What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from The Distracted Mind
Fifteen minutes into a session, the coach is listening to his client describe a stalled decision, but part of his mind is still snagged on the difficult call he had with a different client an hour earlier. His phone, face-down on the desk, buzzes once, briefly. He doesn't pick it up, but he spends the next thirty seconds wondering who it might be, and in that quiet stretch he misses the exact moment his client's voice changed while describing what's really holding her back. He recovers, asks a decent follow-up question, and the session ends fine enough on the surface. But he knows, driving home afterward, that he wasn't fully there for a meaningful chunk of it, and he chalks the lapse up to simply needing to be more present next time. The truth is narrower and less personal than a character flaw: he was asking one mind to hold a client's live session, a previous client's unresolved call, and background monitoring of his phone all at the same time — and that reframing points toward something more specific and fixable.
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 coach's split attention
Wanting to fully support the client in front of you while also carrying forward everything else on your plate is an understandable set of goals, but no single mind can execute both with full presence at the same time. That gap explains lapses in presence better than simply calling them a lack of skill.
A mentor keeps a laptop open during a video session "to take notes," but ends up glancing at an incoming email mid-conversation and missing the one sentence where the mentee finally named the real problem.
Close every application except the one needed for notes before a session begins, and keep the phone entirely out of the room.
Telling client signal from your own noise
Some interference during a session is external, like a notification, and some is internal, like unresolved feelings from the previous client's call. Recognizing which is happening changes what needs addressing before the next session can go well.
A coach carries frustration from a difficult earlier call into the next session without realizing it, and responds to a client's ordinary hesitation with unusual impatience.
Build a two-minute reset between sessions specifically to name, even just silently, whatever feeling is still active from the last one.
Structuring sessions instead of relying on willpower
Telling yourself to simply "be more present" rarely survives a day of back-to-back sessions. Structuring transition time, device placement, and session boundaries works more reliably than resolve applied moment to moment.
A coach books sessions with zero gap between them, and arrives at each new session still mentally finishing the last one, apologizing internally for not being fully switched over.
Block a fixed transition window between every session, even five minutes, used only to close out the previous one.
New channels competing for your attention
As scheduling apps, client messaging platforms, and social channels for building your practice keep multiplying, each becomes another possible source of interference around your actual sessions. There's no single setup that solves this permanently, since new channels keep arriving, which means protecting your presence is a practice to maintain rather than a problem you finish solving.
Being fully present with one client and staying reasonably responsive to others waiting for you can conflict. A workable resolution is setting clear expectations about response times outside of sessions, so full presence in the room doesn't come at the cost of anyone feeling ignored.
Name one thing, honestly
Thinking back over your last few sessions, when did your attention actually leave the room, and was it pulled away by something outside you or something you carried in with you?
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 a fixed transition window between every session, even five minutes, used only to close out the previous one.