Using Floor and Ceiling Goals With Your Client

Most coaches get goal-setting all wrong with their clients, especially when it comes to implementation. Floor and ceiling goals can really help with this. You see, there’s a paradox we have to contend with as coaches, and it is that the pursuit of perfection often prevents progress. And only by accepting imperfection do we achieve excellence.

I know that sounds backwards. You’re probably thinking, “Wait, aren’t we supposed to push our clients toward their best?” Yes, but the fastest way to kill someone’s progress is to demand perfection from them.

I am sure you have had a client come to you frustrated, defeated, and convinced they just “don’t have what it takes” to get in shape. They’ve set ambitious goals (train five days a week, hit protein target daily, get eight hours of sleep, etc. etc.). They crush it for two, maybe three weeks. 

Then life would happen. A work deadline. A sick kid. A few rough nights of sleep. They’d miss a workout, then feel guilty. They’d skip another session because they “already ruined the week anyway.” By week four, they’d be doing nothing, feeling like a failure. This happens with coaching all the time, and it is very often why you have clients who eventually ghost you (they are just feeling shame). 

I am sure that this sounds familiar to most of you out there. It’s the trap I see newer coaches fall into constantly, and honestly, it’s one I fell into myself for years. We set these beautiful, ambitious goals with our clients; goals that look perfect on paper. But the problem with them is that they’re very often binary. You either hit them, or you fail. There’s no middle ground, no flexibility, no acknowledgement that life is messy and unpredictable.

This all-or-nothing approach is actually a recognised cognitive distortion in psychology, and it’s literally one of the thinking patterns that cognitive behavioural therapists help people overcome. Yet we coaches reinforce it constantly with how we structure goals.

Now, this binary thinking might work for the 5% of clients who are already highly disciplined, who have complete control over their schedules, who’ve never met a goal they didn’t crush. But for the other 95%, it creates a cycle of brief success followed by guilt, shame, and ultimately, quitting.

The ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught his students not to demand that things happen as they wish, but to wish that they happen as they do happen. In other words, to accept reality and work within it. Binary goals do the opposite, as they demand reality conform to our plan, and when it doesn’t, the whole system collapses. We have not learned a lesson that has been echoing around for 2,000+ years!

Ultimately, the problem isn’t your clients’ willpower or discipline. The problem is that we’re setting them up with a system that treats anything less than perfect as failure.

This is where the concept of floor and ceiling goals enters.

This approach of setting both a minimum viable target and a stretch target for each goal, has completely transformed how I coach and how my clients experience their own progress. Instead of one rigid target that you either hit or miss, you give your clients a range to work within. A floor that represents “this still counts as a win” and a ceiling that represents “this is what great looks like.”

The floor is their safety net. The ceiling is their aspiration. Everything in between is where real, sustainable progress happens, and it is where most people will spend most of their time.

That’s what we’re going to dive into in this article. I’m going to teach you how to set floor and ceiling goals with your clients, how to frame the conversation so they understand the concept, and how to use this framework to build the kind of consistency that actually creates lasting change.

TL;DR

Coaches often sabotage clients with rigid, perfection-or-bust goals that crumble when life hits. The fix is to use floor and ceiling goals.

• Floor: Your 80-90 % guaranteed win, even on hard weeks (e.g., two 20-min workouts, 80 g protein 5×/week). It kills all-or-nothing shame and wires the habit.
• Ceiling: The stretch that lights you up on perfect weeks (e.g., five full sessions, 140 g protein daily). It pulls you forward without punishing slip-ups.

Between them lies the golden mean: most weeks you land mid-range, dopamine hits stay frequent, and consistency compounds. If you do this right, clients stop ghosting, self-efficacy skyrockets, and progress sticks for years, not weeks.

You ideally want to set floors from current reality (“worst realistic week”), ceilings from best-case excitement, and then teach weekly self-adjustment. You should celebrate every landing, floor included. Review every 8-12 weeks; raise floors only when they’re too easy, ceilings when they’re consistently crushing them.

Ultimately, perfection is the enemy; creating a range is the victory. We are coaching an ultramarathon, not a sprint.

Defining Floor and Ceiling Goals

To really dig into this stuff, we need to get crystal clear on what we mean by floor and ceiling goals, because the success of this entire framework depends on you understanding and explaining these concepts precisely.

Aristotle taught that virtue lies in the golden mean, which is the middle path between two extremes. Courage, he said, is the mean between cowardice (deficiency) and recklessness (excess). Generosity is the mean between stinginess and wastefulness.

Floor and ceiling goals create this same golden mean in behaviour. The floor prevents deficiency (doing nothing), the ceiling prevents excess (unsustainable perfectionism), and the range between them is where sustainable progress lives.

The Buddhist concept of the Middle Way points to the same wisdom: avoid both asceticism (deprivation, excessive discipline) and indulgence (laziness, giving up). The path to enlightenment lies between these extremes. Two thousand years later, modern behavioural science confirms what ancient wisdom already knew. 

Sustainable change happens in the middle, not at the extremes.

So, how do we actually know where the middle is?

The Floor Goal: Your Minimum Viable Win

The floor goal is the bare minimum that still counts as a success. It’s not what you’d like your client to do on a perfect week, it’s what they can almost always do, even when life is chaotic, work is crushing them, they’re traveling, or they’re just having an off week.

The key word here is “almost always.” If your client can only hit their floor goal 50% of the time, it’s not actually a floor. A proper floor should be achievable roughly 80-90% of the time, and ideally even more, even under less-than-ideal circumstances.

Think of it like engineering fault tolerance. When engineers design bridges, they don’t design them for perfect conditions, they design them for variable loads, different weather conditions, and unexpected stresses. The bridge has a safe operating range, not a single perfect specification. Your client’s behaviour needs the same kind of flexibility built in.

Examples of floor goals:

• Training: Two 20-minute workouts per week (any type of intentional movement)
• Nutrition: One serving of vegetables with dinner four nights per week
• Protein: Hit 80g of protein on five days per week
• Sleep: In bed with lights off by 11 PM three nights per week
• Steps: 5,000 steps on four days per week
• Hydration: Three full water bottles per day

Notice how these are specific and measurable, but they’re also… quite modest. They might even make you uncomfortable. You might be thinking, “But that’s not enough to get results!” Hold that thought, because we’ll come back to it.

The floor goal serves several crucial functions:

First, it builds the habit loop. It gets your client showing up, taking action, proving to themselves they can do this. The behaviour itself is more important at this stage than the volume. We know that neurons that fire together wire together. Floor weeks still serve to build the neural pathways that create lasting habits.

Second, it acts as an insurance policy against all-or-nothing thinking. When your client is having a terrible week, the floor goal is what keeps them in the game. It’s behavioural redundancy, like a backup system that kicks in when the primary system fails.

Third, it gives you something to celebrate. When you’re checking in with your client and they sheepishly admit that they “only” hit their floor, you get to reframe that as a win. Because it is.

The Ceiling Goal: Your Stretch Target

The ceiling goal is the aspirational version. This is what your client would do if everything went right, if they had full control of their schedule, if motivation was high and energy was abundant. This is what “great” looks like.

The ceiling should be challenging but not fantastical. It should excite your client without intimidating them. When they think about their ceiling goal, they should feel a mix of “that would be amazing” and “yeah, I could do that on a good week.”

Think of a thermostat in an office. It doesn’t maintain one exact temperature, it maintains a range. Maybe 20-22°C (68-72°F). Sometimes you’re at 20°C (68°F), sometimes at 22°C (72°F), usually somewhere in between. The system works because there’s a range of acceptable performance, not a single point.

Examples of ceiling goals (paired with the floors I mentioned above):

• Training: Five 45-minute workouts per week following their full program
• Nutrition: Vegetables with lunch and dinner every day
• Protein: Hit 120-140g of protein every day
• Sleep: In bed by 10:30 PM every night, with a wind-down routine
• Steps: 10,000+ steps every day
• Hydration: Five water bottles plus additional hydration around workouts

Notice the relationship between the floor and ceiling in each case. They’re not wildly different goals, they’re really just different doses of the same behaviour. The floor is “some,” the ceiling is “optimal.”

The ceiling goal serves different functions than the floor:

First, it gives your client something to reach for. Humans are naturally goal-directed, and we like having targets to pursue. The ceiling provides that aspirational pull.

Second, it helps you and your client understand what “best case scenario” looks like, which is useful for planning and for tracking how often they’re hitting their stride.

Third, it creates a framework for self-regulation. Your client starts to learn: “I can usually hit my ceiling when I plan ahead and when I don’t have major disruptions. I hit somewhere in the middle most of the time. And I fall back to my floor when life gets hectic.” That’s sophisticated self-awareness, and it’s exactly what you want them to develop.

Why Both Matter: The Range Is Where Real Life Happens

Ultimately, your client won’t hit their ceiling most of the time. If they do, your ceiling is too low. It’s actually become a realistic target, which means you need to adjust.

Similarly, they shouldn’t be hitting just their floor most of the time. If they are, either the floor is too high (and needs to come down), or the ceiling is too low and uninspiring.

The sweet spot is that your client hits somewhere in their range most weeks. Sometimes they crush their ceiling. Often, they land in the middle. Occasionally, they fall back to their floor. And very rarely (like, maybe a few times a year) they might even miss their floor, and that’s okay too because we’re dealing with humans, not robots.

The range itself is the goal. The range is where consistency happens. The range is where your client learns to adapt, to self-regulate, to keep showing up even when perfect isn’t possible.

Herbert Simon’s concept of “satisficing” versus “maximising” becomes relevant here. From an evolutionary perspective, organisms that could make “good enough” decisions quickly tended to survive better than those that endlessly optimised for perfect decisions. The gazelle that satisfices (“that water source is probably safe enough”) survives better than the one that maximises (“let me analyse all possible water sources to find the optimal one”) because while it’s still analysing, it dies of thirst.

Your clients’ brains are wired for satisficing, not maximising. Floor and ceiling goals honour this evolutionary wiring while still creating progress.

Floors build momentum and confidence. Ceilings inspire growth and create those peak weeks where everything clicks. Together, they create a sustainable path forward that honours the reality of being human while still driving progress.

This isn’t about having low standards or being soft on your clients. It’s about being strategic. You’re playing the long game here, and the long game is won by consistency, not intensity.

The Psychology Behind Floor and Ceiling Goals

Before we get tactical, you need to understand why this approach works so well. It’s not just a coaching trick, it’s actually rooted in some fundamental psychology about how humans learn, build habits, and sustain motivation. When you dig into it, you’ll find that modern neuroscience, behavioural economics, and ancient philosophy all point toward the same insights.

If you have read any of our content before, you will know we are big on self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a concept from psychologist Albert Bandura, and it’s basically your belief in your own ability to succeed at a specific task. Self-efficacy isn’t a fixed attribute, it’s built through experience, particularly through what Bandura called “mastery experiences.” In plain English: success breeds more success.

Every time your client successfully completes a goal, even a small one, they’re building evidence that they’re the kind of person who follows through. They’re strengthening their belief that they can do this. That confidence then makes it more likely they’ll show up next time, creating a positive feedback loop.

Here’s where traditional, binary goal-setting fails. When the only way to “succeed” is to hit a single, ambitious target, most clients are experiencing failure far more often than success, especially in the beginning. Miss your five workouts this week? Failure. Only got 90 grams of protein instead of 130? Failure. That’s a lot of evidence accumulating in their brain that they’re not good at this, that they can’t stick with it.

Therapists often use the ABC model from Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy to describe what happens next: there’s an Activating event (missed workout), which triggers a Belief (“I’m a failure, I can’t do this”), which leads to a Consequence (quit entirely, avoid coach, do nothing rest of week). This pattern plays out thousands of times in coaching relationships, and most coaches never recognise they’re the ones actually reinforcing it.

Floor goals interrupt this cycle at the belief stage. Your client might not hit their ceiling every week, but they can hit their floor most weeks. And every time they do, they’re depositing another piece of evidence into their self-efficacy bank account. They’re becoming someone who follows through, even when it’s hard. The belief shifts from “I failed again” to “I showed up, and that’s how you win over time.”

When you achieve a goal, any goal, your brain releases dopamine. Dopamine isn’t just about pleasure; it’s about reward prediction and motivation. You feel good, and you’re motivated to repeat the behaviour. Frequent small wins from hitting your floor goal provide regular dopamine hits that reinforce the habit loop. Your brain learns: showing up feels good.

The fascinating thing is that unpredictable rewards may actually be even more motivating than predictable ones. This is called variable ratio reinforcement, and it’s why slot machines are so addictive. When your client sometimes hits their floor, sometimes lands in the middle, and occasionally crushes their ceiling, that variability itself can actually be motivating. Their brain doesn’t know exactly what level of reward is coming, so it stays engaged. This sounds strange, but I do believe that it is playing a role here.

There’s another psychological principle at play here too. This is the concept of self-determination theory and intrinsic motivation. Research shows that people are most motivated when they feel three things: autonomy (choice and control), competence (feeling capable), and relatedness (connection to others or to something meaningful).

Rigid, binary goals undermine all three of these. They strip away autonomy; you either do the prescribed thing or you fail. They undermine competence because they set most people up to fail more often than they succeed. And they can damage the coaching relationship when clients start avoiding you because they’re ashamed they didn’t hit their targets.

Floor and ceiling goals, on the other hand, actually build all three. They give clients autonomy to choose where they land in the range based on their circumstances. They build competence by ensuring regular wins. And they strengthen your coaching relationship because clients don’t have to pretend or hide when they’re struggling, as they can hit their floor and still feel good about checking in with you.

The framework also shifts motivation from extrinsic (external validation from hitting the target) to intrinsic (internal satisfaction from honouring yourself and your commitment). That shift is crucial for long-term adherence because extrinsic motivation is fragile, as it depends on continued external reinforcement. Intrinsic motivation is durable, because it comes from within.

Something else that’s critical to understand here is the concept of psychological flexibility. ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) defines psychological flexibility as the ability to adapt your behaviour while staying committed to your values. It’s about expansion versus contraction; expanding your behavioural repertoire versus contracting into rigid patterns.

Rigid goals cause contraction. When you believe you must do five workouts or you’ve failed, your behavioural options narrow. Miss one workout, and the whole week feels ruined. But floor and ceiling goals create expansion. You have multiple ways to succeed, multiple ways to stay connected to your values (health, vitality, self-care) even when circumstances change.

This distinction between values and goals is important. Your client’s value may align with something like “I want to be healthy and strong for my family.” The goal (five workouts) is just one way to express that value. But when you make the goal rigid and all-or-nothing, missing it feels like you’ve betrayed the value itself. Floor and ceiling goals keep the connection to values intact, regardless of which level you hit that week. The value is honoured whether you hit your floor or your ceiling.

There’s also this counterintuitive phenomenon I’ve observed over and over in my coaching experience. When you explicitly give clients permission to do the “good enough” version of their goals, they often end up doing more than they would have with rigid expectations.

This may be because the psychological weight of perfectionism is actually quite exhausting. When your client believes they have to do the full workout or it doesn’t count, and they only have 20 minutes, they’ll often choose to do nothing. I mean, if you are going to class it as a failure if you do the 20 minutes or if you do nothing… most people will choose the nothing. But when you’ve established that 20 minutes counts as a win (that it’s their floor goal), they’ll do the 20 minutes. 

Behavioural economists have a concept for this called loss aversion. People are more motivated to avoid losses than to achieve gains. When you frame the floor as enough to “maintain your streak” rather than “achieve the minimum,” it becomes a real psychological powerhouse. Your client doesn’t want to lose their streak of showing up, so they find a way to hit their floor even on terrible weeks.

The “good enough” option isn’t an excuse for laziness. It’s a pressure release valve that prevents the all-or-nothing thinking that kills consistency.

I also want to touch on what researchers often call decision fatigue and cognitive load. Your clients are making hundreds of decisions every day, and each one feels like it depletes their mental resources a little bit. By evening, when it’s time to work out or prep that healthy meal, they often feel like they are running on fumes.

Binary goals require a full tank of mental energy, and you either find the willpower to do the whole thing or you fail. Floor and ceiling goals reduce the cognitive load by simplifying the decision tree. Instead of “should I work out or not?” the question becomes “which version can I do today?” There’s always an acceptable answer, which means less mental wrestling and faster decision-making.

There’s even a technique from psychology research called implementation intentions (“if-then” planning), developed by Peter Gollwitzer, that maps perfectly onto this. “If it’s a tough week, then I do my floor.” “If everything’s going well, then I go for my ceiling.” These simple if-then rules reduce cognitive load even further and increase follow-through.

Ultimately, our brains didn’t evolve for long-term fitness goals. They evolved for immediate survival in environments where energy conservation was critical. Binary goals trigger a threat response in the brain, and failure feels dangerous, like it has consequences for survival. This is why missing a single workout can trigger such disproportionate emotional responses in some people.

Floor and ceiling goals work with our evolutionary wiring rather than against it. They honour our natural drive to conserve energy (the floor is achievable without heroic effort) while still providing opportunities to push when we have the resources (the ceiling). And because ranges feel psychologically safer than single targets, they don’t trigger the same threat response that leads to avoidance and quitting.

Further to this, with traditional goal-setting, you get what I call the “boom and bust” cycle. Clients go all-in, burn out, quit, feel guilty, eventually restart, repeat. Progress looks like a series of sharp peaks and deep valleys. But progress in fitness, nutrition, and lifestyle change isn’t built in peaks, it’s built in consistency over time. Consistency is the prerequisite for success.

Floor and ceiling goals flatten that curve. Your client is always making some progress, even if it’s just floor-level progress. Small, consistent progress compounds. The client who hits their floor of two workouts per week for an entire year (~104 workouts) is going to see better results than the client who does five workouts per week for a month, quits for two months, restarts, quits again, and ends up with maybe 80 total workouts scattered across the year with huge gaps.

The maths is straightforward, but the psychology is what makes it work. Habits form in the basal ganglia through repetition, and consistency of practice matters far more than intensity for habit formation. These neural pathways form through repeated firing of the same circuits, not through occasionally firing them at maximum intensity. Floor weeks still build the neural pathways. They still strengthen the habit. 

Doing nothing does not build these pathways. So, when stress hits, which it inevitably does, we revert to our defaults. If your default pattern is “all or nothing,” well, stress triggers nothing. But floor goals help install a better default: “do something.” Even when you’re feeling decision fatigued and you’re running on autopilot, the autopilot pattern becomes “show up at some level” rather than “quit if I can’t be perfect.”

Ultimately, floor and ceiling goals aren’t about lowering standards, they’re about being smarter about how humans actually build lasting change. They work with your clients’ psychology, biology, and neurology, not against it.

How to Set Floor and Ceiling Goals with Clients

Now let’s get into the practical application. How do you actually determine what the floor and ceiling should be for each client and each goal? This is where coaching becomes more art than science, but I’ll give you a framework to work within.

Start with Current Reality, Not Future Aspirations

The biggest mistake I see coaches make is setting goals based on what the client wants to achieve rather than where they’re actually starting from. You have to build from current behaviour, not from wishful thinking.

The pragmatist philosopher William James argued that truth is what works. We should judge ideas by their practical consequences, not by abstract ideals. This applies perfectly to goal-setting. The “ideal” goal that sounds perfect in theory but fails in practice isn’t actually a good goal. The goal that actually produces results, even if it sounds lesser, is the true one.

So your first step is to gather data. What’s the client actually doing right now?

If you’re working with someone who hasn’t exercised consistently in years, and you ask them, “How many times per week do you want to work out?” they might say five. But what matters is what they’re currently doing and what they can realistically add to their life right now.

To do this, you must ask better questions, like:

• “Over the past month, how many times per week have you typically moved or exercised intentionally?”
• “Looking at your current schedule, what days of the week have the best openings for training?”
• “What have you successfully stuck with in the past, even during busy periods?”

Get specific numbers based on recent history. If your client worked out twice in the past month, that’s valuable data. If they hit their protein target three days out of the last thirty, write that down.

Setting the Floor: What Can They Hit on a Terrible Week?

Now, here’s how I determine the floor: I ask the client to imagine their worst realistic week. Not a week where they’re hospitalised or where there’s a family emergency, just a normally difficult week. Heavy workload, poor sleep, kids are sick, back-to-back obligations, or whatever else. We all have these weeks, and there are usually recurring things that cause us stress and a lack of time.

Then I ask: “In a week like that, what’s the absolute minimum version of this goal that you could still do? What’s the smallest version that would still feel like you, you are keeping momentum going?”

This is where you need to get the client to be honest and realistic. Push them to go lower than feels comfortable. If they say, “Even on a terrible week, I could do three workouts,” challenge that. “Okay, but what if you’re travelling that week too? What if you wake up with a migraine on one of your workout days?”

The floor needs to be achievable even when multiple things go wrong. I generally aim for a floor that’s 40-60% of what the ceiling will be, but that’s not a hard rule, and it depends entirely on the individual and the specific goal.

This is also where behavioural economics comes in. Research on present bias shows that we overvalue immediate rewards and undervalue distant ones. Floor goals provide immediate wins, because you can hit your floor this week and feel successful now, rather than always chasing some distant future perfect week. That immediate reinforcement is very psychologically powerful.

The mental accounting principle from behavioural economics is also at work here too. People tend to categorise different behaviours in separate “accounts” in their minds. With binary goals, one missed workout can feel like the entire “fitness account” is in the red, which often leads to abandoning the whole thing. But with good floor goals in place, it is much easier to keep the account in the black. One missed workout doesn’t contaminate everything else.

Setting the Ceiling: What Would Great Look Like?

For the ceiling, you want to find the intersection of two things: what would produce great results, and what would be realistic on the client’s best weeks.

This is where you can be more ambitious, but stay grounded in reality. The ceiling shouldn’t be what an Instagram fitness influencer does. It should be what this specific client, with their specific life, could accomplish when things are going well.

To figure this out, you would ask questions like:

• “If you had a week where everything clicked (good sleep, manageable work schedule, high energy), what would you love to accomplish?”
• “What version of this goal would make you feel like you really pushed for progress?”
• “If I checked in with you at the end of an amazing week, what would you be excited to report?”

The ceiling should excite them. When they think about it, they should feel a little pull of motivation, a sense of “yeah, that would feel really good to hit.”

Teaching Self-Adjustment: The Most Important Skill

Once you’ve established the floor and ceiling, you need to teach your client how to self-adjust within that range based on their current circumstances.

Behavioural economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein showed that how you present choices dramatically affects which ones people make. By presenting a range of options (floor to ceiling) rather than a single mandate, you’re using proven behavioural design principles to improve adherence.

You’re also creating what they call a “nudge”, which is a gentle push toward better behaviour that maintains freedom of choice. The floor is a nudge toward consistency; it makes showing up easier by lowering the barrier when needed.

This is about giving your clients a mental framework for decision-making. The conversation sounds like this:

“You’ve got a floor of two workouts and a ceiling of five. Every Sunday, I want you to look at your week ahead. Consider your schedule, your energy, any travel or disruptions. Then make a call: where in that range are you aiming this week? Are you going for ceiling? Probably landing mid-range? Or is this a floor week?

The key is that there’s no wrong answer. A floor week isn’t a failure; it’s a strategic choice based on reality. You’re not flaking out or giving up. You’re being smart and keeping yourself in the game.”

This also leverages implementation intentions (those if-then rules I mentioned earlier). “If I have a normal week with no travel, then I aim for my ceiling. If work is chaotic, then I aim for mid-range. If I’m travelling or dealing with illness, then I hit my floor.” These simple rules reduce cognitive load and increase follow-through.

This teaches your clients to be realistic, to plan proactively, and to make intentional choices rather than just hoping for the best and then feeling guilty when life happens.

Over time, your clients will get really good at this. They’ll start to naturally assess their capacity and adjust their expectations accordingly. They’ll stop surprising themselves with missed goals because they’ve learned to read their own lives.

Using Floor and Ceiling Goals to Build Resilience and Autonomy

One of the most powerful aspects of this framework isn’t even about the goals themselves; it’s about what your clients learn in the process. Floor and ceiling goals are a teaching tool that builds skills your clients will use for the rest of their lives.

Teaching Self-Regulation

When you give clients a range to work within instead of a rigid target, you’re asking them to develop a sophisticated skill: self-regulation. This means accurately assessing their capacity in any given week, making intentional choices about where to aim within their range, and adjusting their approach based on feedback.

This is a dramatically different skill than just following instructions.

Most coaching relationships, especially with newer coaches, look like: the coach sets the plan, the client tries to execute it, and then reports back on success or failure. The coach is doing all the thinking, all the planning, all the adjusting. The client is just trying to comply.

This creates dependency. Your clients need you to tell them what to do every week because they haven’t learned how to think for themselves.

Floor and ceiling goals flip this dynamic. Now the client has to think. They have to assess their week and decide: “Can I go for my ceiling this week? Or do I need to aim for my floor?” That’s a decision they’re making, based on their own judgment.

Over time, they get really good at this. They start to recognise patterns: “Okay, I tend to hit my floor during the first week of the month when work is busiest.” Or “I can usually go for my ceiling when I’ve planned my meals ahead on Sunday.” They’re developing self-awareness and learning to be strategic.

This skill transfers beyond fitness. They’re learning to be realistic about their capacity, to make intentional choices, to honour their limitations without using them as excuses. That’s skill development that helps their entire life.

Preventing Boom-and-Bust Cycles

Let’s talk about what happens without floor goals, because I want to make sure you understand the alternative you’re helping your clients avoid.

Here’s the typical cycle:

1. Client sets ambitious goal (train 5x/week, hit protein target every day, etc.)
2. Client crushes it for 2-3 weeks, feeling motivated and capable
3. Life gets busy, or motivation dips, or they have an off week
4. Client misses their goal a few times
5. Client feels guilty and like they’re “failing”
6. Client thinks “I’ve already ruined this week, might as well start fresh next week”
7. Client does nothing for the rest of the week (or longer)
8. Client either quits entirely or eventually restarts the cycle from step 1

This boom-and-bust pattern is exhausting, and it’s incredibly common. I’d bet at least 60-70% of the general population engages in some version of this with their health and fitness goals. And if you are a coach, you likely see this in 90+% of your clients, as your clients are generally the ones that need more help than the general population. So, it is really important that you understand this.

The problem is in step 6. The all-or-nothing thinking says that if you can’t do the full thing, there’s no point in doing anything. So they go from “doing something” to “doing nothing,” and those periods of doing nothing are where all the momentum dies.

Albert Camus’s essay on Sisyphus (the mythological figure condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down, forever) has profoundly influenced my thinking on this. Camus writes that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. The daily showing up, the repeated action, IS the meaning. There is no moment when the boulder stays at the top and you’re “done.” The meaning is in the pushing itself.

Health and fitness is the same. There’s no moment when you’ve “achieved fitness” and you’re done. It’s an ongoing practice, a daily or weekly showing up. Floor goals help your clients understand this and find meaning in the showing up itself, not in some imaginary perfect future state.

Floor goals interrupt the boom-bust cycle right at step 6. When your client has a rough week and misses their ceiling, they don’t spiral into nothing. They think, “Okay, can’t hit my ceiling this week, but I can hit my floor.” And they do. And then they report to you that they hit their floor, and you celebrate it, and they feel successful rather than guilty.

The week ends with “I showed up” instead of “I quit.” That’s a completely different psychological outcome.

From a neuroscience perspective, this is extremely important because of how stress affects our behaviour. When we’re stressed, our prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for executive function and willpower) gets “depleted”. We revert to our default patterns under stress. If your default is “all or nothing,” stress triggers the nothing response. If your default is “do something, even if it’s just my floor,” stress triggers the “show up at whatever level is possible” response.

You’re literally rewiring your client’s stress-triggered autopilot, and the neural superhighway that runs from their habit centre (striatum) to their planning centre (prefrontal cortex). The new default lane is ‘show up’, not ‘shut down’.”

Over time, your clients learn that they don’t have to be perfect to be successful. They learn that something is always better than nothing. They learn that they can have off weeks without derailing entirely. That’s resilience.

Building Autonomy: Clients Who Think for Themselves

Phenomenal coaches want their clients to develop enough autonomy and self-efficacy so that they’re not dependent on a coach for every decision. They become partners in their own coaching rather than passive recipients of your instructions, and eventually learn the skills to be able to do all of this health and fitness stuff on their own long term.

Clients who work with floor and ceiling goals develop this autonomy faster than clients with rigid plans. This is because they’re constantly making choices within their range, getting feedback on those choices, and learning what works for them.

They start to recognise things like:

• “I need to aim for my floor during quarter-end at work because those weeks are always chaos.”
• “I can usually push for my ceiling when I’ve blocked off time on Sunday to meal prep.”
• “When I travel for work, I can hit my floor if I pack resistance bands and do hotel room workouts.”

These are strategic insights they’re developing based on their own experience. You’re not telling them this stuff; they’re figuring it out through trial and error within the safe container of their floor/ceiling range.

As they develop this autonomy, your coaching relationship actually gets better. Your check-ins become more collaborative. They come to you with insights about what’s working and what’s not. You’re troubleshooting together rather than you just prescribing and them just following (or not following).

Clients who develop this kind of autonomy stay in coaching longer because the relationship is more rewarding for both of you. And when they eventually do move on from regular coaching, they have the skills to maintain their progress independently.

This is what the existentialist philosophers called authentic choice. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that we’re “condemned to be free”, as we must make choices and take responsibility for them. Rigid goals strip away that freedom; you’re just following orders. Floor and ceiling goals restore it. Your client chooses, authentically, where to show up within their range. That choice is theirs, not imposed by some external authority. 

And with that freedom comes responsibility, but it’s a responsibility they can actually fulfill, which builds confidence and their ability to actually live fully in the world. 

Creating Antifragile Systems

There’s a concept from Nassim Taleb that’s relevant here too: antifragility. Some things are fragile, as they break under stress. Some things are robust, as they withstand stress. But some things are antifragile, wherein they actually get stronger from stress, variability, and challenges.

Your goal as a coach should be to create antifragile behaviour change systems, not just robust ones. Floor and ceiling goals do this.

When your client has a terrible week and falls back to their floor, something interesting happens. They prove to themselves that they can maintain their habits even under adversity. They learn that stress doesn’t have to mean failure. And the next time life gets hard, they’re more confident they can handle it.

The variability itself (sometimes ceiling, sometimes floor, sometimes middle), makes the system stronger. Your client is practising adaptability. They’re learning that their commitment to health can flex and bend without breaking.

This is the opposite of fragile systems (rigid goals) that shatter the first time they encounter stress. It’s even better than robust systems that merely survive stress. It’s a system that learns from stress and becomes more resilient with each challenge.

Think about animals in nature. The most resilient animals aren’t the ones with a single dominant strategy, as those collapse when conditions change. The resilient animals have diversity, multiple strategies, and flexibility. Floor and ceiling goals create that same kind of resilience in your clients’ behaviour.

Reducing Guilt and Shame

For a lot of people, missing a workout or falling off their nutrition plan doesn’t just feel disappointing, it feels shameful. They’ve internalised the idea that they “should” be able to do these things, and when they can’t, they feel weak, undisciplined, or broken.

This shame response is incredibly destructive because it drives avoidance behaviour. Clients start skipping check-ins because they don’t want to admit they didn’t hit their goals. They ghost their coaches. They quit programs not because they can’t face another week of feeling like a failure.

From a physiological perspective, shame and guilt trigger the same stress response as physical threats. Cortisol spikes, inflammation increases, and your body goes into a protective state. Chronic activation of this stress response, which happens when clients are constantly falling short of rigid goals, increases allostatic load (the cumulative wear and tear on the body from chronic stress). This actually undermines both adherence and results.

Floor goals dramatically reduce this shame spiral because they change the definition of success. Your client isn’t failing when they hit their floor; they’re succeeding. There’s always a version of the goal that counts as a win, which means there’s always a reason to check in, to stay engaged, to keep going.

I’ve had so many clients tell me some version of this: “With my old coach, I would avoid checking in when I had a bad week because I was embarrassed. With you, I never feel that way.” This is because I celebrate the floor weeks, along with the ceiling weeks.

That’s the difference. That’s what keeps people in the game long enough to actually see results.

There’s a concept from Christian theology that’s relevant here, even if you’re not religious, which is the concept of grace. Grace is the idea that you are accepted and loved even in your imperfection, even when you fall short. Floor goals operationalise grace in coaching. You’re telling your clients: “You are successful even when you only hit your floor. Your worth isn’t contingent on perfect performance.”

The goal isn’t just to help your clients build muscle or lose fat or get stronger; it’s to help them build a healthy, sustainable relationship with fitness and nutrition that can last for decades. And that requires removing the shame and guilt that drive most people away from consistency.

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When (and How) to Adjust Floors and Ceilings

Floor and ceiling goals aren’t set in stone. They’re a living framework that should evolve as your client progresses. Knowing when and how to adjust these targets is crucial to long-term success.

Tracking Progress: Reading the Data

First, you need good data. You should be tracking not just whether your client hits their goals, but where in their range they’re landing week to week. This is really simple; just note whether they hit their floor, landed in the middle, hit their ceiling, or (rarely) missed their floor entirely.

After four to eight weeks, you should have enough data to spot patterns. Pull back and look at the bigger picture:

• What percentage of weeks are they hitting their floor?
• How often are they hitting their ceiling?
• Where do they most commonly land?

Here’s what good patterns look like:

• Floor is hit 85-95% of the time
• Ceiling is hit maybe 30-50% of the time
• Most weeks, they land somewhere in the middle to upper-middle range

If you’re seeing these patterns, your floors and ceilings are set well. The client is winning consistently, occasionally crushing it, and has room to stretch without feeling overwhelmed.

What’s interesting here is that when your client sometimes hits their floor, sometimes their middle, sometimes their ceiling, that variability in “reward level” can actually be more motivating than predictable performance. Their brain stays engaged because it doesn’t know exactly what level of achievement is coming. So, you should not see them “not being perfect” as a defect. It can actually lead to better results. 

When Floors Are Too High

If your client is only hitting their floor 50-70% of the time, and they’re rarely getting close to their ceiling, your floor is probably set too high. It’s functioning as their ceiling in practice.

This is really common, especially with ambitious clients or coaches who are afraid of setting the bar “too low.” But remember that the floor should be achievable even during difficult weeks. If it’s not, you’re just back to rigid goal-setting under a different name.

When you spot this pattern, have an honest conversation:

“Hey, I’ve been looking at your tracking over the past six weeks, and I’m noticing you’re hitting your floor of [X] about 60% of the time. That tells me we set your floor a little too high. The floor should be something you can hit almost always, even when life is crazy. What do you think your true floor is? What could you do even on your worst weeks?”

Then adjust down. Yes, this might feel like lowering the bar, but you’re actually fixing a miscalibration. You’re not reducing their overall output, you’re giving them more wins and more confidence, which will likely increase their consistency.

When Ceilings Are Too Low

On the flip side, if your client is hitting their ceiling 70-80% of the time, your ceiling has become their normal performance. It’s not a stretch anymore, it’s just their realistic target.

This is great news in one sense, as it means they’ve progressed! They’ve built capacity and consistency. But it also means it’s time to adjust.

The conversation here is exciting:

“I’ve been tracking your progress, and you’ve been crushing your ceiling most weeks for the past month. That’s incredible, and it shows how much you’ve grown since we started. I think it’s time to raise your ceiling to give you something new to reach for. Your old ceiling was [X]. What do you think your new stretch target should be?”

Let them help set the new ceiling. They’ll often suggest something appropriate because they have a good sense of what feels like a stretch at this point. This collaborative approach also reinforces their autonomy and investment in their own progress.

The Art of Raising the Floor: Progressive Overload for Behaviour

Here’s one of my favourite strategies, and it’s where this framework really shows its power: raising the floor over time. This is much like the Ratchet Effect, whereby we are creating one-way progress that doesn’t slip backwards.

In exercise, we talk about progressive overload, which is the process of gradually increasing the demands on the body to drive adaptation. You can do the same thing with behaviour by gradually raising what counts as the “minimum.”

When your client has been consistently hitting somewhere above their floor for an extended period (usually 8-12 weeks), it’s time to have this conversation:

“You’ve been doing great with your goals. Looking at the past couple months, I notice you’re almost never falling back to your floor of [X]. You’re usually hitting [Y] or better. I think your capacity has increased, which is awesome. What if we raised your floor to [Y]? That becomes your new minimum, and we set a new ceiling of [Z].”

This is how you create genuine, sustainable progress without overwhelming your client. You’re not suddenly jumping from two workouts per week to five. You’re going from a floor of two and a ceiling of five, to a floor of three and a ceiling of five or six. Small upward adjustments based on demonstrated capacity.

The key is that you’re raising the floor, not just the ceiling. You’re saying, “The level you’re consistently hitting now becomes your new baseline.” This validates their progress while also gently increasing expectations.

From an Aristotelian perspective, this is how eudaimonia (human flourishing) actually works. It’s not achieved through single heroic acts but through consistent practice of virtue over time, with gradual increases in what virtue demands of you. You don’t become excellent all at once. You become excellent through sustained practice that slowly raises your standards. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” – Will Durant, paraphrasing Aristotle.

Nietzsche had a similar idea with what he called “self-overcoming.” The will to power isn’t about dominating others; it’s about continuously overcoming your previous self. Raising the floor is exactly this: your client is surpassing who they were eight weeks ago, establishing a new baseline that reflects their growth.

When NOT to Adjust

It’s also important to know when to leave things alone.

Don’t adjust goals during particularly stressful life periods. If your client just started a new job, had a baby, is dealing with a family health crisis, or is going through any major transition, now is not the time to raise expectations. In fact, you might even need to temporarily lower the floor to help them maintain any consistency at all.

Don’t adjust goals too frequently. Give each set of floor/ceiling goals at least 4-6 weeks before considering changes, and ideally 8-12 weeks. You need enough data to see real patterns.

Don’t adjust based on one great week or one terrible week. You’re looking for sustained patterns, not outliers.

And the big one is that you shouldn’t make your client feel like they always have to be progressing. Sometimes, maintaining is the goal. If your client has reached a level of consistency that’s working well for their life and their results, and they’re happy there, it’s perfectly fine to keep the same floor and ceiling for months or even longer. Not everything needs to constantly escalate.

This connects back to satisficing versus maximising. Your client doesn’t need to maximise every metric of their fitness. They need to find a level that’s “good enough” to produce results while fitting sustainably into their life. That might mean staying at the same floor and ceiling for a long time.

Using Multiple Metrics for Calibration

Don’t just look at compliance rates. Also consider:

• How does the client feel about their goals? Do they feel challenged? Overwhelmed? Bored?
• Are they seeing the results they want? (Though remember, results lag behind behaviour, so be patient.)
• How is their energy and recovery?
• What does their life look like? Has anything changed that would impact their capacity?

Sometimes a client is hitting their targets but feels exhausted and burnt out. That’s a sign to potentially lower the ceiling even if the data says they’re hitting it. Sometimes they’re hitting their floor most of the time but feeling unchallenged and want to push more. That’s a sign to raise it even if the data doesn’t quite say you have to yet.

Use the data to inform your decisions, but coach the human in front of you, not just the numbers on a spreadsheet.

Common Mistakes Coaches Make

Let me save you from the mistakes I made and the ones I see other coaches making regularly. These are the pitfalls that undermine the effectiveness of this framework.

Mistake #1: Setting Floors Too High

This is by far the most common error, and I’ve made it myself more times than I care to admit. You set what you think is a “floor,” but it’s actually still pretty ambitious. It requires things to go reasonably well. It’s not achievable on truly difficult weeks.

Why do we do this? Usually because we’re afraid of setting goals that feel “too easy” or because we’re overly optimistic about our clients’ capacity. We want them to succeed, so we convince ourselves they can do more than they realistically can.

The test is simple: if your client is only hitting their floor 60-70% of the time or less, it’s too high. A true floor should be hit 85-90% of the time or more.

Remember: the floor is not your aspirational goal for the client. It’s not what you think they should be capable of. It’s what they can almost always do, even when multiple things go wrong.

Think about engineering fault tolerance again. Engineers don’t design bridges for “pretty good” conditions, they design for worst-case scenarios with safety margins. Your floor is that safety margin.

Mistake #2: Forgetting to Revisit and Adjust

You set floor and ceiling goals in week one, and then… you never look at them again. You just keep checking whether the client hit their range, but you never ask whether the range itself is still appropriate.

This is lazy coaching, and I say that with love because I’ve done it too. It’s easy to fall into a routine and forget that these goals should be living, evolving targets.

Set a reminder for yourself to review and potentially adjust floors and ceilings every 8-12 weeks. Make it part of your coaching process. During your quarterly or monthly planning sessions, explicitly ask: “Are these goals still set right? Should we adjust?”

Your clients change. Their capacity increases. Their life circumstances shift. Your goals should reflect that.

Mistake #3: Only Celebrating Ceiling Wins

This mistake is insidious because it completely undermines the purpose of having a floor goal in the first place.

Here’s what it looks like: Your client hits their floor, and you say something like, “Okay, you got your minimum in.” Or worse, “Hey, you hit your floor, but let’s try for more next week.” The message they hear is: “Floor performance is barely acceptable. Ceiling is what I really care about.”

And just like that, you’ve recreated the perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking you were trying to avoid.

Remember, you’re helping clients overcome what cognitive behavioural therapists identify as dichotomous thinking; seeing things in black and white, all good or all bad. If you only celebrate ceiling wins, you’re reinforcing that distortion rather than correcting it.

You have to genuinely celebrate floor performance, especially when it happens during a difficult week. This takes practice because it can feel strange to celebrate “minimum” effort. But that’s the wrong frame. You’re not celebrating minimum effort, you’re celebrating consistency, adaptation, and the client’s ability to show up even when it’s hard.

Floor weeks are wins. Middle-range weeks are wins. Ceiling weeks are wins. All of it counts, and your language needs to reflect that consistently.

Mistake #4: Applying the Framework Rigidly

Some coaches take this concept and turn it into a rigid system where everything must have a floor and ceiling, and those must be tracked precisely, and there are rules about when to adjust, and…

Stop. You’re missing the point.

Floor and ceiling goals are a framework for thinking about sustainable goal-setting. They’re not a strict protocol. Some goals might benefit from this approach, while others work better as simple targets. Some clients will resonate with this language, while others might prefer a different framing.

The principles matter more than the specific terminology. The principles are:

• Give clients multiple definitions of success
• Build in flexibility that accounts for life’s unpredictability
• Celebrate consistency across a range of performance
• Gradually increase expectations based on demonstrated capacity

If you can achieve those principles without explicitly using “floor” and “ceiling” language, great. Do what works for your clients.

This is pragmatic coaching in action, as we want to judge methods by their consequences, not by whether they perfectly follow some abstract system.

Mistake #5: Not Explaining the “Why”

Some coaches introduce floor and ceiling goals as just a different way to structure targets, without explaining the reasoning behind it. The client goes along with it but doesn’t really understand why you’re doing it this way.

When that happens, clients don’t fully buy in. They might still secretly believe that only ceiling performance really counts. They might feel like you’re lowering expectations because you don’t think they’re capable.

Take the time to explain the psychology. Help them understand that this isn’t about having low standards, it’s about being strategic. Show them how all-or-nothing thinking has derailed them in the past. Get them to intellectually and emotionally buy into the approach.

When clients understand why you’re coaching them this way, they become partners in the process instead of just following instructions.

Mistake #6: Avoiding the Floor-Ceiling Conversation Because It Feels Uncomfortable

Sometimes coaches know their clients need more flexibility, but they avoid introducing floor goals because they’re worried about how it will land. “What if they think I don’t believe in them?” “What if they use the floor as an excuse to slack off?”

This discomfort usually means you’re not clear on your own confidence in the approach. If you’re wishy-washy in how you present it, your clients will pick up on that uncertainty.

Get solid on this for yourself first. Understand why it works. Understand that giving permission for “good enough” performance actually improves compliance (that’s the Permission Paradox).

Then present it with confidence. You’re not lowering standards; you’re being smarter about how humans actually change behaviour. Own that.

Mistake #7: Setting Floors and Ceilings That Are Too Close Together

If your floor is three workouts and your ceiling is four workouts, you haven’t really created much of a range. There’s not enough flexibility for the concept to do its job.

Generally, you want at least a 40-50% gap between floor and ceiling, and often more. If the floor is two workouts, the ceiling might be four or five. If the floor is 80g of protein, the ceiling might be 130g.

The range needs to be wide enough that your client has real flexibility to adapt to different types of weeks. If it’s too narrow, you’re back to having essentially one target, which defeats the purpose.

Think about a thermostat with too narrow a range; if it only tolerates 17-18 degrees Celsius, it’s going to be turning on and off constantly, working too hard. You want a comfortable range that the system can operate within.

Floor and Ceiling Goals Conclusion

Here’s a question worth sitting with: Would you rather be perfect for a month or consistent for a lifetime?

Most clients, when they first come to you, are chasing perfection. They want the perfect program, the perfect diet, the perfect body. And most newer coaches, eager to help, give them exactly that. A perfect plan.

But perfection is the problem, not the solution. As Voltaire wrote centuries ago, “Perfect is the enemy of good.” In coaching, I’d take that further: perfection is the enemy of consistency.

Good coaches write great programs. They know the science, they understand programming principles, they can design an elegant training split or an optimal macro split. That’s important. You should absolutely be good at that.

But world-class coaches understand that the best program in the world is worthless if your client doesn’t follow it consistently. And the “perfect” plan that your client can only maintain for three weeks before burning out is infinitely worse than the “good enough” plan they can sustain for three years.

The mark of a great coach isn’t creating perfect plans, it’s creating adaptable systems that meet clients where they are and help them build sustainable consistency.

Remember that you’re playing the long game here. Anyone can get a client excited and going hard for a month. The question is: will they still be training a year from now? Two years? Five years?

Floor and ceiling goals are a long-game strategy. They prioritise sustainability over intensity. They prioritise consistency over perfection. They prioritise building skills and confidence over short-term results.

And ironically, this long-game approach often produces better results faster than the short-term, intensity-focused approach because your clients don’t keep quitting and restarting. They just keep going.

This may remind you of the tortoise and the hare fable. That fable has survived 2,500 years for a reason. Slow and steady wins the race. Not because slowness is virtuous in itself, but because it’s the only pace you can maintain for the full distance.

Your clients aren’t running a sprint. They’re running an ultramarathon that lasts the rest of their lives. Coach them accordingly.

So, as you go to implement this framework with your clients, remember what you’re really doing. You’re not just helping them hit more workouts or eat more protein. You’re teaching them how to be consistent, resilient humans who know how to show up for themselves across all of life’s circumstances.

You’re helping them overcome the cognitive distortion of all-or-nothing thinking. You’re building their self-efficacy through accumulated wins. You’re teaching them psychological flexibility. You’re developing their practical wisdom (their phronesis) so they know how to choose rightly in each moment.

You’re helping them build a skill (the skill of sustainable self-improvement) that will serve them for the rest of their lives. That’s world-class coaching.

For those of you ready to take the next step in professional development, we offer advanced courses like our Nutrition Coach Certification, which is designed to help you guide clients through sustainable, evidence-based nutrition change with confidence, while our Exercise Program Design Course focuses on building effective, individualised training plans that actually work in the real world. Beyond that, we’ve created specialised courses so you can grow in the exact areas that matter most for your journey as a coach.

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