Jim Coyle has around 1,300 EOS® sessions behind him, and he's a self-described striver who once worked 120-hour weeks back to back.
Around 300 to 400 sessions he went transactional: "just another session, look at all this money I'm making."
His instinct was more, more sessions, more hours, without seeing that more was the problem. He'd confused efficient with effective.
Clients left. One told him his work was crap, and what stays with him is the promise he broke while being paid.
The fix came from phone calls: CJ Dubé and every peer he respected had hit the exact same wall, which took the shame out of it.
So he does less and loves clients on purpose. 100 sessions last year, 90 this year, fully present in the room.
Just another session
I have around 1,300 sessions behind me now, and the stretch I think about most is not one I'm proud of. Somewhere around three or four hundred sessions in, I hit a wall I didn't have a name for yet: I was still doing the sessions, but stopped transforming lives and started running transactions.
From the outside, nothing looked wrong. I was busy, and the work kept coming. But somewhere in there my own attitude had curdled into something like, just another session, look at all this money I'm making. And underneath even that, I already knew the truth: it didn't matter. I could run the meeting and collect the fee, but if nobody's business or life was any different by the time I left the room, I hadn't really done the job.
The busy badge
I need to back up and tell you that I'm a striver, because it explains how I got there.
For most of my life, the answer to almost every problem was to work harder, and I had the hours to prove I believed it. I've worked 120-hour weeks, several of them back to back. There aren't enough hours in a week to do that, and I found a way anyway.
I wore the busy badge like it was an achievement.
But the busy badge was great when you were a kid earning them one at a time. A grown adult still collecting them is only proving how much they can carry, not how much good they can do. I say it to clients more bluntly than I'll write it here: wearing the busy badge today does not do one thing for anybody.
So when the work started to feel flat, I reached for the only tool I trusted: more, more sessions, more prep, more hours. It never once occurred to me that more was the thing making it worse. I had quietly confused being efficient with being effective.
I was efficient, getting an enormous amount done, but I just wasn't doing much good for anyone, and efficiency with nothing behind it is a very convincing way to fail.
When the clients started leaving
Then my clients started leaving, and a few of them were honest enough to tell me exactly why. One of them, near enough word for word, told me it was crap. And he was right!
When he'd signed on with me, I'd made him a promise, and somewhere in all that motion I'd stopped keeping it. That's the piece that still sits with me: not the revenue I lost when he walked, but the promise I broke while he was still paying me.
And it wasn't only the clients. When I'm in that state, I'm not just a worse Implementer, I'm also a bad husband and a worse dad, to two kids I love pouring into. The busy badge does not stay politely at the office, it follows you home and makes you absent there too, and the people who get the emptiest version of you are usually the ones you took all those sessions for in the first place.
The calls that pulled me out
Eventually I did the one thing that helped: I called CJ Dube’, who was my boss on the coaching team at the time, and I asked her straight out: what happened for you around three or four hundred sessions? She didn't flinch or dress it up, she'd hit the exact same wall.
It had gone transactional for her, too, and hearing her say it out loud took some of the shame out of it for me. That gave me the nerve to keep going, so I called others I deeply respected: Jill Young, Mike Abercrombie, John McMahon, Sarah Stern. Every single one of them had hit it. Sarah, as it happened, was hitting it right as we were talking, which made for a strange and honest conversation to be having together.
By every logic it should have been a demoralizing week of phone calls: it was the opposite.
It was the most freeing run of conversations I'd had in years. I wasn't broken, and I wasn't secretly bad at the thing I'd built my life around. I had hit a ceiling that every Implementer hits eventually, and the moment I understood that, I got to decide what I was going to do about it instead of just drowning in it.
More than once I caught myself apologizing to the person on the other end of the line, and then admitting that mostly I was just relieved to be commiserating with someone who had been there too.
Loving them on purpose
What I decided caught me off guard, because for the first time the answer wasn't more. I doubled down on loving my clients.
The ones I could pour into, I poured into harder than I ever had. The ones I couldn't love well, I stopped forcing it, and instead tried to help them see that maybe I wasn't the right person for them.
I want to be careful here, because I didn't fire anybody: I don't like the way people in our world talk about firing clients, because you made them a promise when they signed, and I'm not willing to walk that back lightly.
But I did stop performing care I didn't feel, because faking it is worse than useless. If you don't actually give a damn, no toolkit in the world will cover for you, and the client can always tell. The strange part is that the work got richer as I did less of it. Every client I kept, I could sink all the way into, and the care I hadn't been able to fake before started showing up on its own once there was finally room for it.
Back in the room
And I got a little obsessive about being fully present in the room, because that turned out to be where the whole job actually lives.
We have a toolkit that can genuinely change a business, but it only works if you dig in, and you cannot dig in when you're spread thin across a hundred and twenty-five sessions. I still watch the videos. I still dig into the craft between sessions, but none of that is the work.
The work is what happens once I'm in the chair with my full attention on the people in front of me. Not long ago I was facilitating a meeting and I stopped in the middle of it and told one of the guys, you have something else to say. He looked at me, caught a little off guard, and asked how I knew. I told him the truth.
I could just feel that he had something else to say. That feeling only exists when I'm all the way in the room. During the transactional years I felt nothing at all, because there was no one home to feel it.
Ninety
I do fewer sessions now than I did at my busiest, on purpose. It turned out that a hundred and twenty-five and a half was too many for me, and yes, people always ask about the half, as if the final half session was the one that broke me. I did a hundred last year. I want to do ninety this year.
And I prepare completely differently. An hour the night before a meeting, an hour the morning of, so that by the time I walk in, I can dig all the way down and genuinely be there for the people who trusted me with their business.
The client who told me my work was crap did me one of the bigger favors of my career. I just wasn't ready, back then, to hear it as one.
