When the Right Words Are the Wrong Fit

When coaching, my aim is always to develop a sustainable approach that meets people where they are and enables them to achieve what they want. There are certain approaches and phrases that feel universal, so they often form part of what we develop. Yet, while there is real benefit here, there is also hidden risk. In this article, I want to unpick an example of how a single piece of language landed unexpectedly with a client, because I suspect their experience is not unique, and the lesson could benefit others.

When looking to narrow down what someone will do to make progress, I often ask what their "non-negotiables" are. It is a phrase I picked up from a great coach I worked with earlier in my career, and it is intended to do specific psychological work. It is meant to eliminate the on-the-day negotiation with yourself, the bargaining that happens when you are tired, busy, and looking for a reason to let something slide. Said with conviction in an objective frame of mind, it works. It gives you clear criteria to use when your resilience is being tested.

The issue for this particular individual was exactly that: it only worked in an objective frame of mind.

As I always say, the real progress happens between our sessions, where individuals experiment with what we discuss. This client described how, whenever they fell short of a non-negotiable, it had a disproportionate impact. It generated a feeling of immediate failure, which then fed into a spiral of negative self-talk and undermining behaviours. Language designed to help became a stick to metaphorically beat themselves with.

The language hadn't failed in a general sense. It had failed for this person, in this moment. This raises a much more interesting question than whether "non-negotiables" is a good or bad phrase: if the same words can be both a foothold for one person and a trigger for collapse in another, what does that tell us about how language actually works on us?

My first instinct, watching this play out, was to fix the phrase. If "non-negotiable" was too absolute, we needed something that retained the conviction but lost the cliff edge. We settled on "high-integrity commitments." Initially, it felt like an improvement. It pointed at the purpose of the commitment rather than just the rigidity of keeping it, and it made room for a commitment to be renewed rather than simply broken.

It took a few more conversations to notice what we had quietly done. If the commitment itself is what constitutes high integrity, falling short doesn't just mean missing a target, it implies you were low-integrity in that moment. For someone already prone to harsh self-judgment, that isn't a softer landing. It is the exact same cliff, just with a different name on it. We had swapped one phrase for another, built with the same good intentions, but it still wasn't tuned to this individual's actual situation.

I think of it like borrowing someone else's glasses. If a friend hands you their new glasses and tells you they have transformed how they see, you would likely not expect the same result. Their prescription was built for their eyes. Put them on, and your world doesn't sharpen; it blurs. The glasses aren't faulty. They were just never built for you.

Language works the same way. A phrase like "non-negotiables" is simply someone else's prescription to get them doing what they want. For the person who created it, it corrects exactly the right thing, maybe a tendency to talk themselves out of commitments, or a need for a hard line to push back against other people's demands. But put that same phrase on someone who has an excess of self-judgment, and it doesn't correct anything. It distorts. The absoluteness that gives one person clarity gives another a cliff edge, somewhere to fall from every time life gets in the way of what they say they want.

Here is why this is so hard to spot: the discomfort of using the wrong language rarely arrives labelled as a mismatch.

Someone you respect shares a phrase that genuinely, helpfully, and enthusiastically changed how they operate. When it doesn't do the same for you, your natural conclusion isn't that the phrase was poorly suited to you. The conclusion is that you are somehow doing it wrong, that you aren't committed enough, or that you are wired differently than the people who manage it fine.

It is worth being precise about what makes a phrase "fit," because fit isn't one-dimensional.

There is logical fit: whether the words accurately describe what you are trying to achieve and the reasoning stands up to scrutiny. "Non-negotiable" is logically tidy. "High-integrity commitment" is tidier still. But there is also emotional fit: how the words land in your body when you fall short, not just when you are succeeding. That is much harder to test in a coaching session, where we are more likely to be in a calm, objective frame of mind. Because we are not emotionally static, the weight of a phrase changes under pressure. When things go wrong and resilience is tested, a well-intentioned phrase can turn into something it was never intended to be. A phrase might pass logically but fail emotionally, and you won't appreciate that until it has been tested by a bad day or a difficult week.

So, what does this mean for you?

I am not proposing a simplistic, five-step framework for choosing better language. Instead, I offer questions worth sitting with: where in your own internal dialogue, the words you use on yourself when things slip, might you be using someone else's prescription?

Where have you adopted a phrase, a rule, or a standard because it worked for someone you respect, without checking what it actually does to you when you fall short? And when you discover it doesn't fit, can you allow that to be information about the phrase, rather than evidence of a flaw in you?

As always, I'm interested in your thoughts. Have you ever adopted a popular productivity or self-development phrase only to find it did more harm than good?