Make This the Year You Win the “Buy In” Battle

Good morning, fellow coaches. We’re starting a new year together in this great game of coaching others to breakthrough success, and I want to hit you with a challenge: make this the year that you create “big buy in” among your coaching clients. Nothing can give you longevity with your clients and leverage big change like this factor.

“Buy in” is crucial, but in an eagerness to get a client on board and move to value quickly, we downplay it to our detriment. Why do we lose early when we don’t nail down “buy in”?

Simple. Successful people tend to be big on self-determination. With people like this, the more they commit to coaching because they believe in the process, the better things are likely to go. The more they feel that the process is being pushed on them by you, or that they are just casually “trying it out” – the less likely the coaching process is to work.

I’ve seen it time after time in our practice: if you’re focused on long term change (and contracts) don’t work with leaders who haven’t experienced “buy in”, or as we call it, “enrollment”. If we are letting clients just “play a game” with no clear commitment, we need to be willing to stop the process and engage them to buy in to deep personal and organizational change, and if they don’t enroll themselves in this way, we need to permanently stop the coaching relationship, for the good of their company and for our reputations as coaches.




To your very best,



Coach Gary Henson