How important is momentum in coaching?
And what helps you create it?
Recently a client got in touch to say she was thinking about stopping coaching. We were halfway through our programme, but it had been 11 weeks since our last session.
When we talked, she explained that she felt she'd lost momentum.
It got me thinking. How important is momentum in coaching? Is it essential for meaningful change? And what happens when we lose it?
The power of momentum
When we start coaching, there's often a real sense of possibility and energy to get started. We might have a challenge we want to work through, a decision we've been putting off, a change we'd like to make, or a feeling of being stuck that we want to move beyond. We're motivated and ready to explore what's possible. When we start to make progress, that progress can create its own momentum.
We gain clarity, take action, notice a difference and begin to see what's possible. That can give us the confidence and determination to keep going.
I know this from my own experience of being coached. When I'm engaged in the process, showing up consistently and doing the work between sessions, I notice the traction it creates. I feel connected to what I'm working towards, and the coaching becomes an important space for reflection, challenge and forward movement.
But I've also noticed that when coaching starts to drift, I can be drifting too - sometimes that might be because I've lost confidence, become distracted by other demands, or started avoiding something that feels uncomfortable or too hard to work through.
When we lose momentum
It's easy to see how this can become a cycle - work gets busy, other priorities take over, or the changes we're trying to make turn out to be harder (or slower) than we expected.
The gap between sessions grows, and we gradually become disconnected from the thing that brought us to coaching in the first place. Eventually, we might start questioning the value of coaching itself.
We turn to coaching for the momentum we haven't created alone, but we avoid coaching when, alone, progress feels hard. Sometimes when we don't want to show up, that might be the time when we need to the most.
But does losing momentum mean the coaching isn't working? Or does it mean we need to pause and reconsider what we need?
Is a pause always a bad thing?
Space to think, reflect, process an experience or sit with uncertainty is exactly what coaching offers you. Not every period of change is visible and you might be making sense of something internally long before you're ready to take action. So the kind of momentum you need may depend on what you're working towards.
If you're building a new habit, preparing for a difficult conversation or taking steps towards a career change, consistency and accountability might be important. If you're exploring your identity, reconsidering your values or trying to understand why you feel stuck, the process might be less linear and you may need time to explore, question and reflect before you feel ready to move forward.
So to what extent do you understand what kind of momentum you need, and when?
If we're taking a long time to make a decision, we can often jump to calling ourselves 'indecisive' but deliberately creating space to think something through is a very different thing.
What creates momentum?
When you look back at times in your life when you've felt momentum, when things have started to move forward and you've felt connected to what you're doing, what made that possible?
Was it having a clear goal? Feeling accountable to someone? Having the confidence to take the first step? Seeing small signs of progress? Having the right support around you? It could be a combination of things.
Unnderstanding what has helped you create momentum in the past can help you recognise what you need when you feel yourself losing it.
For me, coaching provides a valuable structure for this. It creates dedicated time to think, reflect and reconnect with what matters. It offers a relationship in which we can explore what's happening, challenge our assumptions and consider what we want to do next.
Coaching isn't about being pushed forward at all costs. It's about creating the conditions for people to find their own way forward, at a pace and in a way that works for them.
It could mean taking action, asking a better question or recognising that what we need has changed.
A few questions to reflect on
When have you experienced real momentum in your life or work? What was happening, and what helped you move forward?
What components made that momentum successful? Was it clarity, accountability, confidence, support, consistency, small wins, a sense of purpose, or something else?
What tends to happen when you lose momentum? Do you recognise it early, or do you only notice when you've drifted away from something important?
How do you distinguish between a pause that you need and losing momentum that you'd like to regain?
And how important do you think momentum is in coaching? Is it essential for meaningful change, or does its importance depend on what we're working towards?
I believe that understanding our relationship with momentum can help us become more intentional about the changes we want to make, the support we need and the pace at which we move.
Do you need to build momentum? Restore it? Or maybe it's time for a pause? The important thing might be learning to recognise the difference.
I'd love to know: when you've experienced momentum in the past, what helped you create it and keep it going?
Gemma Brown is a life and career coach based in Cambridge. For information about her 1-2-1 coaching services, workshops or team coaching, do contact her here.
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