Every coach has a version of this moment. The client said they would walk after dinner four nights this week. They walked twice. You’re on the call. They haven’t brought it up. You have to.
The temptation is to soften it into nothing or to harden it into a question with one right answer. Both fail. Here’s the language that works.
Don’t ask why. “Why didn’t you walk on the other nights?” lands as a request for an excuse. Excuses are exhausting to give and to hear. You’ll get a quick story and learn nothing.
Ask what got in the way. “What got in the way of walking on the other nights?” externalizes the obstacle. The client doesn’t have to defend themselves; they get to describe a situation. The difference is one word and the air in the room.
Ask before you celebrate. If you praise the two nights they did walk before naming the two they didn’t, the conversation shifts to “great job, but.” Reverse it. Name the gap with curiosity first, then notice the wins last. The client leaves the call holding the wins, not the gap.
Treat consistency as a design problem, not a willpower problem. Most missed commitments are signal that the plan was wrong, not that the client was weak. Asking “should this commitment be smaller, more specific, or anchored to something else?” reframes a stumble into a redesign. It is also, in my experience, the kind of question a client remembers for months.
Don’t flinch. This is the hard one. If the client senses that you are uncomfortable raising the gap, they will become uncomfortable too, and the next missed commitment will go unnamed. The way to not flinch is to remember that you are doing them a favor by noticing. Coaches who never name the misses end up with clients who never get unstuck.
The undone things are where the work is. Pretending they aren’t is the warmer choice in the moment and the colder one over a year.
Founder of Grove. Twenty years building software for skilled professionals. Currently writes mostly on Tuesdays from a small studio in Austin.