Breaking the Inertia of Success: Learning Before the Loss
This new six-part series equips coaches to work with clients who are navigating constant change, heightened expectations, and the pressure to perform without a pause.
Every 1-hour virtual session runs the same way. You receive one client in their own words, a two-hundred-word initial client download with no carryover from a prior session. You then have seven minutes of silence to write the three questions you would actually ask in the first ten minutes. Not your best three. Your actual three, verbatim. Everyone submits before anyone talks, because the moment a room discusses first you get consensus, and consensus tells you nothing about what was in the room. Then we do the part most of us never do out loud: trace each question back to the exact words of the client’s that produced it. Some trace to a phrase. Some trace to a gap between two things they said. Some don’t trace to anything, and that is usually the most useful five seconds of the hour.
Within a week, every participant receives the full anonymized question bank the room produced. Every question every coach wrote. It belongs to the chapter.
The six sessions share a mechanic, and the vocabulary accumulates across the season. Each one stands alone. Come to one, or come to all six.
Because Core Competency CCEs are the hardest to find, this series gives coaches (ACC, PCC, MCC, and those on the path) an immediate, high-value opportunity to strengthen their practice while supporting leaders who must adapt faster than the environments around them.
Session 5: I’m Faster If I Just Do It Myself
Coaching the shift from doing the work to getting it done through others
The most common transition in leadership and one of the hardest to coach, because the client is usually correct — they are faster. This session works someone who has to get results through people who will do it worse for a while. What do you ask when the client’s objection is accurate?
Learning objectives
1. Evoke awareness by forming questions that surface weak signals at the edges of a client’s operating environment, before anyone has named a problem.
2. Maintain presence and listen actively for the specific words a client chooses, and for the gaps between what they say and what they leave out.
3. Trace a coaching question back to the client language that produced it, distinguishing questions generated by the topic from questions generated by the client.
4. Apply a coaching mindset that treats client success as a prompt for deeper inquiry rather than reduced scrutiny.
Earn CCEUS: .75 Core & .25 RD
Pricing: Free for all members, $20 for non-members
Upcoming Series Session Dates:
01/21 Session 5: I’m Faster If I Just Do It Myself
02/25 Session 6: Now They Have to Coach Somebody
Scott Drexler, DM, ACC
Scott is a pracademic, an award-winning researcher and leadership coach working at the intersection of coaching, high-reliability organization (HRO) science, and extreme-context leadership. A retired U.S. Navy SEAL and a Federal Internal Coach, he has spent his career leading under pressure most organizations never face, from the battlefield to directing national-scale federal emergency response, and now coaches leaders who operate in that same permanent instability. He holds a PhD in organizational leadership, publishes on coaching in high-stakes environments, is the founder of Spearpoint Performance Institute, and serves on the ICF Georgia board.
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