Is Not Good Coaching Advice
Last week I told you about a conversation I overheard involving a sales manager who said: “If you have a difficult client, our policy is to give them as much as you can of what they want so they’re satisfied. Then the next difficult client you have will be much easier to deal with.” That article explored the tension between being liked and being useful. (Read it here.)
What the sales manager said is solid sales advice. But if you take it literally into a coaching practice, it’s also a recipe for burnout while your clients quietly stop making progress.
Let’s look a little deeper.
In sales, “what they want” usually means something concrete and reasonable — a discount, a faster delivery date, an extra feature thrown in. Giving it to them costs you something measurable and buys you a closed deal. In coaching, “what they want” in a difficult moment is rarely that clean. It’s an extension on homework they didn’t do. It’s agreement that their situation is uniquely unfair. It’s you softening a piece of feedback because they got defensive the first time you said it. Say yes to enough of those, and you haven’t closed a deal — you’ve slowly renegotiated your role from coach to cheerleader.
So, if “give them what they want” is the wrong instinct, what’s the right translation of that sales manager’s policy into coaching terms? I’d argue that it’s: “give them as much structure and clarity as you can, so they feel safe enough to do the hard thing anyway”.
This is a very different kind of giving. A client who’s stalling on a scary decision doesn’t need you to let the deadline slide — they need you to break the decision into a smaller, less scary first move.
A client who’s frustrated that progress feels slow doesn’t need you to agree that it’s taking too long — they need you to show them, concretely, what has actually changed since session one. A client who pushes back defensively on feedback doesn’t need the feedback withdrawn — they need it delivered with enough warmth and specificity that it’s harder to argue with.
In each case, you are giving the client something in response to their difficulty. You’re just not giving them the exit they were angling for. You’re giving them the conditions that make staying in the hard thing more bearable than leaving it.
There’s a second piece of the sales manager’s advice worth stealing, too: the idea that handling this difficult client well is what makes the next difficult client easier. This is true in coaching, but not because you get better at appeasing people. It’s true because every time you hold a boundary or push through resistance skillfully instead of caving in, you build your own tolerance for the possible discomfort of being disliked in the moment.
Most new coaches don’t struggle with difficult clients because they lack technique. They struggle because they haven’t yet built the stomach for a client being frustrated with them for five minutes in service of something better six months from now.
So keep the sales manager’s structure — have a policy, don’t improvise your response to difficulty from scratch every time — but swap out the content. Your policy isn’t “give them what they want.” It’s “give them what actually gets them unstuck, delivered with enough warmth that they can hear it.” That’s a harder policy to execute. But it’s also the only one that will still be working a year into the relationship.
