Systems-Based Coaching: Building Long-Term Results Without Relying on Motivation

Unfortunately, like a lot of coaches, you may be coaching using a motivation based coaching model, rather than a systems-based coaching model. The issue with this is that motivation is a terrible foundation for coaching.

I know, I know. That sounds almost blasphemous in an industry built on transformation stories and before-and-after photos. But hear me out, because this shift in thinking completely changed how I coach, and more importantly, it dramatically improved my clients’ long-term success rates.

In my early years as a coach, I thought my job was to get people fired up. I’d send motivational texts, share inspiring quotes, and give rousing pep talks before tough workouts. And you know what? It worked. For about three weeks. Maybe a month if I was lucky.

Then life would happen. A stressful work project. A sick kid. A bad night’s sleep. And suddenly, all that motivation I’d carefully built up would evaporate. My clients would miss sessions, stop tracking their food, and eventually ghost me entirely. I’d blame them for not being committed enough. They’d blame themselves for lacking willpower. Everyone felt like a failure.

But the problem wasn’t that my clients weren’t motivated. The problem was that I was building their entire health journey on the shakiest possible foundation. Motivation is wonderful when it shows up, but it’s about as reliable as weather in spring. And if you wouldn’t bet your salary on feeling motivated tomorrow, why would you bet your health on it? And as a coach, why would you quite literally bet your salary on your clients being motivated? You can’t build a sustainable coaching practice, or sustainable client results, on something so fundamentally unstable.

TL;DR

Motivation is an unreliable foundation for coaching. It’s like weather, unpredictable and fleeting. Instead of trying to keep clients pumped up, coaches should become “systems architects” who build structures, processes, and environments that produce results regardless of how motivated someone feels on any given day.

The key is starting absurdly small and making these tiny habits so easy they’re nearly impossible to fail at. Success builds self-efficacy, which compounds over time. The approach draws on neuroscience (habits move from the energy-intensive prefrontal cortex to the automatic basal ganglia), behavioural economics (reducing friction and designing choice architecture), and philosophy (Aristotle’s insight that excellence is a habit, not an act).

Systems-based coaching focuses on what’s controllable: environment design, implementation intentions (“when X, then Y”), habit stacking, and identity-based change. Rather than asking “How motivated are you?” ask “What made that easy?” Setbacks become feedback about the system, not personal failures. The goal isn’t dramatic three-month transformations but sustainable change that lasts years. Creating clients who succeed without needing constant external motivation because their systems work even on their worst days.

While systems feel restrictive, they are actually creating freedom by eliminating constant decision-making and willpower depletion. You’re not helping clients chase motivation; you’re helping them build a life where healthy behaviours are simply who they are.

Understanding the Real Game

What ultimately led to being a better coach was that I stopped trying to be a cheerleader and started becoming a systems architect.

Systems-based coaching isn’t about getting your clients pumped up. It’s about building structures, processes, and environments that produce results whether your client wakes up feeling motivated or not. It’s the difference between hoping your client has enough willpower to resist the break room biscuits and helping them pack a satisfying mid-morning snack so they’re not starving by 10 a.m.

Think about it this way. Motivation is weather. Systems are climate. Weather changes by the hour. Climate is what you can actually plan around. Your job as a coach isn’t to manufacture endless supplies of motivation for your clients. That’s exhausting for you and disempowering for them. Your job is to help them build systems that work even on their worst days.

This isn’t just coaching philosophy. This is biology. Your client’s resting heart rate doesn’t respond to motivation. Their VO2 max doesn’t care about their feelings on any given Tuesday. Body composition changes, muscle hypertrophy, strength gains, and improved aerobic capacity, these physiological adaptations emerge from consistent stimulus over time, not from heroic bursts of effort followed by collapse. The human body is essentially a biological system that responds to patterns, to regularity, and to what happens most of the time.

You can’t motivate your way to a lower resting heart rate. You can’t willpower your way to increased mitochondrial density. These adaptations require redundancy and reliability, standard operating procedures, and daily practice. They require systems.

The Science That Changed My Mind

When I discovered BJ Fogg’s work on behaviour change, something clicked for me. Fogg talks about how behaviour happens when three elements converge at the same moment: motivation, ability, and a prompt. For years, I’d been obsessing over the motivation part, trying to crank it as high as possible. But Fogg showed me that motivation is actually the most unreliable of the three elements.

Ability and prompts? Those we can design. Those we can control. Those we can systematise.

If you make a behaviour easy enough, it doesn’t matter if motivation is low. If you create the right prompt at the right time, the behaviour happens almost automatically. This is where real coaching happens, in the unglamorous work of making things easier and creating better cues.

James Clear drives this point home beautifully when he says you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. I’ve watched this play out hundreds of times. The client with modest goals but excellent systems will outperform the highly motivated client with big dreams and no structure every single time. It’s not even close.

This aligns perfectly with what cognitive neuroscience tells us about how the brain actually works. Our prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for willpower and decision-making, feels like it has limited capacity. It feels like it depletes throughout the day. Decision fatigue feels real. Every choice we make, every time we resist temptation through sheer willpower, feels like we’re draining a finite resource. Systems work because they transfer behaviours from the energy-intensive prefrontal cortex to the basal ganglia, where habits live. Once something becomes automatic, it’s no longer a decision. It’s just what you do. The cognitive load drops to nearly zero.

From an evolutionary psychology perspective, this makes perfect sense. Our brains didn’t evolve for long-term optimisation. They evolved for immediate survival. The limbic system, our ancient emotional brain, prioritises now over later. It engages in what is called hyperbolic discounting, dramatically overvaluing immediate rewards while undervaluing future ones. This is why motivation-based approaches feel so good in the moment but fail over time. They’re fighting millions of years of evolutionary programming.

Systems-based coaching works with our evolutionary wiring, not against it. We evolved to conserve energy, to avoid unnecessary effort, to default to the path of least resistance. Good systems respect this by making the beneficial choice the easy choice, by reducing the friction between intention and action, and by designing environments where the right behaviour is the default option.

The Power of Starting Absurdly Small

One of the hardest things you’ll do as a systems-based coach is convince your clients, and maybe yourself, to start smaller than feels reasonable. I mean genuinely tiny. Laughably small. Two push-ups small. One vegetable at dinner small. A five-minute walk small.

This is just the minimum viable product. You’re not building the final version. You’re building the simplest thing that works, that you can test and iterate on. In startups, as I am sure you have seen, they launch with bare-bones features and add complexity only after the foundation proves stable. The same principle applies to habit formation.

Your clients will resist this. They’ll want to go bigger. They’re motivated right now, after all, and they want to capitalise on it. But that initial motivation is precious, and we need to use it wisely. Don’t use it to go hard and burn out. Use it to build a system so solid that it survives the inevitable motivation crash.

When a habit is tiny, it’s almost impossible to fail at it. And when your clients can’t fail, they build self-efficacy. Self-efficacy, as Albert Bandura demonstrated, is the belief in your own capability to succeed. It’s built through mastery experiences, not through being told you can do it. Every tiny success strengthens the neural pathway that says, “I’m someone who follows through.”

The tiny habits approach also teaches you to look for what Fogg calls “after” moments. These are existing behaviours that can serve as anchors for new habits. After I pour my morning coffee, I’ll do two push-ups. After I brush my teeth at night, I’ll lay out my workout clothes. After I sit down for lunch, I’ll take three deep breaths. These anchors are implementation intentions, what psychologists call “when-then” or “if-then” plans. They leverage existing procedural memory to establish new patterns.

And here’s the part that felt silly to me at first but turned out to be crucial: celebration. When your client does that tiny habit, they need to feel successful. This isn’t just feel-good nonsense. This is neuroscience. The brain’s dopamine system doesn’t just respond to anticipation and outcomes; it responds to progress. When you complete a behaviour and immediately feel good about it and are celebrated because of it, you’re creating a prediction error in your reward system. Your brain thinks, “Oh, that felt better than expected,” and strengthens the neural connection. That feeling is what wires the habit into your brain. It’s what makes them want to do it again tomorrow.

Tiny habits create frequent goal completions, which means frequent dopamine hits, which means sustained engagement. It’s behavioural design informed by how reward circuitry actually works.

The Philosophical Foundation: Excellence as Habit

There’s a reason this approach works, and it goes deeper than neuroscience or evolutionary psychology. Aristotle figured this out twenty-four centuries ago when he wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” (paraphrased by Will Durant).

This is the philosophical bedrock of systems-based coaching. Aristotle understood that virtue ethics isn’t about having good intentions or feeling virtuous. It’s about acting virtuously so consistently that it becomes your character. You don’t become courageous by feeling brave. You become courageous by acting bravely in small ways until courage becomes who you are.

The same principle applies to health. You don’t become healthy by feeling motivated to be healthy. You become healthy by acting like a healthy person so consistently that it becomes your identity. This is what psychologists call identity-based habits. It’s not about what you want to achieve, it’s about who you want to become. And you become that person through repeated action, not repeated intention.

The Stoics understood this too. Epictetus taught that we should focus on what’s within our control and accept what isn’t. Motivation? Not in your control. It comes and goes like weather. But your systems? Those are entirely within your control. The Stoic sage doesn’t rely on feeling motivated. They rely on disciplined practice, on doing what needs to be done regardless of how they feel. This is freedom. Not freedom from discipline, but freedom through discipline.

What we call discipline is often just a good system masquerading as willpower. When people look at someone who exercises every morning and think “Wow, they have such discipline,” they’re usually looking at someone who has eliminated the need for discipline through excellent system design. They laid out their clothes the night before. They scheduled the workout at a time that works. They found a form of exercise they actually enjoy. They removed the friction. What looks like exceptional self-control is often just exceptional environmental design.

Truth is what works. We judge ideas by their consequences, not their elegance. And systems work. Motivation-based coaching produces dramatic short-term results followed by dramatic collapse. Systems-based coaching produces modest, compounding results that accelerate over time. 

There’s even an existentialist argument here. Sartre said existence precedes essence; we’re not born with a fixed nature, we create ourselves through our choices and actions. Systems are the scaffolding for self-creation. Every time your client follows their morning routine, they’re not just exercising, they’re authoring themselves. They’re choosing who they’re becoming. That’s existential responsibility in action.

Building Systems That Actually Last

Once you’ve got your client successfully doing something small, your job is to build systems around it that make it stick and allow it to grow. This is where environment design becomes your best friend, and where insights from choice architecture and behavioural economics become immediately practical.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, in their work on nudge theory, showed that small changes in how choices are presented can dramatically alter behaviour without restricting freedom. As a coach, you’re essentially a choice architect for your clients. You’re designing the context in which they make daily decisions about movement, nutrition, sleep, and stress management.

I spend a lot of time with my clients talking about friction. Not the physics kind, but the kind that exists between them and the behaviours they want to do. Every extra step, every additional decision, every moment of inconvenience adds friction. And friction kills habits, especially when motivation is low.

From a pure physics perspective, friction is resistance to motion. In behavioural terms, friction is anything that makes a behaviour harder to initiate. Your job is to eliminate friction for the behaviours you want and deliberately add friction to the behaviours you don’t. Keep the running shoes by the door. Prep the breakfast ingredients the night before. Delete the food delivery apps. Put the TV remote in a drawer. These aren’t trivial tweaks. They’re leveraging what behavioural designers call default effects and loss aversion to reshape the decision architecture of daily life.

Donella Meadows, the systems theorist, talked about leverage points, which are places in complex systems where small changes can produce large effects. In your client’s life, these leverage points are often environmental. Moving the fruit bowl to the counter. Changing the route home to avoid the drive-through. These tiny environmental shifts have cascading effects because they alter the default option, and humans are powerfully biased toward defaults.

I also help my clients think about identity, not just actions. It’s one thing to go to the gym. It’s another thing to become someone who exercises. The shift sounds subtle, but it’s profound. This is where behavioural activation from cognitive behavioural therapy becomes relevant. In CBT, particularly in treating depression, therapists learned that you don’t wait until someone feels better to act differently. You act differently, and the feelings follow. Action precedes motivation, not the other way around.

When you help a client adopt an identity, they start making decisions from that identity automatically. They don’t have to debate whether to work out. People who exercise work out. That’s just what they do. This is self-determination theory in action. When behaviour is integrated into your sense of self, it’s no longer externally motivated or even consciously decided. It’s simply an expression of who you are.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), they call this committed action based on values. You clarify what matters to you (like health, longevity, being able to play with your grandkids) and then you commit to actions aligned with those values, regardless of whether you feel like it in the moment. ACT also teaches psychological flexibility and cognitive defusion, the ability to notice thoughts like “I’m not motivated today” without being controlled by them. You observe the thought, acknowledge it, and act according to your values anyway.

Implementation intentions are another powerful tool in your systems toolkit. These are the “when-then” plans that remove decision-making from the equation. When it’s six a.m., then I work out. When I feel stressed, then I go for a walk. When I’m tempted to skip a meal, then I have a protein shake. These plans act like psychological guardrails, keeping your clients on track even when they’re operating on autopilot.

This works because it bypasses the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of your brain that detects conflict between competing goals. When you’ve pre-decided what to do in a given situation, there’s no conflict to detect, no willpower to deploy. The behaviour becomes nearly automatic.

Habit stacking builds on this by linking new behaviours to ones that are already solid. If your client never misses their morning coffee routine, that’s the foundation you build on. The existing habit becomes the cue for the new one, and you’re not asking them to remember something completely new or find extra time in their day.

What you’re really doing is creating what Charles Duhigg calls keystone habits. These are habits that trigger a cascade of other positive behaviours. The person who starts exercising regularly often finds themselves naturally eating better, sleeping more consistently, and managing stress more effectively. These aren’t separate decisions. They’re second-order effects of the keystone habit, ripples spreading through the system.

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The Physiological Payoff: What Systems Actually Build

Let’s get concrete about what we’re actually building here. When I talk about systems-based coaching and systems creating long-term results, I’m not speaking metaphorically. I’m talking about measurable, objective improvements in human health and performance.

Resting heart rate, for instance. A lower resting heart rate indicates improved cardiovascular efficiency, as your heart doesn’t have to work as hard to meet your body’s demands. But you don’t get there through motivation. You get there through consistent cardiovascular training over months. Three intense weeks followed by three months off? Your resting heart rate goes nowhere. Moderate, consistent training that happens because it’s part of your system? Your resting heart rate drops, sometimes dramatically.

The same principle applies to VO2 max, the gold standard measure of aerobic fitness. VO2 max improves through repeated cardiovascular stress followed by adaptation and recovery. It requires progressive overload applied consistently over extended periods. 

Body composition changes demand sustained caloric and macronutrient patterns. Not heroic restriction for a few weeks, but manageable patterns sustained for months and years. Muscle hypertrophy requires progressive mechanical tension over time. Strength gains depend on consistent progressive overload. These aren’t outcomes you can sprint toward. They’re outcomes that emerge from the compound interest of daily habits.

Albert Einstein supposedly called compound interest the most powerful force in the universe. Whether he said it or not, the principle applies perfectly to habit formation. A 1% improvement repeated daily doesn’t sound impressive. But compounded over a year, that’s a 37-fold improvement. James Clear calls this the aggregation of marginal gains. Dave Brailsford, the cycling coach who transformed British Cycling from mediocrity to dominance, built his entire approach around it.

The beauty of this approach is that small, sustainable improvements compound without increasing injury risk, burnout, or life disruption. You’re not trying to change everything at once. You’re trying to change one thing, let it stabilise, then build on it. This is how biological systems actually improve, through progressive adaptation, not through shock and awe. Systems rather than motivation.

But the benefits extend beyond what we can measure with a heart rate monitor or body composition scan. Sleep quality improves when you have consistent sleep hygiene systems. Stress management improves when you have reliable practices, not occasional crisis interventions. Health span and longevity (actual years of healthy, functional life) correlate strongly with sustainable lifestyle patterns, not with periodic intensive interventions.

Look at the Blue Zones research, Dan Buettner’s study of the places where people supposedly live longest. They don’t have motivation. They have systems embedded in their environment and culture. They walk because their towns are built for walking. They eat well because that’s what their community eats. They have social connections because it’s built into daily life. They’ve systematised longevity without ever thinking about systems.

This connects directly to what Aristotle was talking about with eudaimonia. This is often translated as happiness or flourishing, but really means something closer to living well or living excellently, as that is the only way you can consistently reach flourishing. Eudaimonia isn’t a feeling you chase. It’s a state that emerges from living in accordance with virtue, from actualising your potential, from functioning excellently over time. It’s the outcome of good systems applied to a human life.

When your clients build systems that improve their health, they’re not just changing their body composition or resting heart rate. They’re building agency, self-efficacy, and self-trust. They’re proving to themselves that they’re capable, that they can follow through, that they have control over their lives. This is intrinsic motivation in the self-determination theory sense. It’s the deep satisfaction that comes from autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Purpose and meaning don’t come from feeling motivated. They come from consistent action aligned with your values. When you help a client build systems that express what they care about (like being healthy enough to hike with their kids, strong enough to lift their grandchildren, fit enough to travel in retirement), you’re not just helping them exercise more. You’re helping them live a life aligned with what matters to them. That’s coaching at its deepest level.

Your Framework for Implementation

When I work with a new client now, I follow a pretty consistent process. Think of this as a diagnostic protocol, similar to how an engineer would assess a structure or a doctor would evaluate a patient. You’re looking for the current state of the system before you start making changes.

First, I audit what’s already working. Most people have some systems already in place, even if they don’t think of them that way. They might always walk the dog at 7 a.m. or always make coffee a certain way. These existing routines are gold because they’re already automatic. They’ve already made the transition from prefrontal cortex effort to basal ganglia automation. They’re habits in the true neurological sense; behavioural sequences that run with minimal conscious oversight.

This is where you’re looking for path dependence. Your client’s current life has momentum, existing patterns that are self-reinforcing. You’re not trying to fight all that momentum. You’re trying to find where you can attach new behaviours to existing patterns with minimal disruption. You’re looking for the path of least resistance that still moves toward their goals.

Then I work with them to identify the smallest viable habit that will move them toward their goal. Not the most impressive habit. Not the one that will get them there fastest. The one they can do even on a terrible day. That’s our starting point.

This is where you need to understand the fresh start effect from behavioural science. People are more likely to pursue goals after temporal landmarks like New Year’s, birthdays, or Mondays. But you can create artificial fresh starts by framing the tiny habit as a new beginning, a new identity. “Starting today, you’re someone who does two push-ups after coffee.” That framing matters more than you’d think.

Next comes environment design. We look at their physical space, their schedule, their relationships, and their default options. Where can we reduce friction? Where can we add helpful cues? Where are the landmines that consistently trip them up? We design around all of it.

This is applied choice architecture. You’re not restricting freedom, and your client can still make any choice they want. You’re just making some choices easier and others harder. You’re shaping the terrain of decision-making. Thaler and Sunstein call this libertarian paternalism, but I just call it smart coaching. You’re setting up your client to succeed by designing their environment for success.

Creating clear triggers is crucial. Vague plans like “I’ll eat better” or “I’ll work out more” are plans to fail. We need specific, we need concrete, we need tied to something else that already happens. The more specific the trigger, the more likely the behaviour. This is where implementation intentions show their power. “When the alarm goes off” is better than “in the morning.” “After I close my laptop for lunch” is better than “at lunchtime.”

Then we build in ways to track and celebrate. Tracking doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple check mark on a calendar can work wonders. What you’re doing here is creating a visual feedback loop. Feedback loops are critical in any complex system as they provide information about whether the system is working and create motivation to keep it working. That string of check marks becomes its own reinforcement. Breaking the streak starts to feel bad. The system becomes self-perpetuating.

Celebration, as we discussed, is about dopamine and reward circuitry. But it’s also about positive reinforcement. You’re pairing the behaviour with a positive outcome, strengthening the association. Over time, the behaviour itself becomes inherently rewarding. You’re literally rewiring your client’s brain through repeated pairing of action and positive feeling.

Finally, and this is where a lot of coaches drop the ball, we iterate and expand gradually. The two push-ups become five. The single vegetable becomes two. The five-minute walk becomes ten. But we only expand when the current habit is so automatic that it would feel weird not to do it. That’s your signal that the system is solid enough to build on.

This is the ratchet effect. In mechanical terms, a ratchet allows motion in one direction while preventing backward movement. Each habit, once established, becomes a platform you can build on without worrying about sliding back. You’re creating irreversibility, which is exactly what you want. The goal isn’t just to reach a destination. It’s to reach a destination from which backsliding is difficult or impossible.

Complex systems have what are called attractors, which are states that the system naturally gravitates toward. Initially, your client’s life has attractors around sedentary behaviour, convenient food choices, and late nights. You’re trying to create new attractors around movement, nutrition, and recovery. The way you do that is by making those new behaviours easier, more rewarding, and more deeply connected to the rest of their life until they become the new default state.

The Motivation Question: Reframing the Conversation

Now, I can hear some of you thinking: “But my clients need to be motivated. If they’re not motivated, why would they even hire me?” Fair question. Let me reframe it for you, because this is where a lot of coaches get stuck in outdated thinking.

Motivation is useful at exactly one point in the coaching journey: the beginning. That initial spark of motivation is what gets someone to reach out, to schedule a consultation, to sign up. And that’s perfect. That’s exactly what it should be used for.

But the key is that you need to use that initial motivation wisely. Don’t use it to go as hard as possible for as long as the feeling lasts. Use it to build systems that will work when the motivation inevitably fades. Tell your clients upfront that you’re not interested in riding the motivation wave until it crashes. You’re interested in building something that lasts.

This shifts your entire conversation with clients. Instead of asking “How motivated are you?” start asking “What made that easy?” Instead of “Do you want this bad enough?” try “What got in your way?” These questions direct attention to systems, to structure, and to what’s actually controllable.

This is straight from solution-focused therapy, a form of psychotherapy that emphasises what’s working rather than what’s wrong. When you ask “What made that easy?” you’re helping clients identify the conditions that support success. Then you can deliberately create more of those conditions. You’re not relying on them to generate motivation. You’re helping them engineer situations where success is likely.

In Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT), the focus is on identifying and disputing irrational beliefs. One of the most common irrational beliefs in fitness is “I need to feel motivated to work out.” That’s simply false. You can work out unmotivated. You can eat well unmotivated. The belief that you need a certain feeling before you can act is what REBT would call a “must” or a “should” that creates unnecessary suffering.

When you help clients recognise that they don’t need to feel motivated, you’re liberating them from waiting for a feeling that may never come. You’re shifting their locus of control from internal emotions (which they can’t directly control) to external systems (which they absolutely can control). This is empowering in a way that motivation-based coaching never is.

And here’s something that might surprise you: motivation often follows action, not the other way around. When your clients successfully follow their tiny systems, when they string together days and weeks of consistency, motivation shows up naturally. They feel capable. They feel proud. They want to keep going. But that motivation is now a nice bonus, not the foundation everything depends on. It’s dessert, not dinner.

This is behavioural activation from CBT, but it’s also just common sense once you see it clearly. We don’t feel our way into acting. We act our way into feeling. The person who waits to feel motivated to exercise will wait forever. The person who exercises regardless of motivation will eventually feel motivated because they’re exercising. The causal arrow runs from behaviour to feeling, not the other way around.

The Pitfalls You’ll Face: Learning to Think in Systems

Let me warn you about the mistakes I see coaches make when they’re trying to implement a systems-based coaching approach, because these mistakes reveal how hard it is to genuinely shift from motivation-based thinking to systems-based thinking.

The biggest one is moving too fast. Your client is doing great with their morning routine, and you get excited and add three more things. Suddenly, nothing is getting done. Systems need time to become automatic. Resist the urge to pile on just because things are going well. 

Neural pathways strengthen through repeated firing. Each time your client does the behaviour, the pathway gets a little stronger. But it takes time, usually somewhere between 18 to 254 days for a behaviour to become automatic, according to research, with significant individual variation.

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Rushing leads to mistakes. Taking your time to do things correctly leads to speed and efficiency down the road. The same applies to building habits. The coach who patiently builds one solid habit at a time will get their client to their goals faster than the coach who tries to change everything at once. Changing lost of things at once can work when you are a very skilful coach, but you will get better results with trying to do less until you become a very skilful coach (which you will become with practice).

Another trap is forgetting to celebrate the small wins. It feels silly to make a big deal about someone drinking an extra glass of water or doing two minutes of stretching. But those celebrations wire in the habit. They create positive associations. They build momentum. Don’t skip this step just because it doesn’t feel impressive enough.

I also see coaches neglect the environment piece entirely. They focus on willpower and discipline when they should be focusing on setup and design. If your client has to exert willpower every single time, the system isn’t good enough yet. Keep tweaking the environment until the right choice becomes the easy choice.

This connects to a concept that is often called structural determinism, which is the idea that structures shape behaviour more than individual will does. We like to believe in individual agency and free will, and those things matter. But they matter less than we think. The environment is more powerful than intention. Design is more powerful than discipline. Once you really internalise this, your coaching becomes dramatically more effective.

There’s also a tendency to assume that what works for you will work for your client. Maybe you love morning workouts, but your client is a night owl. Maybe you thrive on detailed tracking, but your client finds it anxiety-inducing. Good systems are customised. They fit the individual’s lifestyle, preferences, and circumstances. Stay flexible.

Finally, systems aren’t set-it-and-forget-it. Life changes. Schedules shift. What worked in summer might not work in winter. What worked when they were single might not work now that they have kids. Part of your job is to regularly revisit and adjust the systems with your clients. 

Ultimately, living systems don’t reach a static state. They continuously adapt to maintain balance in changing conditions. Your client’s life is a living system. The habits that maintain health in one season of life may need adjustment in another. So you should build in regular check-ins to assess whether the system is still serving them.

Making This Shift in Your Practice: Becoming a Systems Architect

If you’re reading this and thinking “Okay, I want to coach this way,” you’ll need to adjust how you onboard and work with clients. This isn’t just a tactical shift. It’s a fundamental reorientation in how you think about your role.

Start by communicating this approach from the very first conversation. Let potential clients know that you’re not in the business of temporary transformations fueled by unsustainable effort requiring lots of motivation. You’re in the business of building systems that create permanent change. Frame it clearly: “I’m not going to pump you up and watch you crash. I’m going to help you build something that lasts.”

The right clients will be relieved to hear this. They’ve tried the motivation approach before. They’ve done the boot camps, the challenges, and the 21-day transformations. They know it doesn’t work. They’re looking for something different, even if they couldn’t articulate what. When you offer them systems-based coaching, they’ll recognise it as the answer they’ve been searching for.

The wrong clients (i.e the ones looking for a quick fix or someone to provide external motivation) will self-select out. That’s good. Those clients wouldn’t have succeeded with you anyway, and they would have left feeling like they failed when really the approach failed them.

Change the questions you ask in your assessments. Don’t just ask about goals and motivation. Ask about routines, about what’s already working, about where things typically break down. Ask about their environment, their schedule constraints, and their energy patterns throughout the day. You’re looking for system gaps, not motivation gaps.

Here are the kinds of questions that reveal useful information: “Walk me through a typical weekday from wake-up to bedtime.” “What health behaviours are you already consistent with?” “When does exercise typically fall apart for you? What’s happening in your life when that occurs?” “What would need to be true for eating well to feel effortless?” These questions point toward systems, toward structures, toward design opportunities.

When setbacks happen, and they will, reframe them immediately. This isn’t failure. This is feedback about the system. The system wasn’t robust enough yet. The environment wasn’t set up quite right. The habit was still a touch too big. What can we adjust? What can we learn?

This is the engineering mindset applied to behaviour change. Engineers don’t view failed prototypes as personal failures. They view them as information. The prototype revealed a weakness in the design. Now we know what to fix. When you bring this mindset to coaching, setbacks lose their emotional charge. They become data. And data is useful.

This also connects to what Carol Dweck calls growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Fixed mindset says, “I failed because I’m not disciplined enough.” Growth mindset says, “I failed because my system wasn’t strong enough yet.” The first is a dead end. The second is a starting point for improvement.

You’ll also need to build your own coaching systems to support this approach. Create templates for habit stacking. Develop your own environment audit checklist. Build a library of tiny habit options for different goals. Use implementation intention frameworks. Have a standard process for celebrating wins. The more systematised your coaching process is, the more bandwidth you’ll have to customise the actual habits for each client.

This is where you’re eating your own cooking. You’re using systems to deliver systems-based coaching. This might sound meta, but it’s essential. If you’re operating on motivation and willpower, you’ll burn out. If you systematise your coaching delivery, you create space for the creative, customised work that actually helps clients.

The Paradox at the Heart of It All

Now, something that trips people up is that systems feel restrictive. But they actually create freedom. This seems paradoxical until you understand what freedom actually means in practice.

When you have no systems, you feel free: you can do whatever you want whenever you want. But in practice, you’re enslaved to your impulses, your moods, and your circumstances. You’re controlled by whatever is easiest in the moment. That’s not freedom. That’s reactive living.

When you have good systems, you’ve chosen in advance how you want to live. You’re not deciding each morning whether to exercise. You’ve already decided. That decision is made. Now you just follow the system. This frees up massive amounts of mental energy for things that actually require decision-making. You’re not controlled by circumstances. You’re living according to your values. That’s actual freedom.

The Stoics understood this deeply. True freedom isn’t the absence of constraints. True freedom is living according to reason and virtue regardless of external circumstances. Systems are the practical implementation of this philosophy. They’re how you live according to your values even when you don’t feel like it.

There’s another paradox worth noting: discipline is easier than chaos. We think of discipline as hard and spontaneity as easy. But in practice, the undisciplined life is exhausting. Constant decision-making. Constant negotiation with yourself. Constant stress about whether you’re doing enough. The disciplined life, built on solid systems, is actually easier. The decisions are made. The path is clear. You just walk it.

This connects to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, which is the state of optimal experience where you’re fully absorbed in an activity. Flow happens most easily when the challenge matches your skill level and when you’re not constantly deciding what to do next. Good systems create the conditions for flow. Bad systems, or no systems, create constant decision fatigue that prevents flow from emerging. Imagine being able to effortlessly sink into a flow state at will because your mind is not cluttered with thoughts you don’t care about and issues that could have been solved with some basic systems.

The Deeper Game: Eudaimonia and the Good Life

Let’s zoom out to the biggest question, because this is ultimately what we’re here for. What is the good life? How should we live? These are ancient questions, philosophical questions, questions that every wisdom tradition has grappled with.

Aristotle’s answer was eudaimonia: human flourishing, living excellently, actualising your potential. And his insight was that eudaimonia comes from virtue, and virtue comes from habit. You become excellent by practising excellence. You become good by repeatedly doing good things until goodness becomes your character.

This is profound for coaching. You’re not just helping people lose weight or get stronger. You’re helping them become excellent. You’re helping them actualise their potential. You’re helping them live well. That’s the deeper game.

And the path to that excellence isn’t through dramatic transformation or intense motivation. It’s through consistent practice of health-supporting behaviours until those behaviours become character. Until being healthy is simply who they are.

Viktor Frankl, the existential psychotherapist, wrote about the search for meaning as the primary human drive. And meaning, he found, comes not from happiness or pleasure but from purpose, from contributing something, from becoming who you’re capable of becoming. When you help clients build systems that improve their health, you’re helping them preserve and extend their capacity to pursue meaning. You’re helping them maintain the physical foundation required for a meaningful life.

Purpose doesn’t emerge from motivation. Purpose creates motivation. When your client is deeply connected to why their health matters, because they want to see their grandchildren grow up, because they have work they care about that requires energy and focus, because they want to travel and explore in their retirement. That purpose informs their systems. The systems are in service of the purpose. That’s when coaching becomes truly powerful.

This is where ACT’s emphasis on values-based living becomes relevant. You don’t build systems for their own sake. You build systems that allow you to live according to your values. If family is a core value, you build health systems that ensure you’re present and energetic for family. If adventure is a core value, you build systems that maintain the fitness required for adventure. The systems serve the life, not the other way around.

The following articles/tools can be quite helpful to explore here: 

• ACT Hexaflex Assessment Tool
• Wheel of Life Self Assessment Tool
• Triage Values Assessment Tool
• Triage Goals-Values Congruency Tool
• Triage Personal Values & Life Priorities Assessment
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Assessment

The Long Game: What You’re Really Building With Systems-Based Coaching

This overall approach builds better coaches and better results, but it requires patience. You won’t get those dramatic three-month transformations that make great Instagram content, at least not initially. Those transformations are real, but they’re usually not sustainable. What you will get are clients who are still successful two years later, still improving, still building on their systems.

You’ll create clients who succeed without needing you to constantly pump them up. Clients who solve their own problems because you’ve taught them how to design systems. Clients who don’t fall apart when life gets hard because their systems are built to withstand normal human challenges.

When you teach a client to build systems, you’re not just improving their health. You’re increasing their human capital. You’re teaching them a meta-skill they can apply to any area of life. That’s more valuable than any physical transformation. And there’s a deep satisfaction in this work that you don’t get from the motivation-based approach. Instead of feeling like you have to be “on” all the time, constantly inspiring and energising, you get to be a thoughtful architect. You get to solve puzzles. You get to watch simple systems compound into remarkable results over time. It’s intellectually engaging in a way that motivation-based coaching never is.

Systems don’t feel restrictive to your clients. They feel freeing. When you have systems, you don’t have to debate every decision. You don’t have to rely on willpower. You don’t have to feel guilty when motivation is low. You just follow the system. There’s a real peace in that, and your clients will feel it.

This connects to what positive psychology calls psychological well-being, not just the absence of pathology, but the presence of flourishing. Systems create autonomy (you’re choosing how to live), competence (you’re succeeding at what you attempt), and relatedness (the social support within good systems). These are the three pillars of well-being according to self-determination theory. You’re not just making people healthier. You’re making them psychologically healthier, more autonomous, more capable, more connected.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. We evolved to live in tribes with strong social structures and predictable routines. Modern life offers unprecedented freedom, but that freedom comes with unprecedented stress and decision fatigue. Good systems recreate some of the structure that our brains evolved to operate within. They’re not fighting human nature. They’re working with it.

So here’s my challenge to you: pick one client you’re working with right now. Just one. Identify one tiny habit you can help them build this week. Make it so small it feels almost silly. Help them find the right anchor, design the environment, and celebrate the wins. Watch what happens when you stop trying to motivate them and start helping them build systems instead.

And the deeper challenge is to apply this to your own life. Where are you relying on motivation when you should be building systems? Where are you making things harder than they need to be? Where could you reduce friction, create better cues, and design your environment for success?

Because the truth is that you can’t give what you don’t have. If you’re running your own life on motivation and willpower, you’ll burn out trying to coach this way. But if you genuinely live a systems-based life, if you experience firsthand the freedom that comes from good systems, you’ll coach this way naturally. It will be obvious. It will be the only thing that makes sense.

This is the work. Not sexy, not dramatic, but devastatingly effective. It’s the difference between coaches who create temporary transformations and coaches who create permanent change. It’s the difference between clients who succeed for a season and clients who build a life.

And that’s exactly what world-class coaching looks like.

Aristotle was right twenty-four centuries ago, and he’s still right today: we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Your job is to help your clients build those habits, one tiny system at a time. Do that well, and everything else, the fitness, the health, the body composition, the longevity, the eudaimonia, follows naturally.

The motivation will come and go. The systems will remain. Build systems.

However, you do still need a working model of physiology, nutrition and training to actually get results. 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.