I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a blog post I stumbled onto headlined You can’t work harder than your clients. Diane Sieg, an emergency room nurse turned author and life coach, writes on her blog:

As I start my second month of Life Coaching at the Wellness Treatment Center, I am reminded of a very important concept: You can’t work any harder than your clients are willing to.
As a life coach, my role is to help these clients set realistic weekly goals and identify specific action steps they need to follow through on to accomplish their goals. I offer ideas, skills, and tools for them to utilize in areas of their lives that are not currently working, but ultimately it is up to them to take action.
They get to decide how much they are really willing to change and how hard they are really willing to work. It is my job to provide information and support, and then let it go. This is sometimes easier said than done, as I can see all the potential and possibilities, if they would only follow through and…

I think there’s great wisdom in knowing which things you can control and which you can’t. Whether you’re a personal trainer, a lawyer or a graphic designer, if your client is dragging his feet, you can’t force him to change.
But I might disagree with Diane a bit, in that I think a big part of what any professional can bring a client is accountability. If you’re an architect and the client his procrastinating approving plans, that’s surely his right, but you might also need to remind him of his goal to get the kitchen renovation done before Thanksgiving and let him know that the delay might affect reaching his goal.
It’s also important to figure out why the client isn’t following through. Did he change his mind about the goal? Did he get distracted by another priority? Is he overwhelmed by making a decision about the contracts you delivered? Can you revisit the goals and objectives to refine them to make them achievable?
That tension about who’s setting the pace keeps turning over in my head.
Do you think the client sets the pace on achieving goals or is that part of what a professional is paid to do?
In case you don’t click through to Diane’s blog, I have to share with you a bit from her profile:

As an emergency room nurse for over 20 years, I have seen it all.   The 40-year-old executive who fell asleep at the wheel because she was too tired.  The electrician with 80 percent of his body burned because he got too distracted.  The young mother of four who ignored the lump in her breast the size of a grapefruit!  So many of the patients I treated had one common denominator—they were trying to do too much, too fast, too often.  All were living life like an emergency.

I wrote my first book, STOP Living Life Like an Emergency, because I wanted to illustrate and identify how so many of us were living in such a frenetic state of more, better, faster.