Say It and You’ll Do It

Laura Whitworth, MCC, CPCC; 1947–2007

“Coaching works for many reasons that overlap and intertwine, but one of the strongest threads in this weave is accountability,” contended the late Laura Whitworth, co-founder of The Coaches Training Institute, and co-author of Co-Active Coaching. Whitworth maintained,

It is often the accountability alone that draws people to coaching. They may be competent and successful in many phases of their lives, but there is one area where they have found they cannot make the changes they want to make alone. They’re just not getting it done, and they want the structure of a partnership to help them do the thing that is hard to do.

How many times in your life have you said you were going to do something, and then not done it because nobody else would know the difference? Just the simple act of telling your plan to another person raises the stakes. On a freezing January morning, you might pull the covers back over your head rather than go to the health club alone. But if you’ve promised to meet someone there at 7:00 a.m., there is a much better chance you’ll actually get your chilly butt out of bed and go.