What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from The Extended Mind
Wanda sat in her office chair after a session with a client who kept sabotaging his own promotion chances, trying to figure out why her usual questions weren't landing. She stayed seated, eyes closed, replaying the conversation from memory, convinced that the right insight would surface if she just concentrated on it hard enough. She didn't stand up to sketch the pattern she suspected on her whiteboard, and she didn't call her own supervision group to talk it through, telling herself an experienced coach should be able to see this alone. She didn't even glance at her session notes from prior weeks, trusting her memory to hold the pattern. After thirty minutes of silent replay she had no new framework, and the next session she ran with the same client repeated the same unproductive script as the one before it.
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
Thinking on your feet, literally, between sessions
Coaches often sit through back-to-back sessions and then try to reflect while still sitting down, brain and body equally still. But physical movement, a short walk or even standing and pacing between appointments, has been linked to clearer, less rigid thinking than staying seated the entire day.
A coach reflects on a difficult client pattern while still sitting in the same chair used for the session itself and keeps circling the same explanation without any new angle.
Build a five-minute walk into the gap between sessions and use it specifically to think through the client you just saw.
Using the room itself to see the pattern
A coaching room built for quiet conversation rarely has anything visual to help a coach spot a recurring pattern across sessions. Sketching a client's recurring dynamic on a whiteboard or paper, even roughly, lets you see a shape that would stay invisible if it only existed in memory.
A coach senses a repeating pattern across months of sessions with a client but never draws it out, and continues offering interventions that don't address the actual repeating structure.
After a session that reveals a recurring pattern, sketch it on paper or a whiteboard before your next session with that client.
Bringing your hardest cases to another mind
Coaches often treat their own judgment as the final word on a difficult case, especially once they have years of experience. Bringing a stuck case to a supervision group or trusted peer, with appropriate confidentiality, surfaces blind spots that solitary reflection consistently misses.
An experienced coach works alone with a client who isn't progressing for months, and a single consultation with a peer reveals an assumption the coach never questioned.
Bring your most stuck current case to your next supervision or peer conversation instead of continuing to work it out alone.
Keeping notes that think alongside you
A coach's session notes are not just records for liability purposes, they are a way of extending memory across months of work with a single client, letting you spot patterns, track language, and revisit earlier hypotheses that would otherwise blur together in memory after enough sessions with enough people, especially across a busy caseload.
Staying fully present and still with a client during a session and wanting to move or sketch to think clearly can pull against each other in the room itself. Save the movement and visual sketching for the reflection time immediately before or after a session, keeping the session itself for attentive stillness.
Name one thing, honestly
Which current client case have you been trying to understand purely through memory and reflection, without sketching it out or bringing it to a peer.
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
Bring your most stuck current case to your next supervision or peer conversation instead of continuing to work it out alone.