A leader I worked with years ago commissioned a blind 360 evaluation of her own leadership. Anonymous feedback, straight from her team, gathered and delivered by an outside firm with no stake in the outcome. That takes nerve. Most people never ask.
The results came back hard.
She didn't like them, so she asked to have the assessment redone. By the time I got involved, she'd brought in a performance psychologist as well, and we all got on a call together. The psychologist had spoken to the team directly and said the feedback was real. The firm that ran the assessment stood behind every number.
She still couldn't accept it.
Sit with what that actually took. She had spent real money, assembled real experts, and put herself in a room with the truth about her own leadership. And her instinct wasn't to change. It was to revise the truth.
Two of the people who gave her that honest feedback no longer work for her. The pattern the assessment named is, as far as I know, still running her company.
I can hold up the mirror. I cannot make you look.
It Would Be Easy For Me To Judge Her
It would be easy. I don't. I've done my own versions of the same thing.
Danny Friedland was my coach for eight years, and he used to ask me how a thing might be happening for me rather than to me. More than once I told him to fuck off, and I meant it at the time. It took me years to get anywhere near accepting that I'm both the problem and the solution to most of what I'm dealing with. Not a session. Not a good book. Years, and I still lose hold of it when I'm frightened enough.
That's worth saying plainly, because growth doesn't work the way we like to describe it. You don't learn something once and graduate from the pattern. Under enough stress the old behavior comes back. What changes isn't that you stop, it's that you catch it sooner, own it faster, repair what needs repairing, and do it differently more often than you used to.
So when a client won't look, I don't think they're weak. I think they're doing something I did for a long time, for reasons I understand from the inside.
Part of it is simple. Even dysfunction can start to feel safe when it's familiar. You know how to survive it. You know your role in it. You've built coping mechanisms around it, and some of them work. Change is scarier because you don't yet know what's on the other side. Sometimes we choose a pain we know how to manage over an uncertainty we don't.
But I don't think that's the whole of it, and this is the part I've come to believe matters most.
The Question Isn't Whether You're Ready. It's What Changing Threatens.
People don't usually resist change because they're stubborn or lazy or insufficiently motivated. They resist because changing threatens something.
If I accept this feedback as true, what does that say about the leader I thought I was? If I change this behavior, who might I disappoint? If I stop being the one who decides everything, what do I have to trust instead? If I admit this isn't working, what have the last four years been?
That's usually where the real work is.
Go back to the 360. It's possible she wasn't refusing to behave differently. It's possible that accepting the feedback would have meant giving up a story about herself she'd been carrying a long time, and that the price of the story felt lower than the price of losing it. Two good people and an unchanged company later, I'd argue she got that maths wrong. But I understand the trade she was making, because I've made it.
So if you're stuck on something you already know needs to change, the more useful question isn't why you haven't done it yet. It's what doing it would cost you. Not in money. In identity, in approval, in control, in certainty, in somebody's good opinion of you.
Sometimes The Work Is One Email
Now here's the other client, and I want you to notice how unheroic this is.
She called me convinced she was about to lose an account and that it would be a catastrophe. Once we'd slowed it down, I asked her what the actual economic consequence would be if they left. She went and looked. It was something like half of one percent of her business. She had spent weeks in genuine distress over half of one percent.
Underneath it was the real thing, which is that she had never asked this client for what she actually wanted. So that was the work.
Not a transformation. One email.
She sent it. The reply came back in capital letters, something to the effect of "oh my God, that's amazing, let's talk Monday."
I'm not saying every painful piece of feedback needs a decision inside 24 hours. Sometimes sitting with it is the work. Sometimes you need more information, or you need to regulate before you respond, and reacting fast would be the mistake. The question I'd ask is whether the time is helping you understand something more clearly, or just helping you avoid the discomfort. Those look identical from the outside.
And that one email wasn't the finish line either. I don't want to hand you a story where somebody gets a piece of feedback and becomes a different leader on Monday, because that isn't how any of this works.
What it actually looks like is: you pick one behavior. You try something different. You ask the people around you whether they're experiencing you differently. You screw it up, probably within a fortnight. You own it. You repair it where it needs repairing. Then you do it again. The email was a first rep, not a transformation, and reps are the whole game.
Which raises something the 360 story never got to. If she had eventually accepted the feedback, deciding privately to be better wouldn't have been enough. People had already been on the receiving end of the old pattern. That usually needs saying out loud.
Something like: I fought this feedback because I didn't want it to be true, and looking back I can see more of what you were trying to tell me. I'm working on it. I also understand why six weeks of different behavior doesn't undo years of experiencing me another way.
That's a hard thing to say and it does more than any private resolution ever will. Your growth isn't only yours. Other people have to be able to experience the difference, or from where they're standing nothing has changed.
The Fire Alarm On The Wall
There's a rhythm to this too, not just a willingness.
Some clients treat coaching like a fire alarm mounted on the wall. In case of emergency, break glass, pull lever. When something is burning, a client is about to walk, cash is tight, a key person just quit, I hear from them three times in a day. Then the fire gets contained and they disappear until the next one.
I understand the impulse, and I've been that guy. But there's usually something else in it, and it's worth naming honestly. There can be an identity payoff in the chaos. If I'm the person who always rescues the company, I get to feel essential. Needed. Capable. The fire is operationally destructive and emotionally useful at the same time, which is exactly why it keeps happening.
The problem is that a business that needs its founder to be a hero every week is rarely becoming more scalable.
And if every coaching conversation happens during a fire, you may get very good at crisis response without ever changing what keeps creating the crisis. You pay for that in turnover, in rework, in decisions that take too long, in delegation that never happens, in your own exhaustion, and in a leadership team that never becomes strong enough to run without you.
The clients who actually change aren't the ones with the most dramatic crises. The glamorous coaching call is the one during the fire. The growth usually happens three weeks later, when nothing is burning and you still have the conversation you said you'd have, still hand over the thing you said you'd hand over, still sit down with the numbers you've been avoiding. Most of the change that matters happens on the boring weeks.
Before You Conclude Anything About Yourself
I don't want this read as "if your coaching isn't working, you're the problem." Often that isn't it.
There are four things worth separating, and only one of them is about you.
Fit. Is this the wrong person or the wrong approach? Chemistry and relevant experience are real variables and not every good coach is good for you.
Timing. Is there genuinely no capacity right now? A sick parent, a divorce, a cash crisis. Some seasons have no room in them and that isn't a character flaw.
Resources. Does the action require capital, people, expertise or information you don't currently have? Then the next step is getting those, not trying harder.
Pattern. Do you roughly know what needs to happen, and the reason it can't be this week keeps changing while the behavior stays exactly the same?
The first three have answers and you should go get them. The fourth is the one I'm interested in, and I'd rather call it a pattern than call it avoidance, because pattern invites curiosity and avoidance invites judgment. Once we can see the pattern clearly, then we can get honest about what might be underneath it.
The tell is repetition. Once is a delay. The same thing still sitting there a year later, having survived three different plans and two different advisors, is data.
There is research that speaks to this, and I want to be careful about what it does and doesn't say. Work by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente on the stages of change, later pooled in a meta-analysis by John Norcross, Paul Krebs and Prochaska across 39 studies and more than eight thousand people, found that the stage someone is in when they begin predicts how much progress they make. Same programme, different starting points, meaningfully different outcomes.
That research sits in psychotherapy and health behaviour, not executive coaching, so I use it as an illuminating parallel rather than proof about my own field. And it doesn't say unready people are hopeless. It says readiness is a real variable, it isn't fixed, and it's mostly invisible from the outside. Someone can look enormously motivated, hire the coach, buy the assessment, take the notes, and still not be at the point where anything moves.
What The Refusal Costs
Let me follow the 360 story downstream, because this is where a personal pattern becomes a business problem.
She defended herself against the feedback. Two people who'd told her the truth left. The replacements watched what happened. They learned that telling the truth around here comes with a price, so eventually people stop telling it.
Now she has worse information than she used to. Problems reach her later and larger. Decisions get made on incomplete data. What started as one leader's defensiveness is now a culture, and the culture is producing worse decisions, and worse decisions show up in the numbers. She will experience most of that as bad luck.
None of it appears as a line item. There is no row in the P&L called "argued with the mirror in 2022."
Here's the part I'd want you to hold onto, though. If the constraint were the market or the economy, you'd be at its mercy. The fact that it runs partly through what you do on Monday means you have real ability to change the outcome.
Being part of it is the leverage, not the verdict.
That's the thing I resisted for years, because I heard the first half of it and never the second.
One More Thing, And It's The Uncomfortable One
There's a version of self-development that becomes its own Avoid-Dance.
Another assessment. Another book. Another coach. Another offsite. Another long conversation about the thing. All of it can be genuinely useful, and all of it can also become a way of staying busy around a decision you haven't made. It feels like work, because you're surrounded by insight. You're learning. You're growing. You have notes.
But at some point insight has to leave the room and turn up in behavior, and collecting more of it can be the most sophisticated avoidance there is. It gives you the sensation of progress without the emotional cost of changing. That's what I mean by expensive entertainment.
So here's what I'd actually ask you.
Think about the last significant piece of feedback you got. From a coach, an assessment, your leadership team, your spouse. Not the one you agreed with. The one that stung.
What did you do in the seven days after you got it?
Not what did you conclude, or intend, or understand. What did you actually do that was different, and could somebody else have noticed?
That doesn't mean every piece of feedback deserves action inside a week. Some things need time. I'm asking whether anything moved outside your own head.
And if the honest answer is nothing, don't beat yourself up about it. Get curious instead. Was it fit? Was it timing? Did the action need resources you don't have? Were you genuinely still processing it? Or did the feedback threaten something you weren't ready to let go of yet?
That last one is worth sitting with longer than the others. Because the real question underneath all of this isn't why you haven't acted. It's what acting would force you to give up.
Maybe it's the belief that you're already the leader you think you are. Maybe it's being the one everybody needs. Maybe it's being right. Maybe it means disappointing a parent, a spouse, a partner, someone who's been with you since the beginning. Maybe it means admitting the company now needs a leader you aren't yet, and grieving the one you used to be.
Then pick one observable behavior and change it.
If you want help working out which of those is actually going on, that's a conversation I'm always willing to have.
Here when you need me,
Todd
