I Turned Away a Client Whose Check Had Already Cleared. Here's Why.

She was 22, unemployed, and living back at home. Her mum had already paid the deposit.

I sent it back.

Not because the mum was wrong to want help but because her daughter wasn't a coaching candidate yet and taking the money would have meant taking her mum's hope and giving nothing real in return.

That decision taught me more about coaching young adults than any course I've ever paid for.

Every Parent Assumes the Problem Is Motivation

It usually isn't.

Parents come to me convinced their almost-adult is "just not motivated." They are lazy, avoidant, stuck. So they look for a coach the way you'd look for a personal trainer, someone to push harder, hold them accountable, light a fire under them.

Here's what many families discover too late: motivation isn't the missing ingredient. Readiness is and it looks nothing like what most parents expect.

A 19-year-old who's furious about being "made" to see a coach can be more coachable than one who shows up smiling and compliant. Anger, at least, means something is stirring. Compliance can just mean they've learned to perform whatever gets the adults off their back.

Three Things I Actually Look For

I don't look for confidence. I don't look for a five-year plan. Most young adults I work with have neither, and that's fine that's not the bar.

What I look for is smaller, and easier to miss.

They can name what's not working, even vaguely. Not the solution. Not even the real problem, necessarily. Just enough self-awareness to say "something feels off" instead of "everything's fine" when it clearly isn't.

They'll let themselves be seen for one hour a week. That's it. Not transformed. Not fixed. Just present, honestly, in a room where someone is going to ask real questions.

There's a flicker of ownership somewhere. A hint that some small part of them wants this for themselves, not just to stop their parents worrying. It can be buried under attitude. It can be one sentence in an hour of eye-rolling. I only need the one sentence.

Skills come later. Confidence comes later. Direction comes later often much later than parents want it to. None of that is the entry requirement.

The Ones Who Aren't Ready Yet (And What That Actually Means)

Some young adults aren't ready for coaching. That's not a judgment on them. It's not a judgment on their parents either.

No one had taught them how to sit with a hard question without deflecting. No one had taught them that admitting confusion isn't the same as admitting failure. No one had taught them that an adult could ask about their life without an agenda attached.

That's not a character flaw. That's a gap. And gaps close just not always on the timeline a worried parent wants.

(I've had parents ask me to "just get them talking" in session one, as if trust were a setting you could switch on. It isn't. I love that they want it fixed fast. I understand exactly why but that's not how any of this works.)

What Coaching Young Adults Actually Requires From the Parent

This is the part nobody puts in the brochure.

Coaching young adults doesn't work as something done to them while everyone else stays the same. It works when the young person has just enough room to change without their whole family system snapping back to the old normal the second they try something different.

If a parent is still answering every question for their 20-year-old in the family group chat, coaching becomes a tug-of-war instead of a partnership. One is genuine readiness for growth. The other is a parent hoping a coach will do the letting-go for them.

So — Is Your Almost-Adult a Good Candidate?

You probably already know, if you're honest with yourself. Not because they've got it all figured out but because somewhere underneath the mess, there's a flicker you recognise a version of them that wants more, even if they can't say it out loud yet.

That flicker is the whole job. Everything else, we build together.

If you're not sure whether your young adult is ready, or you're not sure whether you're ready to loosen your grip enough for coaching to actually take it, join me at my online summit:

The Raising Ready Humans.

There are 28 experts discussing topics on young adults. Come and grab some pertinent information and gifts from all of them.

Secure your seat here>>> https://www.michelle-hibbert.com/rrh?am_id=michelle6548