A few weeks ago, my 18-year-old daughter called me a "screenager.”

 I was playing screw games. You know, those mobile puzzle apps where you remove layers of bolts and screws. They sound ridiculous (they are ridiculous) and they're also incredibly satisfying, progressively challenging, and recently, the single most effective way I've found to avoid doing my actual work.

February and March are my heaviest workflow months, with dissertations stacking up and client work piling on from every direction. 

Instead of facing any of it, I found myself solving one more puzzle, then one more, then one more, telling myself I was "decompressing." 

What I was actually doing was using a game as a pressure valve, so I didn't have to sit with how overwhelmed I felt.

When my daughter called it out, I cycled through embarrassed, then ashamed, then something more useful: recognition. I've seen this exact pattern play out in clients more times than I can count. When we think about addiction derailing a career transition, we picture the serious stuff. 

Substance abuse. Something clinical with a formal name and a referral attached. 

There's a whole category of derailment, though, that's far more common and almost never gets named in a coaching session. I call it mainstream addiction. These are the habits that are socially acceptable, even normalized, that quietly eat the hours and attention a person needs to move their career forward.

Phone games, social media, online shopping, fantasy sports, binge-watching, Reddit rabbit holes (I see you), and even "productive" avoidance like reorganizing the desk, researching tools they'll never buy, or reading one more article about career strategy instead of actually doing the work of career strategy. 

None of these set off alarm bells, and that's exactly why they're so dangerous.

Your client doesn't show up and say "I have a phone game problem." They say "I just couldn't find the time this week," and if you take that at face value, you miss what's actually happening underneath it.

Today I'm walking you through 4 coaching strategies to help you spot the pattern, name it without shame, and help your client get unstuck at the root level.

Let's dig in.

It is tempting to go straight to structure: 

Those are reasonable questions, but they skip past the most important one:

"Walk me through what actually happened when you sat down to work on this."

Then listen carefully, not for what they did, but for where they went. The detour is almost always in there. 

They sat down to update the resume, and one thing led to another, and an hour disappeared. They opened LinkedIn to send a message and ended up scrolling for 45 minutes. They planned to draft their networking email and found themselves reorganizing their home office instead. 

The detour is the data, and when you hear it, you know you're finally in the real conversation.

A lot of coaches fumble when they see the avoidance.

They either let it go entirely because naming it feels confrontational, or they address it in a way that makes the client feel caught doing something wrong. Both responses shut the conversation down before it starts.

Shame kills momentum every time. I'm telling you about my screw game saga because the shame of it would have kept me stuck if my daughter hadn't made it safe to see it clearly. Your clients need that same permission from you.

Something like this: 

"A lot of the professionals I work with find that when a transition makes them feel under pressure or uncertain, they unconsciously find ways to avoid sitting with that discomfort. It usually means the stakes feel very real to them. What does that look like for you?"

That framing normalizes the behavior so it reads as a recognizable pattern rather than a character flaw. It points to the underlying emotion rather than the surface behavior, and invites the client to name it themselves. 

That last part matters most, because what they name for themselves lands far harder than what you name for them.

Once the pattern is on the table, your client needs to feel the real weight of it through math, not guilt.

Help them calculate the exchange rate. 

Every hour spent on the numbing behavior is an hour borrowed from the future they say they want. If your client is spending 90 minutes a night on a phone game instead of working on outreach, that's pipeline-building that didn't happen, relationships that didn't get warm, and a job search running at half speed without them even realizing it. 

Making the invisible visible is a coaching move, not a judgment call.

Try this prompt: 

"If we added up the hours this week that went to [behavior] instead of your search, what would that number be? And what would have been possible in those hours?"

Let them do the math, because the answer lands harder when it comes from them.

Mainstream avoidance almost always sits on top of something unspoken.

For me, it was overwhelm. The screw games gave me a sense of accomplishment and control when my real work felt like too much to face, and if I'd only deleted the app without addressing the workload and the feeling of being buried, I would have found another hiding place within a week. Your clients will do exactly the same thing.

The behavior is the solution the client invented for a problem they haven't named yet. The job search feels hopeless, so Netflix becomes the anesthetic. 

Networking feels exposing, so scrolling feels safer. 

Visibility feels risky, so they stay busy with things that look productive but aren't moving the needle.

Treating only the behavior gets you temporary change at best, and the real work lives in the layer underneath. The goal is to get the client articulating what they've been running from, because once it's named, it loses some of its power and you can coach them on it directly. 

Here are a few prompts that open that conversation:

I deleted the screw games, restructured my April, and I'm writing this newsletter instead of solving a Level 247 bolt puzzle, which honestly I was very close to cracking.

The real lesson here has nothing to do with phone discipline. 

Career professionals are not immune to the same patterns that derail our clients, and the coaches who are willing to be honest about that, with themselves first and then with the people they serve, are the ones doing the deepest work.

If your client keeps stalling out, look past the action plan and look at where their attention is actually going.

The answer might be sitting right there on their home screen.

Talk soon, Heather

P.S. If you're ready to deepen your coaching practice, my Facilitating Career Development (FCD) credentialing program through the National Career Development Association (NCDA) was built for career professionals who want to coach with more skill, more confidence, and more impact. Learn more here.