Series: Understanding the role of a coach and a client is vital to doing effective work within the container.
Remember when I asked you to put yourself in the shoes of a coaching client? To think about why on earth they are hiring you to help them sort their problems?
And remember when I shared what I think the role of a coach is in the process?
Today I want to talk about the twin energies of encouragement and challenge. And why I think that they’re often over used and in many cases… used backwards.
I believe it’s my role to encourage you not to listen to me. To drop any notions of following my advice. And to encourage you to follow your own knowing above all else.
I also believe it’s my role to challenge you to pause and listen to anything stopping you from doing what you are here saying you want to do.
Most coaches, in my observation, encourage clients that they can DO IT! They CAN do the thing the client says they want!
And they challenge them to move forward, to bust through their blocks like the Kool-Aid man! (Did I just date myself as an eighties kid?)
My role as a coach is to approach the issues clients bring in ways they can’t get anywhere else in their lives. Everyone (in their lives and online) is telling them to get over their sadness and depression. To move past their hesitations. To bust through their blocks with morning routines and green smoothies. They gotta want it bad and just go for it!
Don’t get me wrong… I have nothing against green smoothies.
But I do think that advice is hogwash.
My role as a coach is to be so present and attuned in the moment that I am able to ask… what do you need right now? And to trust they know the answer. To ask… “May I challenge that assumption?” Or “May I encourage you to pause for a moment and sit with that?” So much of coaching actually comes down to the ability to sense pacing. What are you trying to rush over? What are you sinking into that’s not helpful? I am here to reflect what I see, hear, and sense… and to invite new pacing into the mix.
When we change what we experience, what we experience can change.
My job is not to give you what you can give yourself. My job is to show you where you can offer yourself what you need… and maybe haven’t been.
This stuff isn’t revolutionary… but its effects are. And it’s reeeaaallly uncommon in most people’s lives.
And that’s why strangers from the internet hire me.
