What Gives Follow-Through Its Best Chance

Most coaches, especially those trained in Motivational Interviewing, are taught to build motivation. Solution-Focused coaches do something different entirely.

When a client leaves a session having articulated why change matters and seeming ready to act, the follow-through doesn't always come.

Motivation is a state. It exists in the moment, in the conversation. It doesn't automatically show up the next time the client is tired, stressed, or short on time.

In Motivational Interviewing, you're taught to listen for change talk, a specific kind of client language that tracks DARN CAT: the client's desire, ability, reasons, need, commitment, activation, and taking steps toward change. The goal is to help the client build their own case for change and then plan how to act on it.

But here's a problem that many coaches who use MI have wrestled with. The follow-through doesn't always come. The session may have gone well, the client seemed more motivated, and then not much happened. The issue isn't that DARN CAT doesn't matter. It's that it captures a state, a snapshot of how the client feels or thinks in one particular moment, with a coach who's genuinely engaged and asking good questions.

That state isn't automatically reproduced the next time the client is tired, stressed, or short on time. Verbal declarations of desire and commitment are not the same as a description of what people actually do to follow through, and how they do it, especially when the going gets rough.

Elite athletes figured this out a long time ago. They don't just plan for success, they rehearse it in vivid, sensory-specific detail, as if it's already happening. Missy Franklin, four-time Olympic gold medalist, put it simply:

It's precisely what Solution-Focused practice has been doing in coaching conversations for decades. Rather than evoking and amplifying DARN CAT, a Solution-Focused approach situates the client inside their preferred future, when things are going the way they want, and asks them to describe in vivid detail what that looks like, what's different, what they're doing, and how they're doing it, as if it's already happening.

The questions are sensory and specific, and they presuppose progress:

Notice that each question asks two things: what the client will be doing in their better future, and how they'd be doing it. Both matter. What comes back is not a declaration of intent, but a description of what and how, concrete, personal, and as if they've already done it.

Those details don't simply come from motivation. They come from the client's own knowledge of what would actually work for them. The more specifically a client describes their preferred future, including getting through the hard times, the more natural it becomes to do in real life. That's what gives follow-through its best chance.