Glass Balls and Rubber Balls: The Coaching Framework Leaders Use to Prioritize What Actually Matters

Executive & Leadership Coaching  |  Coach Training & Education  |  Coaching Tools

By Jamie Slingerland, MCC | Co-Founder, Catalyst Coach Academy

One of the most common things I hear from leaders in coaching sessions is some version of this:

“Everything feels urgent. I can’t figure out what to focus on. I’m dropping things and I don’t know which things are okay to drop.”

It is a genuinely disorienting place to be — especially for high-achieving leaders who have built their identity around not dropping anything. Around being the person who handles it all, handles it well, and somehow keeps every plate spinning without letting any of them fall.

The problem is not that they are not trying hard enough. The problem is that they are treating everything as equally fragile. And when everything feels like it matters equally, nothing can actually be prioritized.

There is a framework I return to in coaching conversations more than almost any other tool I use. It is simple enough to explain in thirty seconds and deep enough to reorganize how a leader thinks about their entire professional life. It is called glass balls and rubber balls.

What the Glass Balls and Rubber Balls Framework Actually Is

The concept is straightforward. Imagine you are a juggler. You are juggling many balls at once — projects, responsibilities, relationships, deadlines, strategic initiatives, team needs, personal commitments. More balls than any one person can keep in the air indefinitely.

Now here is the question that changes everything:

Which of those balls are made of glass — and which ones are made of rubber?

The work of prioritization — real prioritization, not just reordering a to-do list — is the work of knowing which is which.

Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds

If the framework is that simple, why do so many leaders struggle with it? Because most high-performing leaders have spent years in environments that treated everything like glass. Every deadline was urgent. Every request from a senior leader was critical. Every deliverable carried the implicit weight of professional consequence.

That conditioning does not disappear when you get promoted. It often intensifies. The higher you go, the more visible your choices become, and the more it can feel like every ball you are carrying is being watched — which means every drop feels catastrophic, whether it actually is or not.

There is also a perfectionism dimension that compounds this. Leaders who are wired for excellence — and most leaders who find their way into serious coaching are — have a deep resistance to the idea that anything in their domain should be less than excellent. Deliberately letting a rubber ball drop, even temporarily, can feel like failure. Like slipping. Like becoming someone who does not care.

It is not failure. It is strategy. And coaching is often where leaders first give themselves permission to think of it that way.

What Applying This Framework Actually Requires

Using the glass balls and rubber balls framework well requires three things that are harder than they first appear.

What This Looks Like in a Coaching Session

A leader comes into a session describing overwhelm. They have recently taken on expanded responsibilities. Their team has grown. Their scope has increased. Their inbox reflects a level of strategic responsibility they have not carried before. Everything feels urgent. They are behind on things they were not behind on before. They feel like they are failing — even though from the outside, they are navigating a significant transition with more capability than they are giving themselves credit for.

The coaching does not start with a to-do list audit. It starts with a question.

If you knew that some of these things could drop without real consequence, and some absolutely could not — which would be which? And what does your answer tell you about what you actually value?

That conversation — the one that moves from overwhelm to clarity, from everything-is-urgent to this-is-what-is-actually-glass — is one of the most practically useful things coaching can produce. Not because it gives the leader a new system. Because it helps them see their situation clearly enough to trust their own judgment about what matters.

That trust — in their own values, their own assessment, their own capacity to lead — is what was missing. Not a better prioritization method.

What This Has to Do With Coach Training

If you are reading this as a coach — or as someone considering coach training — here is what I want you to take from it. The glass balls and rubber balls framework is not the point of this post. The point is what this kind of coaching conversation requires of the coach.

These are the capacities that ICF-accredited coach training develops — not as techniques, but as genuine skills. The ability to listen beneath the surface. To ask the question that opens the real conversation. To trust the client’s own wisdom rather than filling the space with the coach’s own answers. That is what coaching at the MCC level looks like in practice. And it is what we develop in every cohort at Catalyst Coach Academy.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Whether you are a leader reading this or a coach who works with leaders, here is the question this framework ultimately points toward:

What in your life is actually glass — and what have you been treating as glass that is actually rubber?

That question, taken seriously, does not just change how you manage your time. It changes what you understand about what you value. And that understanding — clear, honest, arrived at through genuine reflection rather than someone else’s framework — is the kind of clarity that coaching exists to create.