Have you ever felt like you’re just playing accountability partner to your client, instead of coach?
Have you found yourself celebrating a client’s successes, acknowledging failures (lack of action) and then brainstorming new ways to help him or her have fewer failures next time?
For example, a client might say “I want to write one blog a week” and two weeks later at the next session, he or she has written zero blogs.
Then, the two of you spend the next 45 minutes brainstorming solutions for example, try writing it first thing in the morning, or start by getting ideas from other blogs, or keep a box of blog ideas and pull one out…etc.
YUCK! This is how I used to coach, and it felt terrible!
It’s accountability coaching and it like running on a hamster wheel. Neither you, nor your client are going anywhere fast.
Before I became a coach, I was a certified teacher. I had been teaching in elementary schools and a middle school for 5 years. I thought, “Coaching can’t be THAT different.”
I told myself, “I ‘coached’ my students to learn their material and succeed.” We did experiments. They shared their results. I got excited with them at their successes, and helped them find new methods for studying and learning when they failed.
But, I was WRONG! That was very basic coaching.
That was teaching and cheerleading and holding students accountable. It was basic coaching.
Thus, when I first started coaching and applied this method to my clients it didn’t work very well.
It didn’t matter how much I acted like a cheerleader at their successes, their successes didn’t become more frequent or greater.
Likewise, it didn’t matter how many new ideas I had them try, to help them accomplish this or that, they’d still come back to me the next session with an incomplete activity.
I was exhausted! It took a TON of WORK to be ready with “new ideas” and to spend most of the session trying to teach them how to do something, instead of truly coach them.
I also began to feel defeated. Why weren’t my clients seeing greater success?
Then, I came to CoachVille and the game approach was the first step towards remarkable success.
But, what REALLY turned me into a great coach was CoachVille’s Inner Freedom Method and Course.
Wow!
Suddenly, I realized that my “new ideas” approach to failures was the equivalent to putting a band-aid over a wound. A band-aid doesn’t help a wound to heal; it just stops any further infection from getting in.
It is the BODY and the soul of the person that heals the wound.
CoachVille’s Inner Freedom Course and Method taught me how to coach my clients so that they go in touch with their bodies and learned how to heal themselves.
Great coaches understand that if a client knows what he or she wants and how to do it but that the client is still not doing it, then the body and/or soul is experiencing fear, and fear will stop you every time.
The Inner Freedom Method helps teach you how to play with your fears. It teaches you that your fears are your friend and while they’ll never go away completely (honestly, you don’t want them to), they don’t have to stop you.
Better yet, the Inner Freedom Method teaches you how to coach your clients through their fears.
Help your clients to heal their wounds (aka. Fears). Don’t hold up flashy band-aids.
As a result of using this method with my clients, none of them are running on a hamster wheel. They all see incredible success and LOVE the shift the feel within themselves.
If you want to try a piece of the Inner Freedom Method now, yourself, here are 3 actions you can take today:
1. Write down a list of actions you’d like to take AND know how to take but are not happening.
2. Go to a quiet space and look at one of the actions on your list. Close your eyes and think about the last time you tried to (or thought about trying to) do the activity. While you’re thinking about it, notice how your body feels. Are you tight in your shoulders? Do you have a pit in your stomach? Simply allow that feeling to be there without judgment.
This energy has a message for you. Notice what it is sharing without putting any opinions onto it.
3. After completing step 2, open your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Now, re-imagine yourself in that same moment. However, this time you have the power, the freedom and the energy to make all the “right” moves, whatever “right” means to you. Notice how different your body feels.
If you haven’t already taken CoachVille’s Inner Freedom Method, check it out here and get yourself signed up.
If you’d like to talk more with me about my experience and the course, email me at: coachmolly@coachville-220824.mystagingwebsite.com