EP 96: What to Do If Your Clients Are Making Excuses

"Is my client just making excuses?" If you've ever asked yourself this, Dr. Kasey Jo Orvidas has some thoughts. Spoiler: the answer doesn't actually matter, and asking the question might be getting in your way.

In this episode, she covers:

• What happens when coaches or clients label something as an "excuse" vs. a "valid reason"
• How the excuse vs. valid reason debate hurts your coaching an client follow though 
• The real reason stressed clients struggle with self-control (hint: it's brain science, not character)
• What self-determination theory reveals about why external goals lead to fragile consistency
• Why you should top focusing on coaching your clients’ “willpower” and what the more effective strategy really is 
• Specific questions to ask when a client doesn't stick to the plan or lacks consistency 

If you've ever felt frustrated when clients don't stick to the plan, this episode will reframe how you think about follow-through.

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Transcript

0:00

The best coaches don't ask are my clients just making excuses. They ask instead, what are we missing here? What do we need to find out? Hello my friends, and welcome back to not another Mindset show. I'm your host, Dr. Casey Joe. My goal with this podcast is to take the science of mindset and behavior change and distill it down into actionable takeaways for you. Together we're gonna unpack research around motivations, self-sabotage, willpower, and so much more, and we're going to take all of that and translate it into strategies you can immediately apply to your health. Fitness, relationships, business, marketing clients, all of the things. But just to be clear, it's not all serious and sciencey around here. We're gonna have a ton of fun too, and I'm so excited to share all of this with you. All right, let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hello and welcome back to not another mindset show. I have kind of a off the cuff episode for you, and I say off the cuff because this is actually was a conversation that I was having in the dms with one of my students, shout out to Kiandra. She fully gave me this idea, literally sent her a voice memo back and was like, you know what? I You should probably talk about this at the podcast, and I'm actually kind of surprised. I haven't talked about this more in the podcast. It may have come out a little bit here and there because I hear this from my students a lot. Not a lot, a lot, but, and it, it always comes up in a way that feels, they know it's kind of like a taboo question or they're feeling a little bit iffy about even asking me this because. They know that it's kind of like, it's almost like a harsh thing to say in a way. and this question is how do I know if my clients are just making excuses or if they actually have a justified, valid reason for for not sticking to the plan, for not following through, for not doing the thing, for pushing back on my suggestions. So. how do we know if it's an excuse or if there's actually a valid reason? And the real thing I wanna say to you, and this is exactly what I say to my students, is that it actually doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if it's an excuse, if it's a quote, unquote, valid reason, justification, I don't care. And you as the coach, should not care either. Because what's actually happening when you ask this question is that you are judging the client rather than actually trying to figure out what's going on, because it doesn't matter if it's an excuse or if there's a valid reason. It's still your job as the coach to help figure out what's going on in order to help them be more successful. So the label itself doesn't matter. In this case, I guess that's not entirely true because the label matters for you. Because if you're thinking this client is just making excuses, these aren't valid reasons. Then you're going to coach differently because that's the perspective that you're taking, that this person doesn't really care. They're just making up excuses. They don't really want this. And it also matters for your clients if they're coming to you and saying, I know that I'm just making excuses, or they're saying no, but I know this sounds like an excuse, but it's really a valid reason. It matters because it's the, the meaning that comes with that label matters, but ultimately it doesn't matter because we still need to work with our clients to figure out what's going on and help them be more successful. So, excuse valid reason, asking this question, how do I know if my clients are just making excuses or if they have a valid reason? You're asking the wrong question. You're thinking about this in a. Honestly an unproductive way. So you're so much better off thinking, excuse or valid reason. It doesn't matter. What matters is my client is struggling to be consistent and follow through on this thing, and that's what we need to get to the bottom of. Not necessarily if this is an excuse or not. That doesn't just, it just doesn't matter. So even if you have a client who, again, themselves say something like, I know, I'm just making excuses. I know this sounds like an excuse, but your goal is not to judge them for it. It's not to brush it off. And just say, don't worry about it. We'll continue on next week. Your goal is to help them recognize that all this means is that something's not working, something isn't going correctly. There's something else going on here, and we have to figure it out. So behavior is always driven. By some underlying factor, and that's your really, the, your biggest job as the coach is to figure out what those underlying factors are. Not label them an excuse or a valid reason. That's your job. And whether you label. it As an excuse or not, it's actually just pointing you towards something that needs attention, and that's what you should be thinking of as a coach. If a client didn't follow through, if they choose to skip a workout to do something else instead, regardless of how it sounds. It just means that there's something going on that you need to pay attention to, that you need to help them work through, that you need to uncover, and supporting clients with real behavior change requires understanding the problem context, not labeling it, not brushing it off, not blaming the client for their lack of follow through, but instead thinking, okay. What is the context here? What information do I need to better understand what's actually going on? That's what you should be doing, even if it sounds like an excuse to you, or again, your client is calling it that, it's still data and it's your job to do something with that data. Okay. All right, so of course this is exactly the kind of stuff that we talk about in the health mindset coaching certification, and. We're giving you strategies for like what to do next with clients who are in this situation and, and how to uncover that context and what to do with it. And without knowing your specific client case, I can't tell you. And listen, I'm not gonna tell you exactly what to do anyway, because that's. Also how I, how I teach is exactly how I teach you to coach your clients. I'm not giving you a script. I'm not giving you a step-by-step exact strategy because every situation is different. However, what I can do is give you some things to think about. So next time you're working with a client, or maybe you have a client in mind right now. Who is saying that they're making excuses or you are trying to determine if it's an excuse or a valid reason to think about these things instead. So I have a few things here that I can walk you through. The first being stress and self-control. So I've said this on the podcast before, talk about this in HMCC, A lot that stress and self-control are kind of like enemies in your brain because they are. They sort of live in different regions of your brain. So if you're using a lot of mental resources, your clients are using a lot of mental resources when they're stressed, that actually pulls away resources from the area of your brain that requires self-control, which I think makes a lot of sense to all of us, right? Like you're stressed out. That means you have less energy to put towards, like self-control.'cause that also requires energy. So. Self-control literally becomes less accessible and less easy when stressed. So speaking of context for what might be going on with your clients, if they're stressed out, they had a stressful week, and now they're telling you about all of this stuff and what made them stressed, and you're thinking like, wow, this just sounds like a bunch of excuses. The truth is their brains are gonna make it harder for them to. Exercise self-control and make the healthier decision, especially when it's the healthy decision is maybe something that they're not used to doing yet, and it's not in like an automatic behavior in any capacity yet. So keeping that in mind for sure, because most of the time your client isn't choosing specifically to not follow through. In those instances, their brain was just prioritizing other things because they were stressed out. So that's one thing you can consider. The next one is self-determination theory. This is something I've definitely talked about a lot in the podcast, and we go through an H-M-C-C-A ton because this is all related to motivation, which everyone loves that word motivation. but it could help explain the context as to why your clients didn't follow through. You could think about it this way, that perhaps they have low autonomy. In the coaching relationship, in the way that they're trying to change their lifestyle and lean into more health and fitness behaviors, if they feel like they're not making the decisions and are in charge of the plan and deciding what's going to happen because you're coaching in that way, that lower level of autonomy is likely to lead to low adherence. So. Think about the autonomy of your clients who are in these positions, and also speaking from self-determination theory and different types of motivation. The more external, not autonomous, not self-determined, the motivation is for the goal. So for instance, you have a client who wants to lose 10 pounds because she's attending a friend's wedding soon. That's a very externally motivated goal, and when we have those very externally motivated goals, consistency becomes very fragile because it's not coming from a place that's internal. We're not doing it because of our personal values or our identity or our own satisfaction, which are better types of motivation to be operating from if we want our clients to stay consistent. So. It's not about whether they had a good excuse. Instead, from this perspective, from self-determination theory perspective, you have to think about whether or not they had a strong enough reason to actually stick to the plan in the first place. The type of motivation that drives their goals matters. Where is their motivation coming from? Do you know this? If you don't, you should maybe look there. the other thing I had is just generally thinking about like habits or just not even habits, but knowing that so much of our behavior is automatic and we're really good at sticking to things that we're used to that are comfortable, predictable, even if those things aren't. Really supportive of our goals, and this is something that our clients often struggle with because they have been in this pattern, relatively automatic way of living that may not be very health and fitness goal supportive, but that is what they're working on trying to do more of. So clients who haven't. Chosen healthier options consistently, or built a lifestyle that has just like more automatic decisions in the way of health and fitness and their health and fitness goals. They will fall back into what is easy, what is comfortable, what is predictable.'cause that just feels, it feels safe in the brain. It's like the normal route we go down. Yeah, that's the route we're most likely to choose. So if you think about it from that perspective, is it an excuse or is it just what they're used to doing? So many coaches are trying to coach willpower. When The real issue is just the automatic, comfortable, predictable ways that our clients are used to living. So they're going to struggle to break free from that normal, predictable, comfortable route, which is totally valid. And that's exactly what we're here to help them with, is start to. Carve a new route and slowly get away from the comfortable, normal, easier route. It's not an excuse, it's just what's normal for them. So keep that in mind. okay. Kind of transitioning here, just like generally, what should you be doing instead? Like, instead of even asking, is my client making an excuse to instead think what got in the way? What is this? Tell us about what's going on and what can you and your client learn from that situation? Again, it doesn't matter if it's an excuse or not. One of the best things you can do, first and foremost is to level with them. Make sure that they feel safe, that they can come to you, even if they feel like they're making excuses and they don't have to feel like, I have to not tell my coach about this. I have to lie about this. Or, you know, when they start to ghost you, things like that because they don't feel safe that they can come to you with these situations. Want to make sure they feel safe doing so. So help them make this reframe too, that whether it's labeled as an excuse, a lack of willpower, a valid situation that got them off track, that it ultimately doesn't matter because what matters is that we learn something from this, that we get something out of this. And that's also very growth mindset supportive, which is also something you should be doing in your coaching. So things you could ask some specific questions here to make this a little bit more practical for you. Like ask your clients this, like what was going on that day, what was maybe different in this situation than before? What were you thinking in that moment? What came up for you? What were you, what were you feeling? Did you feel like you had a decision to make and you chose one decision over the other? What felt hard about following through in that moment, or what would've made this easier? Those are all really good questions to better build that context and better understand what was actually going on. Most importantly here, what I'm getting at is we're not trying to immediately jump into solutions. We're trying to diagnose what's going on, so don't just skip to the solution. Don't skip the diagnostic process. Your job isn't to like catch your clients in excuses or label things as excuses or even consider what's an excuse and what's not an excuse in your own head. It's to create awareness and to build that context for the both of you. of you. As a coach, you need to help clients identify the limiting factors that they see in themselves. Understand the patterns that you are guiding them to start to recognize, and to help them start to propose their own solutions. Do you see how all of this stuff is about helping them become more aware them, recognize them, doing the things? We're kind of bringing it back to that autonomy piece here. So if you catch yourself labeling something as an excuse, it often just means that you expected compliance, but you didn't account for the complexity of the situation. And the same thing goes for your clients. They're telling you that this is just an excuse or they feel like it's just an excuse. You can say the same thing to them. That they're expecting perfection, compliance, like sticking to the plan no matter what, but there's so much more complexity to this. So please keep in mind you are in the people business, not just the nutrition and workout plan business, unless that is all you want to do. However, if that's the case, then just please know your job is definitely on the line in the age of AI and Chacha pt, because AI and Chacha PT can make the plan. You need to be able to provide more than that if your client is not following through and it frustrates. You that really just to me should tell you that your expectations of that client are something else. It's okay to be frustrated, but recognize that frustration as information about your own expectations and that it's not just about the client's behavior. I'm gonna say that again 'cause I feel like it's really important and I said it in such like a, a backwards, roundabout way, that if you're feeling frustration with clients who are not sticking to the plan, you think that they're making excuses. That is information about your expectations about the client. It's not just about the client's behavior. So bringing this all full circle, my friends. Excuse or valid reason. It really doesn't matter. The meaning behind it does matter, but what matters most is how can we get something out of this to lead to better outcomes? Every missed action or failed plan, adherence is feedback. It's information, behavior always makes sense in context. There is a reason your clients are doing something or not doing something. It is your job to figure out what that is. Be the investigator. Figure out what the context is, ask questions, work with your clients on those things. The best coaches don't ask are my clients just making excuses. They ask instead, what are we missing here? What do we need to find out? Okay. I think. I think that's all I have to say about that for now. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it helped you just kind of think about things differently, reframe things. Please take this to your clients. Please take this in your coaching and I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you next week. I. And that's a wrap for today's episode of Not another Mindset show. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you get notified of the next one. Because if you're anything like me, if the episodes aren't popping up for you automatically, you'll keep forgetting to come back to the show even if you really, really enjoyed it. So go ahead and hit that subscribe button and make it super easy for you and of course. If you wanna see more episodes just like this one, I'd love for you to let me know by leaving a review. I know, I know it's super annoying to do, but the few seconds that it takes means the world to me and also ensures that I can keep providing free education and value to you. And just to sweeten the deal, I am going to be picking a random reviewer every single month to receive a free workshop or product from me. If you're looking for more free resources or just wanna connect, hang out, chat a little bit, come find me on Instagram. I'm Coach Casey, Joe over there. That is where I hang out the most in the land of social media. Alright, my friends, that is all I have for you this time. I so appreciate you being here and love to see you prioritizing your growth. I'll see you next time.