Teodora's notebook has the same line under three different dates: "Talk to Baba." Under the last one, in smaller writing, she's added: "Push harder?"
Her client is the eldest daughter in a family building-supplies business in Ras Al Khor, and she came to coaching with one aim: to tell her father she won't be taking over the company. In session two she wrote the sentence she'd say to him. In session three she agreed to say it that weekend. In session four she hadn't, and agreed again, warmly. In session five she brought six good reasons the timing was wrong, and met every question about them with a seventh.
Forty minutes before session six, the client cancels: something's come up at work, and could they move to next week? The first thing Teodora feels is relief, and the second is how little she likes the first.
She types "No problem at all" and sends it.
Teodora and her client are composites. The relief is the part of the story this guide keeps coming back to.
What is client resistance in coaching?
Client resistance is the name coaches give to the ways a client slows the work: stalling, cancelling, agreeing to a step and not taking it, or arguing with every question. It isn't the client failing at coaching. In our experience it's an old pattern protecting itself, and it usually marks the place where the real work begins.
If you're still choosing where to train, you can talk that choice through before anything else, on a free Zoom call with one of our RS Method Master Coaches. The apply page lists the call as "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes". Find a time here. Or read on.
What does resistance look like in a session?
It tends to come in four forms. They're easier to work with once you see a single pattern behind all four.
The stall. The session circles. The client talks fluently about the goal and never quite arrives at it, and each week sounds like progress while nothing moves.
The cancellation. Late, polite, always for a good reason. It often lands the week after a session came close to something.
The yes that isn't. The client agrees, sincerely, and then doesn't act. Teodora's client has said yes to the same conversation three times, and she meant it every time.
The argument. Every question meets a reason, and the reasons are often true. What matters is the job they're doing in the room, which is keeping one subject at arm's length.
ICF's 2025 Core Competencies give a coach a steady place to start. One behaviour reads: "Acknowledges that clients are responsible for their own choices" (2.01, checked on coachingfederation.org on 27 October 2026). Not acting is a choice too, and it belongs to the client. So the coach's task isn't to win it back. It's to get curious about what the choice is for.
Why does a pattern protect itself?
Look closely at the yes. Teodora's client has been saying yes to her father for most of her life. Yes to the business degree, yes to Saturdays in the showroom, yes to the family dinner where her uncles raised a glass to the next generation. Each yes kept the family's peace, and she gave it the way you sign for a parcel at the door: quickly, warmly, without opening it.
Her coaching yeses carry the same signature. They go into the hallway with the others, still taped shut. That's why the stalling isn't her failing the coaching. The pattern is doing what it was built to do, which is keep a peace in place by never opening the box with "no" written inside.
It's also why pushing rarely helps. In our experience, a coach who pushes becomes one more person she has to say yes to.
Seen through the RS Method, a yes like hers is a guard on duty, and the useful question is what it stands in front of. For someone in her place it might be a single evening: the night she said she wanted to study architecture, and her father set down his fork and didn't speak to her for nine days. With an evening like that, the method subtracts. The fear stored in those nine days of silence comes out, and a guard with nothing behind it has no reason to stay at its post. In our experience, that's when people stop signing for things they don't mean.
If a client like Teodora's would test you, better to find that out before you choose a training than after. Begin where the institute's path begins, with a free Zoom call, held by an RS Method Master Coach, about whether we suit each other. Ask for a time.
What does a coach's own resistance look like?
Return to the relief. Teodora didn't want the cancellation, and she was glad of it. Both are true. The session she was spared was the one where she'd planned to push, and part of her didn't want to find out what pushing would do.
A coach's own resistance rarely looks like resistance. It looks like pushing, the "Push harder?" in the notebook, which is a coach trying to win. It looks like rescuing, offering the client a gentler goal so the hour feels better. It looks like agreeing, week after week, that the timing really is wrong. And it looks like relief when a hard session doesn't happen.
ICF's competencies name the awareness this asks for. Behaviour 2.10 reads: "Remains aware of the influence of one's thoughts and behaviors on the client and others". Teodora's "No problem at all" was kind, and it also told her client that cancelling costs nothing between them.
Coaches often recognise more of themselves in a resistant client than they'd like. Teodora knows that hallway. She has a few taped boxes of her own, and a client's unopened yes is very easy to leave alone when you're leaving yours alone too.
Every RSCI cohort opens its own boxes before it handles anyone else's, because the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. For more on how presence and a coach's own material connect, our guide to coaching presence goes further.
How do you work with a client who stalls?
Use this at the start of the session after a step was skipped or a session was cancelled. It's an invitation, not a verdict.
- Leave your planned follow-up closed. If your notes say "Push harder?", don't open them yet.
- Say what you've noticed, without blame. "We've agreed this step three times now, and it hasn't happened. I'm curious about that, not cross."
- Ask what not doing it has made possible. "What has not having that conversation let you keep?" Few clients expect that question, and the answer is often the real subject.
- Ask what doing it would cost. "If you said it this weekend, what would you lose?" Listen for the one word that carries more weight than the rest.
- Offer a challenge, lightly. ICF's glossary defines challenges as "Thought-provoking interventions offered by the coach to disrupt the client's habitual patterns, assumptions, or narratives." For Teodora it might be: "What if the yes is what we should be talking about?"
- Check yourself before you agree anything. Relieved, irritated, impatient to be proved right? Name it silently, and set it to one side.
- Let the client size the next step, including no step. ICF lists inviting "the client to consider how to move forward, including resources, support and potential barriers" (8.05). A small step they'll take is worth more than a big one they'll only sign for.
If missed sessions keep happening, look at your coaching agreement together and agree how they're handled, out loud.
Not every stall is a pattern protecting itself. If what you're seeing has gone on for weeks and is reaching into how the client sleeps, eats, works or gets along with the people close to them, it may need someone a coach isn't: a therapist or a doctor. Therapy works on a different layer from coaching, and it can run before the coaching or alongside it. The signs, and the words to use, are in our guide to when to refer a coaching client to therapy.
Where anything points to someone being in danger, local emergency services come before any coaching question. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services. And if the weeks described here sound like your own rather than a client's, please talk to a doctor or a mental health professional, and keep going with any care you already have. Nothing here replaces it.
Where does a coach learn to stay steady with a client who won't move?
Not from a script for handling resistance. Three things in a training make the difference, and RSCI builds in all three.
- Your own hallway, opened first. It's hard to stay curious about a client's taped boxes while your own are stacked behind you. In our cohorts, the trainee's own material is worked on first, under supervision.
- A method that removes rather than pushes. The first of the RS Method's two movements, in The Method page's words, "is subtractive." That gives a coach something to do with resistance other than lean on it.
- A supervisor who catches your reflex first. Supervised practice is where you find out whether you push, rescue or agree too easily, before a client of your own has to find out for you.
If an ICF credential matters to you, here's how the ICF side is set up, in the words we always use. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
Resistance tests our razor, the middle line most of all. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
One lawyer came to the RS Method with an identity conflict. The result: years of internal conflict resolved in minutes through a deep identity shift.
The Method lays out the RS Method's two movements and the inner-work-first standard every cohort follows.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Relief like Teodora's is the kind of material an RSCI cohort works on in each trainee first. The Method sets out that order.