If you’ve experienced the benefit of a professional coaching relationship, you might’ve witnessed a significant and transformational change in the way you show up. Perhaps you’ve achieved progress, unlike anything you’ve experienced before coaching. A breakthrough. But what about sustaining progress after coaching?
As a coach, I’ve always contemplated how a client can continue their journey of progress, and not revert back to the old ways, or into a passive mode, whereby they grow as a function of what happens to them and not by what they make happen. In this blog I will focus on specific steps, call it a methodology, you can follow to help keep on track. It’s a way for you to remain in the driver’s seat instead of the passenger seat. Now, I don’t want to downplay the role inertia plays in our growth. Often, it’s a function of things we’ve done, albeit it often lacks calculated intentionality. I equate this to the passenger seat of a car; you still have some control, but perhaps not as much as you could. When things happen to you, your reaction to said events can have a significant impact on where you end up. In the driver’s seat, however, we can create more of those opportunities for intentional change.
Want to Make a Change? What’s Your Goal?
Regardless of whether you have worked with a professional coach, it is important to know you can’t hit your until you know what it is. While this may sound obvious, it is often more elusive than one might think. For example, if your goal is to be a more effective leader, what will be your indication when you have achieved that goal? I find that we usually have a pretty good sense of what our goal is, if we can answer the question: how, precisely, will I know when I’ve achieved my goal? What will you notice? The answers to questions like these will help paint a vivid picture of where you are heading. It can serve as your beacon to keep you on track. Let’s assume your answers to these questions are as follows:
- You will notice you’re more inquisitive than directive.
- Your direct reports are leaning in more. They’re coming up with fresh ideas and coming up with solutions their own problems.
- You’re more tuned in to your employees wants and needs.
- The team dynamic seems to be more collegial and people are coming in earlier.
- You are being more transparent about your intentions. Etc.
Consider these your sub-goals, or mini-lighthouses, all in support of the big lighthouse. It’s like when you are planning a vacation. You will likely begin contemplating where you will go, when, with whom, where you will stay, you Will get there, how long you will stay, what your budget is, etc. You get the picture.
Arguably, with transformational goals (e.g. becoming a better leader, spouse, employee, friend, etc.) you may never actually get there, but you will continue to make progress to get closer. Let’s call this goal your lighthouse. Once you clearly see the lighthouse for which you are aiming, it will be infinitely easier to direct your energy in support thereof. It’s also noteworthy that sometimes discovering your lighthouse is a journey, in and of itself. Be patient and give yourself some leeway to take the time to discover your lighthouse. Sometimes you may have to try a few things to collect new data points to help you figure out just what that is.
3-Step Lighthouse Process for Sustaining Progress After Coaching
Let’s assume you have identified your lighthouse. Here is a three-step process to keep your momentum going.
1. Experiment:
As you think about making progress towards your lighthouse, what is the most immediate or significant obstacle you need to overcome? What is one specific thing you can do differently from what you’ve done before in support of overcoming this obstacle? By being intentional and taking some calculated risks, you’re likely to experience more significant growth. A quick word about risk. I’m not suggesting we jump out of an airplane without a parachute. We are talking about a small change. The key here is to come up with fieldwork (aka an experiment) that requires you to do something you’ve not done before. In our example of becoming a better leader, it might entail several things, such as being tactfully transparent about your intentions (including how you are trying to develop as a leader), asking more questions to make your team think, instead of directing with answers, or synthesizing what your team is saying to demonstrate you heard them, etc. Make sure you’ve identified your measure of success for each experiment, just as you have for your lighthouse. i.e. What, specifically, will be your indication of the experiment was a success?
2. Reflect
After you’ve conducted your experiment, ask yourself the following questions: a) What worked? b) What didn’t work? c) What did I learn about being a leader? d) What did I learn about how I relate to my team? e) What did I learn about myself? At times it may also be appropriate and helpful to gather feedback. In our example, perhaps we would ask the team about what they are noticing.
3. Adjust
Then, based on whatever new learning you discover, decide what is one thing you will do differently the next time. Repeat this process weekly. Once you’ve made enough progress on the first of your sub-lighthouse goals, think of the next area requiring your attention… all in support of your big lighthouse. Voila! You are now in the driver’s seat!
Written by Nick Tubach, MBA, PCC
To learn more about executive coaching and how it can accelerate your professional and personal growth, let’s talk about your journey and what is possible. Contact Bridgeline Executive Coaching.
FAQs
How do you sustain progress after a coaching engagement ends?
Sustaining progress after coaching requires shifting from being a passenger in your own growth – where development happens as a reaction to external events – to being the driver, where you create intentional opportunities for change through deliberate experimentation, reflection, and adjustment. The article outlines a three-step Lighthouse Process for maintaining momentum: identify your clearest next obstacle and design a specific experiment to address it, reflect honestly on what worked and what you learned, then adjust your approach for the next cycle and repeat. Without this kind of structured self-coaching discipline, even the most significant coaching breakthroughs risk fading as old habits and passive patterns gradually reassert themselves.
What is the Lighthouse Process and how does it help with goal achievement?
The Lighthouse Process is a self-coaching framework the article introduces for sustaining growth after a formal coaching engagement: your ‘lighthouse’ is a vivid, clearly defined picture of your ultimate goal – specific enough that you can describe exactly how you will know when you have made meaningful progress toward it. Sub-lighthouses are the smaller, measurable milestones that support the big lighthouse, each with its own indicator of success, functioning like waypoints that keep you oriented and motivated as you navigate the journey. The power of the lighthouse metaphor is that it provides both direction and a constant reference point, making it significantly easier to identify what specific experiments to run next and whether your energy is being spent in the right places.
How do you know if you have set the right goal to work toward after coaching?
The article offers a precise and practical test for goal clarity: if you can answer ‘how, precisely, will I know when I have achieved this goal – what will I notice?’ with specific, behavioral, observable answers, you have a real goal worth working toward. Vague goals like ‘become a better leader’ only become actionable when broken into concrete indicators – such as ‘my team is coming up with their own solutions,’ ‘people are leaning in more during meetings,’ or ‘I am asking more questions than I am giving answers’ – because these specifics are what tell you whether you are making genuine progress or just going through the motions. If you cannot paint that vivid picture of what success looks and feels like, the goal is not yet clear enough to drive sustained action.
What is the difference between intentional growth and passive growth?
The article draws a clear and important distinction between passive growth – where development happens as a byproduct of things that occur around you, like a passenger who has some influence but is not steering – and intentional growth, where you actively create the conditions, experiments, and feedback loops that move you toward a clearly defined goal. Passive growth is not without value; reacting well to the things that happen to you is a real skill, and many people develop significantly through it. But intentional growth – the driver’s seat mode – is far more reliable, faster, and more likely to produce the specific kind of transformation you are aiming for, because it is directed rather than circumstantial.
How does the Experiment-Reflect-Adjust cycle support continuous leadership development?
The Experiment-Reflect-Adjust cycle is the article’s core self-coaching methodology for turning aspiration into sustained behavioral change: you identify a specific obstacle, design one concrete experiment that requires you to do something you have not done before, and define in advance what success will look like. After the experiment, you ask five honest reflection questions – what worked, what did not, what did I learn about my leadership, about my team, and about myself – and then use that learning to choose one thing to do differently in the next cycle. By running this cycle weekly and progressively moving through your sub-lighthouse goals, you build the kind of compounding growth that does not depend on an external coach to maintain its momentum.
