I recently had the chance to sit down with Madeleine Homan Blanchard for an upcoming podcast, and we got into something I think about a lot: classic coaching models, and how we use them without turning a session into a lecture.
Here’s the distinction. You can know the Eisenhower Matrix cold, urgent versus important, and never once say the word “Eisenhower” to a client. Instead you just ask the question the model is built on. Of everything on your list right now, what’s actually urgent, and what’s actually important? That’s it. The model becomes the question. The client never needs the label, and honestly, they don’t need one more framework named at them. They need a question that opens something up.
Madeleine asked me which models are my favorites, and my honest answer surprised even me a little: the ones my clients built. Not the ones from a textbook. The ones that showed up in a room because a real problem needed a real tool, and we made one up together.
Case in point: WAIT (Why Am I Talking). One client and I coined it mid-session, and if I’m honest, half the value of session, was in the shorthand: what am I talking about. It’s a check a client can run on himself, that’s it, and it stuck because he made it, not because I handed it to him.
Then there’s the pair I’m most curious about right now, because we’re still testing it. A different client was stuck on something a lot of coaches hear in some form: he couldn’t leave the workday where it belonged. So we built What’s Important Now and What’s Important Tomorrow. At the end of the day, he scans his list and asks what matters tomorrow. Then the next day, before adding anything new, he goes back to that list and checks it against what’s important now. Is it still important? Sometimes the answer is no, and that’s data too.
We’re new on that one. He’s testing it. I’ll let you know how it holds up.
What I keep coming back to is this: the models in the textbooks are worth knowing, because they give you a shape to reach for. But the ones that last, the ones a client actually keeps using six months later, tend to be the ones built in the room, out of a specific problem, in a specific person’s language. Our job isn’t always to teach the model. Sometimes it’s to notice when a client is halfway to building their own, and get out of the way.
If you want the full conversation with Madeleine, it’s on next weeks podcast. Drop me a line and tell me what you think.
