Empowering/Repowering Your Coaching Clients
A great coach distinguishes his or herself by how well they empower clients to begin to take responsibility and take steps towards their holistic goals. Since it helps to identify and untangle some of the barriers that have kept them stuck, we want to look at what our client sees as important. But apart from getting our client started on the pathway to their goals, we then transition to a role of evaluation and of course, provide support. But we don’t struggle through our client’s changes or rise up to meet their goals; so becoming any more involved tends to be counterproductive to the client. We especially want to avoid taking on the client’s problems as our own. This would be far too great of a burden for a coach but it does happen.
Holistic goals that require change for our client are not going to happen overnight but we can usually organize a complete strategy for clients within the first couple of sessions. With this in mind, be sure to inform clients that your first meeting with them is really a conversation about assessing how Holistic Life Coaching is right for them. Once that is all clear, a CHLC would again pick no more than two actions or behaviors to get working on; You can make suggestions when selecting a priority. Since you have established rapport with your client by now, you have then also identified some priorities mutually. There will most likely be a few other areas to explore either concurrently or later as sub-goals. But we take small steps at first with our client.
Future meetings with your client – post-assessment – should occur weekly. This may require coordinating client activities with other practitioners.
Remember, the idea of holism itself implies that there could be quite a lot of specialist activity or advice needed. This is, in fact, why you do a detailed assessment of each client. How would we know what type of support our client requires to achieve their ultimate. We may need to involve their support network, or other qualified health profession – also to help them manage their stress. We could also face clients with underlying emotional uncertainty, stopping them from living their whole life. You may need to refer some clients to higher levels of intensity for intervention. Either way, getting your client the help they want and probably need is impossible without a thorough assessment.
How does the coach know that they are on track with helping and leading their client? How does the client know where they stand relative to reaching their goals? You may agree that most clients will forever be pursuing “that one thing” that brings them to a holistic life. But remember, this should never been an “ought” situation (“I ought to live holistically for my family”.) It is assessing that allows us to broach this conversation.
Many times we are asked “how long do I work with a client?”. This is like asking “How many sessions will I use with my client?” The right answer is that it depends. A coaching relationship with each client depends on what needs to change. There are a few norms in the coaching industry, however. One example is the 12 week period for coaching and the following assessment of where the client has arrived and what’s been working/not working. It is not very likely that your client will have reached all of their holistic goals to a point of calling them a habit at this point. That can take a very long time, and it will be different for each client. Some of your clients will have significant gaps – doing very well in some areas and quite terribly in others.
We also can revisit the importance scores from the initial valuation. But now the values being asked are more than just “how valuable is this to your holism?”; it now also asks “how do you score your progress that you feel you’ve made towards achieving your first goal?” The coach also records a percent to reflect their perspective on the client’s success. Do you feel your client moved as expect- ed toward their goal(s)?
If we did this evaluation too early, we’d see very little changes; waiting a full coaching cycle lets us look at more time and data to consider. A coaching cycle can be 12 or more weeks but this is not set in stone; our client may need a much longer engagement. 12 weeks is referenced as it is a norm, it is easy to price out as a package for the specialist and it is a realistic time for behaviors or actions to change. Your client will feel very confident after seeing that they have actually made some progress – even if it’s mall.
This non-physical, conversational assessment of our client becomes a process that allows coaches to get a meta-view of what our client views as important to them, to establish goals and to strategize coaching plans; it allows us to measure what we might call soft indicators. Such indicators inform the coach in ways that provide parts of each unique client’s holistic puzzle. The sooner we start to identify what our client truly wants and needs, and acknowledge some obstacles or barriers in their way, we can start orchestrating positive effects on our clients whole life.
Support as a Way of Preventing Relapse
Apart from a coaching cycle, another time based factor in coaching is relapse or collapse. Clients will make progress and fall all the way back to where they were previously. We evaluate this behavior just as any other. We don’t give up on our client, we choose our words very carefully during relapses as to not dominate our client into NEA mode. But what might be different – and what may have been lacking in your original strategy – is the effect of having true support in place for our client for those times when we are not there with them in session.
Using this approach also helps the coach in other ways. It’s not prescriptive coaching, telling people what they need – like a doctor might.
A client might go to a doctor and discuss very specific or narrow range of symptoms – like feeling depressed or having back pain, for example. The doctor might take 10 minutes to write a prescription to deal with symptoms; a CHLC would look at the whole client to see if there is a less invasive – or less medicated – manner of making people feel better and resolve many conditions that fall under the holistic umbrella. Mind-body fitness coaching is just one example. The other part of this assessment process and protocol is that it is complete and with that said, allows motivation to have as much of an influence in some cases as medicines that do not really work.
It’s also a way to start dialogue that supports your expectations for the client needing to take responsibility for setting their own holistic goals; we can more precisely identify the best ways to help and lead our client. This is not a rushed process, we take our time. 12 weeks is just the beginning for most of your clients. By comparison, medical doctors do not have this regular type of interaction with a client; indeed it is a patient at this point and that would of course suggest that something beyond what we can offer may be required or necessary. We never contradict those who outrank us in terms of education and experience.
A holistic assessment need not be more than some icebreaker conversation starters and the copious notes you take after asking them. If you can converse your way through the questions you need to ask, it is best to do this in a face-to-face setting. By contrast, a client could fill out a questionnaire on a computer – but what is different about this assessment style is that it’s based on a critical reflection process. We are actively encouraging our client to reflect deeply on personal matters sometimes for the first time in their lives. We encourage them to reflect on their own their own life and we show curiosity for how he client arrived where they are at. We learn where it is that they want to go and it then it becomes very focused. We also reflect our thoughts to the client as feedback, etc.
But remember, we use PEA to keep as maintain a positive flow. Whereas some other assessments are focused on a client’s problems/challenges, yours as to be focused on what outcomes the client wants and in getting this information, you will also have a clear way to map or strategize some goals or at the very least, recommendations. Generally, you work in a planned order but the great thing about assessing your client is that you know what to address, what is important and all of the supporting behaviors – but only because you will have discussed as much of the client’s life as possible. In a 50-minute session, this will require structure. Be sure to inform clients of what to expect in their first session. If there is paperwork to be completed as required for your coaching relation- ship, it should be provided (ideally, electronically) to your client as to use more time in session getting to the more salient matters at hand.
After all of this talk and reading up on assessments, what is our ideal outcome with this? What is the information we are looking for?
To answer this we will end with a summary of what our coaching is really about getting to help our client in a way that is different than coaching the client can get anywhere else. But having an Holistic Life Coach is becoming more common. This means you will have some competition. What will you do to distinguish yourself? If you are not sure of the answer to that, we give you a hint – it has a great deal to do with how successfully you get results with your client. To help provide your assessment some structure, here some basic underlying questions that you will want to include in any holistic assessment – essentially, this is the information you need at its core.
Maintaining an awareness of these four goals with each client will provide structure to your coaching service. Work discretely to incorporate each element into your coaching strategies. Your client will notice – and they will know that you are taking the time to learn about their lives.
And while it is true that these four questions effectively encapsulate the whole process, don’t be fooled by the simplicity of this coaching model it can be an intensive process and the deeper the intensity, the longer in duration your coaching relationship may be. This list should not be viewed a checklist that is rushed but a summary of the overall process of coaching. is not rushed. This is simply a way to summarize what you will need in a very basic – yet essential.
If a coach were to offer services that lacked the proper form of support, research has shown that there might be a resultant motivation issue, resulting in compromised effectiveness for your client. We really want to tap into client motivation when we see it; we can keep our client empowered, motivated and ultimately, successful in sustaining their new change goal. The motivation we see from clients should always have a positive frame to keep actions on point.
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