Process-Focused Coaching

Process-focused coaching is a much better approach to take with your coaching methodologies than outcome-focused coaching. You see, most of your clients will hire you for results you cannot guarantee. They’ll come to you wanting to lose 30 pounds, build muscle, or finally stick to a nutrition plan, and they’ll expect you to make it happen. And you, being eager and well-intentioned, will probably take on that burden like it’s yours to carry.

I did this for years. I’d lie awake at night thinking about the client whose weight hadn’t budged in three weeks, analysing everything I might be doing wrong, tweaking their program, adding more accountability measures, secretly panicking that I was somehow failing them. The paradox kept me up at night: clients were paying me for outcomes, but I had absolutely no control over whether they actually followed through on what we discussed. I could design the perfect program, but I couldn’t do their workouts for them. I could create the most reasonable nutrition plan, but I couldn’t sit at their dinner table and guide the fork to their mouth.

The ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus understood this tension twenty centuries before personal training was even a profession. He taught what he called the “dichotomy of control”. This is the crucial distinction between what’s “up to us” and what’s “not up to us.” Our judgments, our actions, our efforts, and our attention are up to us. The outcomes, other people’s choices, or how our body responds on any given day are not up to us, no matter how desperately we wish they were.

This is the fundamental tension of coaching that we need to discuss, because I see newer coaches drowning in this same anxiety. They’re so focused on getting their clients results that they’ve lost sight of what coaching actually is. They’re trying to control the harvest when all they can really tend is the garden. And what I’ve learned after years of working with hundreds of clients is that the moment I let go of outcome control and became a truly process-focused coaching practice, I became a better coach. And not just a little better, dramatically, fundamentally better. And paradoxically, my clients started actually getting better results.

But let me be clear about what I mean by process-focused coaching, because I think we throw that phrase around without really understanding what it means.

The Illusion of Outcome Control

Ultimately, you don’t control outcomes. You just don’t. I don’t care how good your programming is, how thorough your nutrition plans are, or how many motivational voice notes you send your clients. You control exactly two things: the quality of your coaching and the environment you create. Everything else is up to them.

This might sound obvious, but watch what happens in practice. A client comes in wanting to lose 20 pounds before their wedding in three months. What’s your first instinct? If you’re like most newer coaches, you immediately start calculating: “Okay, that’s about 1.5 pounds per week, totally doable, I’ll put them in a moderate deficit, add some cardio, check in three times a week…” You’ve already attached yourself to that outcome. You’ve mentally signed a contract that says you’re responsible for those 20 pounds coming off.

This is where behavioural economics gives us a useful warning through something called Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The moment you make that scale weight your primary target, you’ve corrupted its usefulness as feedback. Suddenly, you’re tempted to manipulate it; cutting carbs the day before weigh-ins, having clients weigh in dehydrated, and celebrating water weight loss as if it’s fat loss. You’ve turned a potentially useful piece of data into a source of anxiety and gaming.

And then what happens? Week three rolls around, and they’ve lost two pounds. Not bad, actually, but you’re already behind schedule. You start troubleshooting. Are they tracking accurately? Maybe we need to lower calories more. Maybe they’re not being honest about their weekend eating. You add more rules, more structure, more tracking. The coaching gets tighter, more controlling, and more stressful for both of you.

I see this sort of stuff happen all the time with outcome-obsessed coaching. However, the real issue is that it works in the short term. The client loses those 20 pounds. They look great at the wedding. They thank you profusely and leave you a glowing review. Success, right?

Then six months later, they’ve gained it all back plus ten more pounds. Because what did they actually learn? They learned that when someone is watching them closely, and they’re accountable to weekly weigh-ins, and they have a big deadline looming, they can white-knuckle their way through a diet. They didn’t learn how to navigate normal life. They didn’t develop any real skills or awareness or autonomy. They just survived a program.

In the language of Self-Determination Theory, you violated all three of their basic psychological needs. You undermined their autonomy by making decisions for them. You prevented real competence from developing because they never learned to problem-solve on their own. And you damaged relatedness by positioning yourself as the authority checking their compliance rather than a partner in their growth.

And that’s not coaching. That’s project management with a side of cheerleading.

What Process-Focused Coaching Actually Means

So let’s talk about what process-focused coaching really is, because it’s not what you think. It’s not just about “focusing on systems instead of goals” or “tracking behaviours instead of outcomes.” That’s surface-level stuff that’s been repeated so many times it’s lost all meaning.

True process-focused coaching means you’re coaching the human in front of you, not the outcome they came to you for. You’re helping them develop awareness, skills, and autonomy. You’re teaching them to fish, not catching fish for them and calling it coaching.

There’s a distinction in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that crystallises this perfectly: the difference between values and goals. Goals are outcomes; destinations you arrive at, and then they’re done. “Lose 20 pounds” is a goal. But values are ongoing processes, directions you move in continuously. “Being someone who takes care of their body” is a value. “Moving in ways that feel good and build strength” is a value.

Goals are finite. Values are infinite. Goals can be achieved and then lost. Values become part of who you are. When you coach toward outcomes, you’re coaching goals. When you coach toward process, you’re coaching values. And values, unlike goals, don’t disappear the moment someone hits their target weight or finishes their 12-week program.

Let me give you a real example. I had a client named Sarah who came to me solely focused on wanting to lose 40 pounds. Classic outcome-focused goal. But within the first few sessions, I noticed that she had absolutely no awareness of her hunger and fullness signals. None. She ate by the clock, by what she thought she “should” eat, by stress, by boredom, by everything except actual physical hunger.

An outcome-focused coach would say: “Okay, here’s your meal plan, hit these macros, let’s get that weight off.” And it might even work, for a while. But a process-focused coach looks at that situation and thinks: “This person needs to rebuild their relationship with food and their body before anything else matters.”

So we didn’t start with a meal plan. We started with curiosity. I asked her to notice when she felt hungry before eating. Just notice, not change anything. Then we added noticing fullness. Then we explored what different foods felt like in her body. Then we played with eating speeds.

What we were really doing was building what Aristotle called phronesis (practical wisdom). Not theoretical knowledge about nutrition, but embodied understanding gained through repeated practice and reflection. Aristotle knew that excellence isn’t an act, it’s a habit. Sarah wasn’t going to develop excellence by following a meal plan. She needed to develop the habit of paying attention, of responding to her body’s signals, of making wise choices in the moment.

This took months, by the way. Months during which the scale barely moved. But you know what happened? She started making choices I never told her to make. She’d text me things like, “I noticed I wasn’t actually hungry, I was just bored, so I went for a walk instead.” Or “I realised halfway through dinner that I was full, so I stopped eating even though food was left on my plate.”

Her brain was doing something fascinating during this process. Every time she paid attention and made a choice aligned with her body’s signals, her brain’s reward prediction error was updating. Dopamine wasn’t just firing when she achieved some distant outcome. It was firing during the process itself: when she noticed something new, when she made a choice that felt aligned, and when she experienced the natural consequence of that choice. She was building neural pathways not around “I must lose weight” but around “I am someone who listens to my body.”

These weren’t things I assigned her. They were insights she developed because we focused on the process of building awareness. The weight came off eventually, more slowly than if we’d just put her on a strict plan. But it stayed off, because she’d developed actual skills. She’d become someone who knew how to listen to her body, who could navigate holidays and restaurants and stressful weeks without needing me to tell her what to do.

That’s process-focused coaching. It’s messier, it’s often slower, and it’s harder to put in a before-and-after Instagram post. But it actually works.

And this approach doesn’t just work better for weight loss or behaviour change. It works better for literally every health marker you care about like cardiovascular fitness, strength development, sleep quality, stress management, body composition, and even longevity itself.

Think about resting heart rate or VO2 max. You cannot directly ‘do’ a lower RHR. You cannot force your body to improve its aerobic capacity through sheer willpower. These are adaptive responses that emerge from consistent training stimulus over time. The process is showing up for your zone 2 work, your interval sessions, and your progressive overload. The outcome (the actual cardiovascular adaptation) is your body’s response, which varies enormously based on genetics, age, training history, sleep quality, stress levels, and a dozen other variables you don’t control.

Same with strength. Same with muscle growth. Same with body composition. Two people doing identical training programs can have wildly different outcomes because bodies are complex adaptive systems, not machines with predictable inputs and outputs.

This is why we teach the stimulus → adaptation → outcome model on our exercise program design course. You can only focus on applying the right stimulus. Hyperfocusing on the outcome, generally doesn’t lead to the results we want. However,  when you stop obsessing over these outcomes and focus on the process (the consistency, the progressive challenge, the recovery, the attention to form and effort), the outcomes tend to take care of themselves. Your body adapts when the conditions are right. Your job as a coach is to help create those conditions and to help your client trust the process while their individual biology responds at its own pace.

If you’ve ever trained or watched high-level grappling (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu), you may know the fundamental principle: position before submission. You don’t force a finish. You focus on controlling position, on being technically sound, on responding to what your opponent gives you. And when you do that well, submissions emerge naturally. They’re not forced; they’re the inevitable result of good positioning. Try to force a submission from a bad position, and you’ll more often than not get countered. You’ll exhaust yourself. You might occasionally land something through sheer aggression, but it won’t be sustainable or repeatable.

That’s exactly what outcome-obsessed coaching is: trying to force the submission. Process-focused coaching is position before submission. You focus on building the skills, creating the awareness, and establishing the foundation. And the outcomes emerge naturally from that solid positioning.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Unfortunately, outcome obsession creates dependent clients. When you’re hyper-focused on getting someone to a specific result, you inevitably start doing more of the work for them. You make the decisions. You adjust the plan. You provide the motivation. You problem-solve. And the client learns that they need you to succeed.

In psychological terms, you’re fostering an external locus of control. The client starts believing that their success is controlled by external factors like your programming, your accountability, or your expertise, rather than by their own choices and capabilities. And the research is clear that people with an internal locus of control are more successful, more resilient, and more satisfied with their lives.

I used to think dependency was fine. Great, even. Job security, right? They’ll keep paying me because they can’t do this without me. But then I’d watch clients yo-yo, succeeding while working with me and struggling the moment they stopped. And I had to ask myself: am I actually helping these people, or am I just creating a dependency loop that benefits me financially but doesn’t serve them?

This gets into uncomfortable existential territory. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre talked about “bad faith”, which is the way we often hide from our own freedom and responsibility by pretending we have no choice, by living for external validation rather than authentic self-direction. Many clients come to us in bad faith. They want us to tell them what to do so they don’t have to take responsibility for their choices. And outcome-focused coaching enables that bad faith. It lets them stay in the comfortable position of following orders rather than developing authentic agency.

Process-focused coaching, on the other hand, is fundamentally about moving clients toward authenticity. You’re constantly returning them to their own experience, their own choices, their own responsibility. It’s uncomfortable at first, both for them and for you. But it’s the only way real transformation happens.

Process-focused coaching builds autonomous humans. People who don’t need you forever. People who develop the skills and confidence to navigate their health on their own. And yes, this creates a retention paradox that might make you uncomfortable because when you coach this way, clients might not stay with you as long because they actually develop independence.

This is not just okay, it’s actually what you want. You see, those clients go out into the world and become living examples of what’s possible. They tell their friends, and not in a superficial “I worked with this coach who got me results,” but a “I worked with this coach who taught me how to do all of this stuff myself” kind of way. The referrals you get from process-focused coaching are different. They’re people who actually want to learn and grow, not people looking for someone to do the thinking for them.

You see, the clients who need you least get the best results. The more independent, self-directed, and autonomous a client becomes, the better their outcomes. So how do you coach people to not need you? That’s the question that separates ok coaches from exceptional ones.

And the other thing that nobody talks about is that your confidence as a coach changes completely when you release outcome attachment. Because you’re no longer at the mercy of things you can’t control. A client has a bad week? Doesn’t shake you, because you weren’t coaching them toward perfection, you were coaching them toward awareness. The scale goes up instead of down? Interesting data point, not a crisis.

You start operating from a state where you stop overthinking, stop trying to control everything, and just respond skillfully to what’s in front of you. You trust your training and your process, and you let the outcomes emerge naturally. You coach from a place of curiosity and partnership instead of anxiety and control.

I sleep better now than I did in my first five years of coaching. And it’s not because I care less, but because I’m now actually focused on things I can actually influence. Process is protocol. Outcome is prayer.

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The Sleep Paradox: When Outcome Focus Destroys the Outcome”

Let me give you the clearest example of why outcome obsession backfires: sleep.

You’ve probably had a client who can’t sleep, who lies in bed anxious about not sleeping, checking the clock, calculating how many hours they’ll get if they fall asleep right now, getting increasingly frustrated. What are they doing? They’re outcome-focused about sleep. They’re trying to force it to happen. And that very effort makes sleep impossible.

Sleep is what happens when the conditions are right and you stop trying to make it happen. It’s the ultimate process-over-outcome situation. You can control your sleep hygiene, your wind-down routine, your bedroom environment, your caffeine timing, your evening light exposure. All process. But you cannot control the actual falling asleep. That’s outcome. And the moment you try to control it, you’ve lost it.

This is true for so many health markers. Try to force your heart rate down through anxiety about your RHR, and you’ll trigger a stress response that raises it. Obsess over your body fat percentage and make desperate decisions that destroy your metabolism and relationship with food. Stress about stress management… see the problem?

Process focus works because it aligns with how adaptation actually happens in the body. You create the right conditions. You show up consistently. You allow your biology to respond. You trust the process.

Common Pitfalls When Coaches Try to Be “Process-Focused”

Now, let’s talk about where coaches go wrong when they try to make this shift, because I see these mistakes constantly, and they’re worth addressing.

The first big mistake is thinking that tracking everything equals process-focused coaching. I see coaches who have their clients logging every workout, every meal, every step, every glass of water, their sleep, their stress levels, their bowel movements, and whatever else is in vogue to track. They call this “focusing on the process”, but really, they’ve just created an administrative nightmare that teaches clients nothing except how to fill out forms.

This is what happens when you confuse data collection with awareness development. They’re not the same thing. Awareness is noticing what’s happening in real-time and learning from it. Data collection is just… collecting data. Sometimes it supports awareness, but often it just creates busywork that obscures the actual learning that needs to happen. Tracking can be useful, don’t get me wrong. But process-focused coaching isn’t about data collection. It’s about awareness and skill development. Sometimes, the most powerful process work happens in a single question: “What did you notice about how that meal made you feel?” No tracking required, just attention.

The second mistake is ignoring outcomes entirely. Some coaches hear “process-focused” and think it means we never talk about results, never celebrate weight loss, and never acknowledge when someone hits a goal. That’s nonsense. Outcomes matter to our clients, and pretending they don’t is disconnected and unhelpful.

Remember, we’re not denying that outcomes exist or that they matter. We’re just recognising what Epictetus taught: outcomes are not “up to us” in the way our efforts and attention are. The difference is that we don’t make outcomes the sole measure of success, and we don’t attach our worth as coaches to whether outcomes happen on our timeline.

I celebrate a lot when a client hits a goal weight. But I celebrate just as enthusiastically when they navigate a stressful week without binge eating, or when they finally do an exercise they’ve been intimidated by, or when they have the self-awareness to recognise they need a rest day. All of these are outcomes, just not the outcomes most coaches are obsessing over.

The third mistake is process without purpose. I see coaches assigning behaviours that are technically “process-focused” but have no real connection to what the client needs to learn. “Do 10 minutes of meal prep every Sunday” isn’t process-focused coaching if the client’s actual struggle is emotional eating. That’s just busy work disguised as progress.

This is where you need to think like a carpenter. A master carpenter focuses on the quality of each individual cut, each measurement, each joint. He knows that if he attends to the process with care and precision, the finished piece will be beautiful. But he’s not making random cuts hoping they’ll somehow come together. Every process action is purposefully connected to the final piece. The amateur carpenter does the opposite; he keeps looking at the final piece, worrying about whether it’ll turn out right, making nervous adjustments, and ironically, making poor cuts because he’s not focused on the process right in front of him. That’s outcome obsession in action.

Every process you coach toward should be intentionally connected to a skill or awareness that will serve them long-term. If you can’t articulate why a particular behaviour matters beyond “it’ll help them lose weight,” you’re probably assigning busywork.

And the fourth mistake is the sneakiest one. It’s using process language while secretly stressing about outcomes. You tell your client, “We’re focusing on building sustainable habits!” but in your head, you’re thinking, “Please lose weight this week so I know my program works.” Your client can feel that energy. They can sense when you’re anxious about their results, even if you’re saying all the right things about process.

This internal work is the hardest part of becoming process-focused, and it’s something you have to actively practice. You have to examine your own attachment to outcomes, your own need for validation through your clients’ results. It’s uncomfortable psychological work, but it’s essential.

What Great Process-Focused Coaching Looks Like in Practice

So what does this actually look like when you’re sitting with a client, whether that’s in person or on a video call? 

Instead of “Did you hit your protein target every day?” you ask, “What did you notice about how you felt on days when you had more protein?” Instead of “Did you do all four workouts?” you ask, “What did you learn about yourself this week in terms of when you have the most energy for training?”

The difference is subtle but profound. One set of questions positions you as the authority checking for compliance. The other positions you as a curious partner helping them develop self-awareness. You’re essentially running a continuous OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), which is the military decision-making framework that Colonel John Boyd developed. But instead of applying it to aerial combat, you’re applying it to behaviour change.

You’re helping clients observe their experience, orient themselves within that experience, decide on their next action, and act. Then the loop starts again. This is an inherently process-focused framework. It doesn’t care about the final destination. It cares about responding skillfully to the immediate situation.

This framework applies beautifully to working with any health marker your clients care about. Someone wants to improve their cardiovascular fitness? You don’t obsess over their VO2 max score. You help them observe how different training intensities feel, orient themselves within their current capacity, decide on appropriate training zones, and act on that information. Then the loop continues. The VO2 max improvement is the natural result of running that loop well over time.

Someone struggling with stress and sleep? Same thing. Observe their stress patterns and sleep quality. Orient around what factors influence both. Decide on practices that might help. Act on them. Repeat. You’re coaching the process of self-regulation, not trying to force outcomes you can’t control.

Your coaching sessions are different too. Less troubleshooting, more exploring. When a client comes in and says they had a rough week, your first instinct isn’t to fix it or prevent it from happening again. It’s to get curious about what happened and what they learned from it. “Tell me about that rough week. What made it rough? What did you do to cope? What would you do differently if it happened again? What do you need to do differently to set yourself up better?”

Notice how none of those questions are me solving the problem for them. I’m helping them build the problem-solving muscle themselves. I’m building their internal locus of control, their sense that they have agency in their own lives.

And celebration changes too. I get genuinely excited about process wins that have nothing to do with the scale. A client texts me that they ate slowly and mindfully at a restaurant without their phone out? I’m celebrating that like they won a championship. Because that’s a skill they’ll use for life. That’s autonomy being built in real time.

This is where understanding how habits actually form matters. Wendy Wood’s research on habit formation shows us that habits develop through context-dependent repetition, not through willpower aimed at distant outcomes. Every time my client Sarah noticed her hunger before eating, she was strengthening a context-behaviour link in her brain. Over time, those actions became automatic; real habits, not just things she was white-knuckling through.

I also get better at knowing when to simply witness instead of trying to coach something. Sometimes a client just needs to be heard. They don’t need a solution or a new strategy or an accountability measure. They need a coach who can hold space for the reality that behaviour change is hard and messy and nonlinear. That’s process-focused coaching too, recognising that sometimes the process is just being human and having someone see that without judgment.

There’s a strange beauty in this, actually. The French existentialist Albert Camus wrote about Sisyphus; the figure in Greek mythology condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down. Camus concluded we must imagine Sisyphus happy, because he found meaning in the process itself, not in ever reaching a destination. Your clients are going to be working on their health for their entire lives. There’s no finish line where they’re “done.” So teaching them to find meaning and satisfaction in the process, in the daily choices, in the gradual skill development, in the small victories, is the greatest gift you can give them.

Unfortunately, sometimes being process focused can actually lead to slower results, which can lead clients to get frustrated about the lack of speedy results. Your job isn’t to panic or to double down on outcome promises. It’s to redirect them back to what they have learned, what skills they’ve built, what’s different about them now compared to when they started.

“I hear that you’re frustrated the scale hasn’t moved as fast as you wanted it to. Help me understand what else has changed though. How’s your energy? Your sleep? Your relationship with food? Your confidence in the gym? Your stress levels?” Almost always, there’s real progress happening that they’re overlooking because they’re fixated on one metric.

This is where the real transformation happens. When clients can see progress beyond the scale, they start to understand that health is multidimensional. They begin to value how they feel, how they move through the world, and how they show up for themselves and others. The scale becomes just one data point among many, rather than the sole arbiter of their worth and success.

And what I’ve observed over years of coaching is that the clients who get obsessed with the process, who genuinely start to enjoy the daily practices, and who get excited about their own self-awareness and capability, are the ones who get the outcome results too. Not despite being process-focused, but because of it. They stick with it long enough for the results to compound. They don’t quit when progress slows. They adjust and adapt because they have the skills to do so.

The person who loses 40 pounds through extreme restriction and willpower often isn’t any happier six months later. But the person who develops body awareness, self-compassion, consistent movement habits, and food flexibility? That person has built something that enhances their entire life, regardless of what the scale says. Now, this isn’t a license to be bad at your job and not actually get the results your clients want, not at all. However, outcomes without skills is not the goal. 

So yes, you still care about outcomes. You still track metrics. You still want your clients to reach their goals. But you understand that sustainable outcomes emerge from sustainable processes. You’re playing the long game, not the quick fix game.

The irony is that when you stop making everything about the outcome, the outcomes often improve. Your clients are less stressed, more consistent, and more resilient when things don’t go perfectly. They’re building a foundation that will serve them for decades, not just until they hit some arbitrary number. And that’s what great coaching actually is: not getting someone to a destination, but teaching them how to navigate the journey for themselves.

Making the Shift: From Outcome-Attached to Process-Focused

If you’re reading this and recognising that you’ve been coaching from a place of outcome attachment, don’t beat yourself up. Every single good coach I know went through this evolution. It’s almost a necessary stage of development, because you have to understand why outcome obsession doesn’t work before you can truly let it go.

But the shift has to start with you, internally, before it can show up in your coaching. You have to get honest about why you’re attached to your clients’ outcomes. Is it because you’re using their results to validate your worth as a coach? Is it because you’re scared of what it means if they don’t get results super quickly? Is it because you’ve built your marketing around before-and-after transformations and you need those stories?

I’m not judging any of those reasons. I’ve been there. But you can’t coach from a place of freedom if you’re secretly terrified of your clients’ outcomes. You have to do the internal work to separate your worth from their results. You have to build confidence in your coaching that isn’t dependent on the scale moving or the physique changing on your timeline.

This is your own version of moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, as Carol Dweck’s research describes. A fixed mindset says “I’m either a good coach (proven by client results) or I’m not.” A growth mindset says “I’m developing my coaching skills, learning what works, adapting to each unique human in front of me.”

Outcome obsession is fixed mindset coaching. Process focus is growth mindset coaching, for both you and your clients.

This might mean working with a mentor yourself, or a therapist, or just doing a lot of honest reflection. But it’s the most important work you’ll do as a coach. You’re essentially learning to control the controllable and release the rest. That’s the fundamentals of Stoicism, but it’s easier said than done when your business and your ego are tied up in outcomes you can’t control.

Then you have to learn how to communicate this approach to clients, especially new ones who come to you outcome-obsessed. I’m very upfront in my consultations now. I tell potential clients: “You’re coming to me wanting to lose 30 pounds, and I’m confident we can work toward that. But I don’t coach by just giving you a meal plan and crossing my fingers. I coach by helping you understand yourself, your patterns, and your relationship with food and movement. We’re going to focus on building skills and awareness. The weight will likely come off as a result of that work, but the real value you’re going to get is becoming someone who knows how to take care of yourself without needing a coach forever.”

Some people hear that, and they’re all in. Some people hear that and realise they want someone who’s just going to tell them exactly what to eat. That’s fine. I’m not for everyone, and neither are you. Better to have that clarity upfront than to take on clients with mismatched expectations.

This is where choice architecture matters. The way you frame the coaching relationship from the beginning shapes everything that follows. If you frame it as “I’ll help you lose 30 pounds,” you’ve architected a choice environment where every interaction will be evaluated against that single metric. If you frame it as “I’ll help you develop the skills and awareness to take care of yourself effectively,” you’ve architected an entirely different choice environment where progress can be recognised in many forms.

And when you’re working with clients, and they get frustrated by a lack of fast visible results, you have to hold steady. This is where a lot of coaches cave and revert back to outcome-focused tactics because they’re scared of losing the client. But if you’ve built trust and you’ve been consistently helping them see progress in other forms, you can weather those moments.

You can say, “I hear your frustration. Let’s look at everything you’ve learned and built over these past few weeks. And let’s talk about whether the approach we’re taking still feels aligned with what you need.” Sometimes you’ll adjust. Sometimes you’ll stay the course. But you’re doing it from a place of partnership and trust, not from fear and control.

Building trust in the process when you’re still learning to trust it yourself is hard, I won’t lie. It helps to document the small wins, to keep notes on the progress you see beyond the scale, to celebrate skill development with your clients so you’re training both of you to see success more broadly. It also helps to connect with other process-focused coaches, because this approach can feel lonely when the fitness industry is screaming about 30-day transformations and dramatic before-and-afters.

There’s an evolutionary mismatch happening here that’s worth understanding. Our brains evolved to respond to immediate feedback. When our ancestors hunted successfully, they ate that day. When they gathered berries, they had immediate sustenance. The delay between effort and outcome was minutes or hours, not months. But modern health and fitness goals operate on a completely different timeframe. You might train consistently for months before seeing significant visual changes. You might eat well for weeks before the scale reflects it. This delay between action and outcome is evolutionarily novel, and our brains aren’t wired for it.

That’s exactly why process focus works better than outcome focus. When you help clients find satisfaction in the immediate process (e.g. the feeling of moving their body, the practice of choosing nourishing food, the skill of listening to hunger signals), you’re working with their evolutionary wiring instead of against it. You’re creating immediate feedback loops that the brain can actually respond to, rather than asking them to delay gratification for months in service of an uncertain outcome.

This evolutionary lens helps explain why process focus is so powerful for long-term health and longevity. The Blue Zone research (Dan Buettner’s study of the world’s longest-lived populations) shows that one of the strongest predictors of longevity isn’t any particular diet or exercise program. It’s purpose. The Japanese call it ikigai: a reason for being.

People in these populations don’t exercise to look good or hit target heart rates. They move because their lives require it, because it’s woven into daily routines that are meaningful to them. They don’t eat restrictively to achieve body composition goals. They eat in ways that are culturally meaningful, socially connected, and aligned with their values.

When you help clients develop health practices as a source of purpose rather than just a means to an end, you’re not just changing their behaviour. You’re helping them cultivate what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia: human flourishing through the development of virtue and the living of a meaningful life.

Now, there’s a crucial distinction here between hedonic happiness and eudaimonic well-being. Hedonic happiness is ‘I’ll be happy when I lose 30 pounds.’ It’s outcome-dependent, temporary, subject to adaptation. You achieve the goal, get a spike of satisfaction, then return to baseline. Research on lottery winners and people who achieve major life goals confirms this again and again.

Eudaimonic well-being is ‘I find meaning in taking care of myself, in becoming stronger, in practicing self-discipline, in honouring my body.’ It’s process-based, sustainable, intrinsically valuable. It doesn’t depend on achieving any particular outcome. The practices themselves become sources of meaning.

Viktor Frankl, the existential psychotherapist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, taught that meaning comes from three sources: creative work or accomplishment, experiencing something or loving someone, and the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. Process-focused health coaching addresses all three. There’s the creative work of self-improvement and skill development. There’s the experience of embodied living, of moving well and feeling capable. And there’s the attitude of growth and curiosity we bring to the inherent difficulty of behaviour change.

When someone is outcome-obsessed, their entire health journey is instrumental; just a means to an end. There’s no inherent meaning in the daily choices. They’re just obstacles to get through.

When someone is process-focused, the journey itself becomes meaningful. Movement becomes an expression of values, not just calorie burning. Nutrition becomes self-care, not just macro tracking. Rest becomes self-respect, not just recovery protocol.

And this sense of purpose, this intrinsic meaning in daily practices, is what actually drives long-term health outcomes. Not the perfect program. Not the optimal macros. Not the most advanced training protocol. Fifty years of reasonably good practices sustained because they’re meaningful and aligned with who you want to be.

That’s what predicts longevity. That’s what predicts sustained health. That’s what process-focused coaching cultivates.

The Freedom of Process-Focused Coaching

Coaching this way is less stressful for you and more effective for your clients. Once you make this shift, you’ll wonder how you ever coached any other way. You stop lying awake at night worrying about your clients’ weigh-ins. You stop feeling responsible for their choices. You stop taking it personally when they have a setback. You start showing up to sessions genuinely curious about what they’ve discovered about themselves. You start seeing coaching as a collaborative exploration rather than a project you’re managing.

And your clients feel it. They relax. They stop performing for you and start being honest. They stop looking to you to fix them and start developing confidence in themselves. They become the kind of people who can navigate life’s complexity without needing step-by-step instructions.

The three pillars of Self-Determination Theory autonomy, competence, and relatedness, all strengthen when you coach this way. Clients make their own choices (autonomy). They develop real skills through practice and reflection (competence). And the relationship between you becomes one of partnership rather than authority-subject (relatedness).

This creates a positive feedback loop. More autonomy leads to more engagement leads to more skill development leads to more confidence leads to more autonomy. Compare that to the negative feedback loop of outcome obsession: anxiety about results leads to rigid control leads to reduced autonomy leads to dependence leads to fragility leads to more anxiety.

And this matters for literally every health outcome your clients care about. Their cardiovascular health, their metabolic flexibility, their body composition, their strength, their sleep quality, their stress resilience, their longevity, all of these emerge from consistent process, not from outcome obsession. You cannot force your resting heart rate down. You cannot will your way to better sleep. You cannot anxiety yourself into lower body fat. These are adaptive responses that happen when the conditions are right and you trust your body’s wisdom.

But you can show up for training consistently. You can practice good sleep hygiene. You can make nourishing food choices most of the time. You can manage stress through movement and breathing and boundaries. You can build strength progressively and patiently.

Process. All process. And when you coach the process well, when you help clients find meaning and purpose in these daily practices rather than treating them as obstacles to endure on the way to some outcome, the health markers take care of themselves. Not on your timeline. Not perfectly. Not without setbacks. But genuinely, sustainably, in ways that last. 

As Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Outcome-focused plans are brittle. They work great until life happens, until someone gets sick, or their schedule changes, or they hit a plateau, or a thousand other variables that you can’t control throw the plan off track. Then what?

Process-focused coaching creates adaptability. Because you’re not teaching them to follow a plan, you’re teaching them to respond skillfully to whatever comes up. You’re teaching them the OODA loop, the observe-orient-decide-act cycle that allows them to navigate complexity. When life punches them in the mouth, and it will, they don’t fall apart because they weren’t dependent on rigid adherence to a plan. They adjust, they adapt, they keep going.

This is the professional maturity that comes with shifting to process-focused coaching. It’s understanding that your job isn’t to create dependent clients who need you forever. It’s to work yourself out of a job by creating autonomous humans who have the skills and awareness to thrive on their own. That doesn’t mean you won’t have long-term clients. I have people I’ve worked with for years. But they’re with me because they value the specific knowledge and skills I have, not because they can’t function without me. That’s a completely different dynamic. They’re not dependent. They’re choosing to continue learning and growing with a trusted partner.

There’s something deeply satisfying about this kind of coaching relationship. You’re not just changing someone’s body. You’re helping them develop what the Greeks called eudaimonia (human flourishing), the kind of deep well-being that comes from living according to your values and developing your capabilities. That’s not something you can achieve through a 12-week transformation program. That’s the work of a lifetime, and you get to be a meaningful part of that journey.

So what would change in your coaching if you truly let go of outcome control? What would you do differently in your next session if you weren’t secretly panicking about whether your client would hit their goal? What questions would you ask? What would you celebrate? How would you show up?

I’ll give you a framework to work with, a kind of three-part guiding principle:

Process builds skill. Skill builds confidence. Confidence creates results.

That’s the sequence. Not results create confidence. Not motivation creates consistency. Process builds skill. Skill builds confidence. Confidence creates results. When you trust that sequence, when you really internalise it, your coaching will get dramatically better. You stop trying to force results and start cultivating the conditions where results emerge naturally.

Start there. Start with one client, one session, one conversation where you commit to being genuinely process-focused. See how it feels. Notice what changes. Ask yourself: what did I observe? How did the client respond? What would I do differently next time? Run your own OODA loop on your coaching.

And then do it again. And again. Because excellence isn’t an act, it’s a habit. You’re not going to become a process-focused coach by reading this article and having an intellectual understanding. You’re going to become one by practicing it, repeatedly, with awareness and reflection.

Here’s a thought experiment for you to really hammer this home. Imagine two versions of yourself five years from now. In one version, you’ve spent those five years chasing client outcomes, stressing about scale weight, white-knuckling people through programs, and measuring your worth by before-and-after photos. In the other version, you’ve spent those five years developing your skill at helping people develop awareness, building autonomy, and fostering genuine behaviour change that lasts.

Which version of you is a better coach? Which version is happier? Which version is making a real difference in people’s lives?

You already know the answer.

The fitness industry needs more coaches who are focused on building capable, autonomous humans and fewer coaches who are just trying to create dramatic transformations for their Instagram feed. We need coaches who understand that real, lasting change is built through the slow, often unsexy work of developing awareness and skills. You can be that kind of coach. You already are, probably, in ways you don’t give yourself credit for. Now it’s about being intentional about it, committing to it fully, and trusting that the results will follow when you focus on the process.

They will. I promise you, they will.

Having said all of that, you do still need a working model of physiology, nutrition and training to actually get results. Otherwise, you’re just doing unstructured tinkering and calling it science. So, for those of you ready to take the next step in professional development, we also offer advanced courses. Our Nutrition Coach Certification 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.

If you want to keep sharpening your coaching craft, we’ve built a free Content Hub filled with resources just for coaches. Inside, you’ll find the Coaches Corner, which has a collection of tools, frameworks, and real-world insights you can start using right away. We also share regular tips and strategies on Instagram and YouTube, so you’ve always got fresh ideas and practical examples at your fingertips. And if you want everything delivered straight to you, the easiest way is to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss new material.