Answers
Why do coaching clients stall in the middle of a program?
By Mike Olaski, Founder, rehabit · Last reviewed 2026-10-27
Because motivation tends to dip in the middle of any goal. Starting feels new and finishing feels close, but the middle feels like neither. Research on goal pursuit finds the same pattern, and what helps most is making progress visible between sessions.
Bonezzi, Brendl and De Angelis (2011) found motivation can be U-shaped: high near the start and the end, lowest in the middle. Touré-Tillery and Fishbach (2012) saw it in everyday behaviour: in a study of Hanukkah candle lighting, 76% lit candles on the first night, 43–50% on the middle nights and 57% on the last.
For coaching programs, the lever is progress people can see. A meta-analysis of 138 studies (Harkin et al., 2016) found that prompting people to monitor their progress improved goal attainment, with larger effects when progress was recorded or shared. rehabit's Journey Co-Pilot is built for exactly this gap between sessions; the Client Pipeline covers the wider delivery system.
Sources
- Bonezzi, Brendl & De Angelis (2011), Stuck in the middle: The psychophysics of goal pursuit. Psychological Science
- Touré-Tillery & Fishbach (2012), The end justifies the means, but only in the middle. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- Harkin et al. (2016), Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? Psychological Bulletin