Staying or Leaving — How to Tell the Difference
A coach I know has been working hard for two and a half years.
She's been in rooms, having conversations, showing up consistently.
By any reasonable measure, she's been doing the work. And yet, when we sat down to look at where she actually was, something became clear that hadn't been visible from inside the effort.
The two and a half years hadn't been two and a half years of building one thing.
They'd been six months of this, then a pivot to that, then a return, then a new direction that seemed more promising, then back again. Each move made sense at the time. Each one was reasonable. Together, they added up to a lot of motion and very little momentum.
When I asked her what had driven each pivot, the answers were revealing...
"An opportunity came up."
"People seemed excited about this other thing."
"Speaking was getting more traction than coaching."
And now, having tried everything, she was back at the beginning — except more exhausted and less certain.
None of those pivots were wrong, exactly.
Exploration is part of building a practice.
But there's a difference between exploration that generates useful data and movement that's driven by something else — and it's worth knowing which one you're doing.
The question underneath the pivot
When you find yourself ready to change direction, there are two questions worth asking before you do.
The first: are you moving away from something, or towards something?
The second question: have you given it enough runs to generate real data?
Let's look at each in turn
Moving towards something looks like: I've gathered enough information to believe this direction has more potential for me, and I want to test that.
It's oriented, even if uncertain.
There's a reason that goes beyond discomfort.
Moving away from something looks like: this isn't working, and something else might.
It's driven by wanting relief from the current situation rather than genuine evidence that the new direction is better.
The pivot feels like progress, but it's actually escape.
Neither is a moral failing. But they're different, and conflating them is expensive.
Most things in a coaching practice don't work the first time.
Not because they're wrong, but because the first attempt is always rough — the messaging isn't sharp, the offer isn't quite right, the confidence isn't fully behind it.
The second attempt is better.
The third is where you start to learn something real.
If you're drawing conclusions after one attempt, you're not working with data.
You're working with a single data point, which is a different thing entirely.
The coach I mentioned had, in most cases, tried things once or twice before moving on.
She'd never given any single direction enough consistent attention to find out whether it actually worked.
The pivot always came just before the point where real learning would have begun.
Discernment isn't staying forever
None of this is an argument for stubbornness.
There are genuine signals that something isn't working — and learning to read them is part of developing professional judgement.
If the people you're reaching consistently aren't the people you want to work with, that's information.
If the work itself feels fundamentally misaligned with who you are, that's information.
If you've run something enough times to have real data and the data is clear, that's information.
The difference between discernment and restlessness is evidence.
Discernment is a decision made from information gathered through genuine commitment.
Restlessness is a decision made from discomfort, dressed up as strategy.
One leads somewhere. The other leads to two and a half years of effort that can't quite be joined into a line.
A practice: the pivot audit
Before you change direction on anything significant, sit with these questions. Not quickly — properly.
What am I moving away from, and what am I moving towards?
Be honest about which one is doing the driving.
How many genuine attempts have I made?
One launch, one workshop, one campaign is not a test. Three is the minimum before you have anything worth evaluating.
What would I need to see to know this is working?
Define it before you look at the results, not after. Post-hoc rationalisation is easy and convincing.
Is the problem the direction, or the execution?
Often what feels like the wrong path is actually the right path with underdeveloped skills, unclear messaging, or insufficient consistency.
Before you change the direction, check whether you've actually walked it.
If I stay with this for six more months and it doesn't work, what will I have lost?
Sometimes the honest answer is: not much. In which case, staying long enough to find out is lower risk than it feels.
The coach I mentioned at the start of this piece didn't need a new direction.
She needed to commit to one and run it enough times to find out whether it worked.
That's a different problem — and a more solvable one.
Discernment is knowing the difference.
If this way of thinking resonates with how you want to build your practice, the SWITCH Coaching Collective might be worth exploring.
It's where I work with coaches who want to develop the kind of professional judgement that comes from going deep rather than wide.
