What to Do When a Client Doesn't Do the Work

A client agrees to something. They arrive at the next session not having done it. What happens in the following sixty seconds determines a surprising amount about whether the engagement survives.

Most coaches do one of two things, and both are wrong. Some skip past it to keep the session pleasant, which teaches the client that commitments are decorative. Others treat it as an accountability moment, which produces shame, and shame produces the polite rescheduling described in the week-three pattern.

The third option is to treat it as information. Because it is — usually the most useful information the fortnight produced.

Four Reasons, Four Responses

1. The commitment was too big

Made in a session, where energy is artificially high. By Tuesday it looks like a project.

Tell by: they can describe exactly what they would have had to do, in detail, and never started.
Response: shrink it until it sounds almost trivially easy. If they laugh at how small it is, it is the right size.

2. It was your goal, not theirs

Sometimes a commitment is the coach's idea that the client agreed to rather than disagree with.

Tell by: vagueness about why it mattered, and a slight relief when you let it go.
Response: drop it and say why out loud. "I think that was more my idea than yours." This buys enormous trust and costs nothing.

3. Something is in the way that they have not said

The most common and least visible. Fear of the outcome, a relationship that makes it costly, a belief they have not examined.

Tell by: repeated non-completion of the same commitment, with a different plausible reason each time.
Response: stop problem-solving the task. The obstacle is the actual work — and a third repetition is the signal, which is why structured notes matter more than they look. In prose, you will not notice it was three times.

4. Capacity genuinely collapsed

Illness, a work crisis, family. Not avoidance.

Tell by: everything else slipped too.
Response: reduce scope for a fortnight and say so explicitly. Clients in a hard month often keep paying and stop engaging out of embarrassment; naming it prevents that.

The First Sixty Seconds

Name it early, lightly, and move immediately to curiosity:

"You didn't get to the thing — what got in the way?"

That is the whole script. No reassurance, which implies it needed forgiving. No probing tone, which implies a verdict. Handled in the first minute it becomes material. Left until minute forty, it sits over the entire session, and the client spends the hour managing your impression of them instead of thinking.

The Pattern Worth Watching

One missed commitment is noise. The same commitment missed three times is the engagement telling you what it is actually about.

Coaches miss this constantly, because three sessions is six weeks and memory does not hold that shape. Whatever record you keep should let you scan commitments across sessions — that single view surfaces more real coaching material than anything else in your notes.

When It Is Every Time

If nothing is ever completed, stop making commitments for a session and ask a different question: what would make this worth doing? Sometimes the answer is that the goal has changed and nobody has said so. Sometimes it is that the client wants a thinking space rather than a change programme — a legitimate engagement, but a different one, and worth renaming rather than continuing to fail at the original.

Seeing It Sooner

All of the above happens at the session, which is up to two weeks after the commitment was quietly abandoned — long enough for the client to have built a story about it.

A simple weekly "did you do it — yes / partly / no, and what got in the way?" moves the conversation from two weeks later to two days later, when it is still small and nobody has rehearsed an explanation. That is what between-session check-ins are for, and what Interlude automates so it happens without you chasing.