Coaching Isn’t a Quick Fix—It’s a Long-Haul Commitment to Transformation

Coaching Isn’t a Quick Fix—It’s a Long-Haul Commitment to Transformation
By David Shrum | Ascend Leadership & Development

I recently had a call that brought to mind our deep desire for quick solutions.

A client shared that a friend had told him: “If you could just solve ‘x,’ things would get better.” The idea being that if he could uncover the root issue, suddenly work would flow and life would become easier. I understood the appeal, but I also knew that just isn’t true.

There are no quick fixes in life, and that includes working with a coach.

Sure, coaching is powerful. As a coach, I help clients explore the mindsets that limit their vision and performance. I help them uncover a vision that feels thrilling and support them in building a strategy to pursue it. But I believe the real transformation happens for a client in the practice. And a great coach is walking alongside the client as they become the person who can carry their thrilling vision into reality.

That practice is where transformation lives. It starts early in the coaching relationship, and it starts with vision. But vision isn’t a finish line; it’s something that is revisited again and again throughout the coaching process. Even after the first limiting beliefs are revealed (often the ones keeping our vision small), progress doesn’t explode overnight. There’s still work to do. A lot of it.

We must practice becoming the kind of person who can live into that vision. Practice integrity. Practice presence. Practice courage. The work is daily and ongoing.

On the same call, I inquired about a few broken commitments he had. He’d planned to start each day with a “miracle morning” routine which consisted of prayer, scripture, journaling, and reading non-fiction. But he’d fallen off. As we explored that break, he said he wasn’t seeing the output he had hoped for.

I asked, “Is that true?”

There was a long pause.

Eventually the silence was broken when he questioned his story, “Maybe I was getting what I wanted.”

I asked, “Where would you look to find out?”

He immediately knew to check his journal.

So he grabbed it. And as he began to review his entries, something shifted.

His notice.

He realized he’d already uncovered many of the limiting beliefs he thought were still holding him back and he did it early in the process. These breakthroughs happened during the first vision sessions and as he began making initial commitments. He also saw himself changing in ways that impacted his work, his family, and his walk with God. He saw a version of himself he admired.

But as he continued reading, something else became apparent: a gap. A few skipped days in the journal. Then a longer break. Eventually, it stopped. When the entries started to become sporadic, they were different. Less reflection, more frustration. Less growth, more negativity.

His takeaway?

He hadn’t been measuring his commitment.

He wasn’t tracking whether his routine was producing the desired fruit (it was). But without reviewing the evidence, he had no narrative to support the impact his actions were having. That gap made it easy to question whether it was worth continuing the practice because when we stop doing what we say we’ll do, when we say we’ll do it, we begin to justify the break in integrity. We sabotage the version of ourselves we’re committed to becoming. We rationalize why it didn’t matter, or why something else was more urgent.

In his case, he convinced himself he wasn’t getting results and that another limiting belief must be lurking, just waiting to be uncovered like a silver bullet.

The truth?

He had simply drifted back into old beliefs he had already confronted and reframed. And instead of recommitting, he justified the slip. As he did, the old patterns returned, and he continued to sabotage the version of himself that he had started to admire.

As it occurs to me.

Our whole person resists discomfort. Even though discomfort is the very thing required for transformational growth. So when we let go of our commitments (especially those tied to who we’re committed to being) we resist the discomfort by justifying why we broke our commitments and rarely stop to ask the hard question:

“What’s more important to me than becoming the person I say I want to be?”

Instead, we justify our behavior to death and start looking for shortcuts. Quick fixes. New hacks. Anything to avoid the battle. Anything to avoid the discomfort.

But the battle is real. And often, the enemy is us.

Coaching is not a quick fix.

It’s a relationship that is focused on a long-haul transformation that shouldn’t end when a contract does. While I truly believe a powerful coach client relationship is crucial to transformational growth, it isn’t magic. The transformation comes from work. From wrestling with who we are, and slowly, faithfully, becoming who we’re called to be.