I get asked a version of this question fairly often:
Have you ever had a client for whom coaching didn’t stick?
My answer is yes. But also no.
And the reason for both is worth unpacking — because how we answer that question says a lot about how we understand change, and whether our expectations for it are actually realistic.
Here’s the honest truth: if coaching only stuck when people never reverted to old patterns, then almost no one who’s ever quit smoking would stay quit. Almost no relationship would survive the learning curve of something new. Almost no leader who’s trying to change how they lead would ever get there — because change isn’t a switch you flip. It’s a process that ebbs and flows, that takes longer than most people expect, encounters more resistance than most people plan for, and almost always includes setbacks that look, from the outside, like failure.
Change is hard. That’s not a coaching problem. That’s a human problem.
I often come back to a quote from Jessie Potter: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.”
Others have expounded on her thought over the years, adding, “If you always get what you’ve always gotten, you’ll always think what you’ve always thought. If you always think what you’ve always thought, you’ll always feel what you’ve always felt. And if you always feel what you’ve always felt, you’ll always do what you’ve always done.”
And around it goes.
What I love about that cycle is what it implies: you don’t have to change everything at once. Change any single element — what you do, what you think, how you feel — and the others start to shift. Not instantly. Not always cleanly. But eventually.
The problem is that when we watch someone else try to change, we tend to measure their progress against the element that matters most to us. We watch for behavioral change — because that’s what we can see. But the most significant shifts might be happening in how they think, or how they feel, in ways that haven’t yet surfaced in what they do.
We conclude that nothing has changed, when in fact a great deal has changed — just not where we were looking.
I’ve seen leaders who’ve done tremendous inner work — who’ve genuinely shifted their thinking about authority, trust, and accountability — whose behavior still looks largely the same from the outside. The shift is coming. But it takes time for new thinking to work its way through to new behavior. And if we judge them at month three as if that’s the final verdict, we’ve closed the book before the story is finished.
This is why my answer to “did coaching stick?” is always yes and no. Yes — something always changes in everyone who commits to the work. No — it rarely changes in a straight line, on a timeline that satisfies outside observers, or in exactly the way we hoped or expected.
The more useful question isn’t “Did it stick?” It’s “Where is this person relative to where they started?” And given the pull of old habits compared to the pull of the new — how close are they to the point where the new becomes stronger?
Most people who look like they’re not changing are actually in transition. The job of a good leader — and a good coach — is to stay curious about that journey rather than declaring it over before it’s finished.
If you’re working on a change that feels slower than it should, or trying to support someone who seems stuck, that kind of work is exactly what I do.
Photo by nader saremi on Unsplash
