You messed up. You didn’t track, you made poor choices or you completely fell off plan. You are embarrassed, ashamed, and feeling pretty defeated. When check in day rolls around, the last thing you want to do is explain yourself to your coach. Maybe you are just busy, your bandwidth is tapped out, you’re traveling, or it would just be a lot easier to skip your check in.
Most people who have had a coach or a plan to follow have slipped up somewhere along the way or had some sort of inconvenience that makes checking in a little more difficult.
One of the main reasons clients acquire a coach is accountability. They need/want someone to check in with to make sure they are doing what they need to do. That accountability does not exist if you are not going to check in. In order to be held accountable by someone else you have to have a little accountability to yourself. In a productive coaching relationship your coach is not going to be mad, disappointed, or any of the other fears you may have. Rather they are going to help you figure out what happened.
When you check in after a hard week or when it is not ideal to check in, we can learn from the week.
We can break down what went wrong.
From there we can determine strategies to help prevent or overcome those circumstances in the future. It is easy to say, “I’ll do better next week and check in then.” But what if the same stressors and hurdles show up? How are you going to deal with them any better than you did this week? You probably won’t and so begins the spiral.
When we slip up, checking in can help isolate the week or the incident. Again, we can acknowledge it, learn from it, and move on. Or you can stress about it for a week, feel embarrassed, get a case of the fuck its and just not check in. The odds of this behavior continuing or the fuck-its carrying over into next week have just gone up tenfold.
Now, maybe what we are doing just is not aligned with what you are able or willing to do right now. This misalignment might lead to a lack of adherence or execution of the plan. Your coach needs to know because that plan might not be for you right now. Just because what we are doing right now is not working does not mean there is not something that will work. Even more so, in learning what is not working we can better figure out what will work.
Lastly, view it from your coach’s perspective. If they are like our team, we only take on the number of clients we feel we can fully serve, rather than taking on as many as humanly possible. We assign everyone a check in day so each person can get the time they deserve and a timely response. When you don’t check in, first of all your coach is going to worry about you. You’re not a number, we genuinely care about you. Second, it can really screw up our day and work week. Imagine if you had a meeting on Tuesday but the other party did not show up or showed up two days late when you have three other meetings. In respecting yourself by showing up, you are also respecting your coach.
But it does happen. There are times when you may have to skip a check in or at least not fully check in. If that is the case, tell your coach. Touch base, let them know, and you can more than likely work something out. Maybe that is an email stating you did not track and things fell apart. Great! We can set up a call or email to find out what went wrong and how we can plan for a better week. Maybe it’s an email saying you’re going to be checking in late. Great! We can now plan for that. Whatever it may be, just touch base if you can and we can always work through it.
At the end of the day you hired a coach for a reason. Whatever that reason may be, you are not going to get anything from the coaching relationship if you don’t show up. Without your input your coach cannot help you. If we don’t know your struggles, we cannot help you make the changes to overcome them. We cannot adapt your plan if we don’t know what is going on. More importantly, this is your journey. Your coach cannot want it more than you. If you cannot show up for yourself, no one can show up for you. So next time you are thinking about skipping a check in, remember why you have a check in in the first place and show up for yourself.
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