Stop Coddling Your Clients

Mountains don't need bubble wrap, and coaching clients don't need coddling.

Hey friend,

Welcome back to the Primal Question Newsletter.

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Confession: for much of my career, I’ve been too soft on my clients, and if you’re a coach or counselor (or just a helpful friend and mentor), you might be making the same mistake.

I’m a natural empathizer. I want people to feel seen and heard. I don’t enjoy conflict or causing tension. And in my sessions, I want my clients to feel safe enough to tell me anything.

For a long time, I thought this was a strength. I was proud of being the “Mr. Rogers of personal development.”

But here’s what I’ve learned after 20+ years of this work:

Sometimes, being too gentle is the most harmful thing you can do for a client.

Let me explain.

I have a client I’ve been working with for a while. Let’s call her Sarah.

Sarah struggles with codependency. Her Primal Question is Q4: “Am I Wanted?” and she’s spent most of her life looking to others to answer it for her. She’s entangled in people’s opinions. She needs to make them feel okay for her to feel okay. She looks to others to tell her what to do with her life, whether she’s on the right track, whether she belongs.

As a recovering codependent myself, I relate to all of that.

Recognizing that Sarah needed specialized help, I recently referred her to an intensive therapy program.

She came back transformed. She experienced massive breakthrough. Real clarity. Real healing. Her life was changed… until it wasn’t.

In our very next session, she slid back into the same old patterns.

She told me, “I need to get my husband to start figuring out his problems so I can be happier. I hate being so stressed around him.”

I asked her why, and in so many words, she told me that she needed him to get better in order for her to be okay. That’s when I held the line, “Sarah, c’mon. The gig is up.”

She looked at me, a little stunned.

“We’re not doing this again,” I said.

“This is the exact same codependency, showing up in different clothes. You just spent a week doing the hardest work of your life. You told me you finally have clarity. Now you’re telling me your happiness depends on your husband doing something? That you need him to change for you to be okay? No. We’re not going back to that.”

She didn’t like it in the moment, but a couple days later, I got a long text from her. She thanked me for the hard conversation because she knew she needed to hear it.

And here’s the thing…

Old Mike would never have said something that blunt.

Old Mike, the soft, tender, people-pleasing counselor, would have leaned hard into empathy and gentleness.

Under the cover of kindness, he would have let her off the hook, and she would have slid right back into the same codependent patterns that have caused her suffering for decades.

I see a lot of therapists and coaches making the same mistake I used to make.

• They go soft because their client has experienced trauma.

• They treat them gently because they’ve been through a lot.

• They let them “take all the time they need” because they seem so fragile.

They think their clients need tenderness.

But more than anything, our clients need the truth, even when it’s hard to swallow.

Sarah experienced breakthrough at the intensive, but that does not mean her old neural pathways disappeared.

She’s been running these patterns since childhood. She has every tool in her toolbelt to get herself off the hook. Everything in her mind, her body, and her gut wants to push her right back to the codependent person she was before the intensive because that’s how she learned to survive.

That’s why she needed disruption, not empathy.

She needed someone willing to hold the line and say, “You’re not going back.”

Here’s the distinction I want you to understand.

Yes. At times, your clients may need a therapist to treat them like the wounded child from their past. I’m not denying that. But you know what else they need? They need someone in their life to start treating them as if they’re already the strong version of themselves they want to become in the future.

Your clients need you to treat them like they’re capable.

If I’m honest, I think the reason most coaches and therapists don’t say the blunt truth is this: you don’t believe your client is strong enough to handle it.

You doubt your client’s capacity to change, so you coddle them.

You try to protect them from what might sting.

Here’s my conviction: every human is stronger than you think. Your clients are strong like a mountain. They don’t need you to try to protect them from the truth anymore than a mountain needs to be protected with bubble wrap.

Is there a client right now who needs some tough love?

Someone slipping back into old patterns, who needs you to believe in them enough to call it out? In your next session, I invite you to tell them the truth they need to hear.

Stop coddling your clients.

Start treating them like the strong, resilient adults they’re capable of becoming.

They might not like it in the moment, but they’ll thank you later.

Warmly,

Mike Foster

P.S. The reason I could call out Sarah's pattern so clearly? I knew her Primal Question, and I knew exactly how she was Scrambling to get her need met through codependency.

That's what the Primal Question framework gives you — the ability to see the root issue fast and coach to it with precision. If you want to learn how to do this with your clients, join the waitlist for Primal Question PRO. We open registration in March for the next cohort.