Maybe: The Most Honest Answer in Coaching and the One Nobody Wants to Hear
Maybe is the answer I give most often to yes and no questions.
Not because I do not know. Because maybe is frequently the most accurate thing available and the willingness to say it honestly is one of the clearest markers of the difference between a coach and a salesperson.
The salesperson needs yes. Yes closes. Yes converts. Yes is the answer that produces the purchase and the purchase is the metric the business model is optimised around. Maybe introduces doubt and doubt is the enemy of the conversion. The scare tactic influencer who tells you with absolute certainty that this compound is destroying your testosterone and this protocol will fix it is selling you certainty because certainty sells. The nuance that would qualify that certainty, the maybe that genuine engagement with the evidence would require, is commercially inconvenient.
The coach who tells you maybe is giving you something more valuable than the yes you were looking for. They are giving you an honest description of a biological reality that does not bend to the clean line your question was drawing through it.
Very few things in the human body are black and white. Almost everything that matters is conditional. The conditions are specific, individual, and frequently unknown until they are tested. That is why maybe is not a failure to answer. It is the correct answer for most of what is being asked.
People Say and Do Differently
This is the first layer of the maybe and the one most coaches are not honest enough to acknowledge directly.
A client tells me what they are doing. They describe their sleep, their nutrition, their training, their recovery, their stress levels, their alcohol consumption, their consistency with the programme. I receive a description. I do not receive the reality. Not because clients lie, though some do, but because what people say they do and what people actually do are routinely different in ways the person describing them often cannot see.
The man who tells me he eats well Monday to Friday is describing his intentions as much as his behaviour. The man who tells me he is sleeping seven hours is reporting the hours he spends in bed rather than the hours he spends in restorative sleep. The man who tells me he is following the programme is reporting compliance as he experiences it, which may or may not match the programme as it was designed.
This is not a moral failure. It is a human one. We all have a gap between the person we describe ourselves as being and the person our behaviour reflects. The gap is not always large. It is rarely zero. And in the context of a health programme where the compounding of small things across consistent execution determines the outcome, the gap between reported and actual behaviour is frequently the entire explanation for why results are not matching expectations.
Maybe accounts for that gap. When someone asks me if a specific intervention will produce a specific result, the honest answer requires knowing not just whether the intervention is evidence supported but whether the person asking is actually going to execute it at the level the evidence was produced at. In a controlled research setting, compliance is measured and verified. In the real life of a man in his 40s with a demanding career and a full diary and the competing pressures of everything else, compliance is self reported and self assessed against a standard that is also self defined.
Maybe acknowledges that I know one of those things and not the other.
The Perfect Outcome You Saw in Someone Else
This is the most important dimension of the maybe and the one that most directly addresses the frustration men bring to the coaching relationship when results do not match expectations.
If I do x, y and z then 1, 2 and 3 will happen?
Maybe. But the 1, 2 and 3 you are pointing at is the outcome you saw in someone else. And that person is not you.
The before and after photograph, the transformation testimonial, the client success story that demonstrated what the programme was capable of producing: these are real. The results were genuine. The programme contributed to them. And they are entirely irrelevant as a benchmark for your specific outcome because the person in the photograph brought a different biology, a different starting point, a different hormonal environment, a different gut function, a different structural reality, a different life context, a different response to training, and a different set of variables that the programme interacted with to produce the result you are looking at.
The Nuch blog on this site makes this point from a different angle. She is exceptional not because the programme is exceptional but because of how she executes the programme, which is specific to who she is and how she is wired. The man who looks at her six month progression and asks if the same programme will produce the same result in him is asking a question to which the honest answer is maybe, and maybe that requires significantly more context before it becomes meaningful.
This is where the pattern interrupt blog, the individualisation argument, and the scare tactic influencer critique all converge. The result you saw in someone else was produced by the interaction of a programme with a specific individual biology. You have a different individual biology. The same programme interacting with your biology will produce a result. The result will not be the same result.
It might be better. The variables might stack more favourably for you than they did for the person in the photograph. Your hormonal baseline might be stronger, your gut absorption more efficient, your recovery capacity more robust. The programme might produce something more dramatic than what you observed in the example that attracted you to it.
It might be slower. The variables might present more complexity for you than they did for them. A structural issue that was not present in the example, a gut dysfunction that is impairing nutrient absorption, a hormonal profile that requires addressing before the training stimulus can produce its full effect: any of these could mean the same programme produces a longer timeline to the same outcome.
It will be yours. That is the only guarantee available. The outcome of an intelligent, specific, consistently executed programme applied to your biology across sufficient time will be the best version of what your specific biology is capable of producing. Not the best version of what someone else's biology produced. Yours.
That is worth wanting. It requires accepting maybe as the answer to the question about what someone else's result predicts for yours.
Nuance, Environment, Energy and Engagement
The four variables that the maybe accounts for are worth naming precisely because they are the ones that most deterministic health claims, the ones that promise specific outcomes from specific inputs, quietly pretend do not exist.
Nuance is the acknowledgement that the same intervention produces different effects at different doses, in different contexts, in different populations, at different stages of a health investment, and in combination with different other variables. The creatine blog on this site makes the case for higher doses than the conventional recommendation because the brain creatine research suggests the muscle saturation dose is not the cognitive optimisation dose. That is nuance. The simple yes, take creatine at three to five grams and you will be fine is the deterministic version. It is less accurate than the nuanced version and less useful for someone trying to make an optimal decision about their specific situation.
Environment is the conditions under which the intervention is being applied. The Zone 2 training that produces significant cardiovascular adaptation in a man who is sleeping adequately, managing his stress effectively, and eating to support recovery produces a different outcome in the same man during a period of work pressure, disrupted sleep, and dietary compromise. The programme has not changed. The environment in which the programme is operating has. The result will reflect the environment as much as the programme.
Energy is the physiological and psychological state the person is bringing to the execution. The training session that is executed at full effort in a state of genuine readiness produces a different stimulus from the same session executed at reduced intensity by someone who is fatigued, stressed, or unwell. The same session on paper. Different biological events. Different outcomes.
Engagement is the quality of attention and commitment brought to the process. The man who is genuinely invested in understanding what his body is telling him, who engages seriously with the check ins and the adjustments and the monitoring that the wellness versus longevity blog describes as the difference between the two approaches, produces better results from the same programme than the man who is going through the motions. Not because the programme changes. Because the quality of the human interaction with the programme changes what the programme can do.
Maybe accounts for all of these. The deterministic yes ignores all of them. The deterministic yes is easier to sell and harder to deliver because it has made a promise it cannot keep for the full range of people it was made to.
3 Action Points: Work With the Maybe Rather Than Against It
Action Point 1: Audit the Gap Between What You Say You Do and What You Actually Do
Spend one week tracking your actual behaviour rather than your reported behaviour across the three variables most directly relevant to your current health investment. Eat what you actually eat rather than what you intend to eat. Sleep what you actually sleep rather than what you estimate you sleep. Train at the intensity you actually train rather than the intensity you describe when asked. Use your phone to log in real time rather than reconstructing at the end of the day, which is where the remembered version diverges most significantly from the actual one. At the end of the week, compare what the data shows to what you would have said if asked without the data. The gap you find is the gap between the result you expect and the result you are actually building toward. It is also the most specific information available about where the real opportunity for improvement sits.
Action Point 2: Replace the Comparison to Someone Else's Result With a Comparison to Your Own Baseline
Identify the specific transformation, testimonial, or result that is currently functioning as your benchmark for what the programme should produce for you. Write down three ways in which the person who produced that result is specifically different from you, in biology, in circumstances, in compliance, or in starting point. Then write down what a meaningful result would look like for your specific biology, starting from your specific baseline, across a realistic timeline that accounts for your specific variables rather than theirs. This is the benchmark that is actually relevant to you. The comparison to someone else's result is not useful information. It is an emotional reference point that will either inflate your expectations or deflate your assessment of genuine progress. Replace it with something that is actually yours.
Action Point 3: Ask Better Questions That Invite the Nuance Rather Than Demanding the Yes
The next time you want to ask a yes or no question about your health investment, reframe it to invite the contextual answer rather than the binary one. Instead of will this work, ask what conditions need to be in place for this to produce the result I am looking for and which of those conditions am I currently meeting. Instead of is this the right approach, ask what variables in my specific situation would affect how this approach performs and which of those variables can I control. These questions produce more useful answers than the yes or no because they locate the agency where it actually resides: in the conditions you are creating for the intervention rather than in the intervention itself. The maybe becomes a map of what is required rather than a refusal to commit to an outcome. Work with the map.
Maybe is not a hedge. It is not a failure of confidence or a reluctance to commit to a position. It is the honest acknowledgement that the human body is a complex individual system that does not respond identically to identical inputs across different people, different environments, different energy states, and different levels of engagement with the process.
The coach who gives you the yes without the maybe is telling you what you want to hear. The coach who gives you the maybe is telling you what you need to know to actually get to yes.
The result you saw in someone else is real. It is not yours yet. Yours is built from your specific biology, executed with your specific level of commitment, in your specific life context, across the timeline your specific starting point requires.
That result is available. Getting to it requires accepting the maybe and working with what it actually contains rather than waiting for the yes that was never going to tell the whole truth.