mentoring.
Notice and gently work through the internal doubts that block creative work
Fear of appearing uncertain in front of a client, comparison to a more visible or seemingly more successful peer coach, and perfectionism about having the "right" answer in every session all keep a coach performing expertise instead of staying genuinely curious alongside the client.
A coach doesn't know how to help with a client's unusual situation, but rather than admitting uncertainty, offers a generic framework that doesn't fit, because admitting "I'm not sure" feels like a failure of the role.
Practice saying "I don't have a ready answer for that, let's think about it together" out loud once this week, in a low-stakes moment, to build tolerance for visible uncertainty.
Treat creative recovery as a gradual, ongoing practice, not a one-time fix
A coach who tries to refill their own reserves with one retreat or workshop will find it fades within weeks of returning to a full client schedule. Treating the daily writing and weekly outing as a standing part of the practice — as essential as session prep — keeps the coach's own well from running dry between the moments they can afford to step away.
During a busy client season, both habits can feel like the first things to sacrifice for one more session slot. Shrinking them instead of dropping them — a few minutes of writing, a shorter outing — keeps the coach's own resources available for the clients who need them.
Name one thing, honestly
When did you last spend time on something purely because it interested you, with no client, session, or program attached to it?
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
Practice saying "I don't have a ready answer for that, let's think about it together" out loud once this week, in a low-stakes moment, to build tolerance for visible uncertainty.