Why Follow-Up Coaching is Vital to Business Writing Training

You’ve done it yourself: taken a class or workshop, listened enthusiastically to the content, resolved to apply it, and then returned to work the next day having changed precisely nothing.

Unfortunately, that happens all the time with business writing training. It’s easy to understand why.

I’ve already got this

You’ve probably written something from scratch almost every day since third grade. You have accomplished a great deal in your life. Deep inside, you are sure you’re a good writer.

Then you take a business writing class. The facilitator shows you that there’s a better way to approach and accomplish business writing. What she describes is a major change from your lifelong habits. She urges you to use the new approach. You quickly see why it would improve your writing. Workshop over, you pack up and go home. Perhaps you even rave to your spouse about how good the training was.

However, the next time you begin to write something for work, you do it the familiar way because you feel that it would take too long to walk through the steps of the new way. The training was great, but perhaps your confidence is low that you can do it on your own.

You didn’t have it, did you?

If all you’ve had is that one-day class with no follow-up coaching, here’s what you’ve missed:

• 25 minutes of one-on-one feedback from a business writing professional about your writing skills and ways to sharpen them

• A chance to adapt the principles of the workshop to your own writing needs—the kinds of documents you write most often

• Tailored explanations of the self-limiting errors you tend to make and ways to overcome them

• The “aha” experience of watching your document take on a professional sheen right in front of your eyes as you apply suggestions from your coach

Yet with one more half hour, you could’ve had it

You know countless analogies: taking too little of a prescribed medication for it to do any good. Carefully chopping the herbs for a great dish and failing to add enough of them during cooking. Searching for months for just the right jacket, finally finding it, and then leaving the perfect jacket in the store, telling yourself you’ll return for it in a few weeks.

Often it’s the failure to follow through, to take the final step, that diminishes everything you’ve done up to that point.

You can do better

We share this human foible for failing to follow through, and we waste much valuable training by skipping the step called “application.” If that little voice in your head tells you at the end of your business writing training, “I’ll use this when it’s an important document—maybe next month,” then you have met your brain’s live-in worst enemy. It’s lying to you. In a month, your unrehearsed skills from the workshop day will already have rusted into scrap.

Evict that slacker from your brain. Take great training and then make it yours. Save hundreds of hours of future writing time while you’re being more persuasive and clearer. Get the follow-up coaching for you and your team.

Nice jacket.