The Importance of Building Powerful Coaching Dialogues in your Coaching Sessions
So often, we live a life filled with expectations and tend to hold ourselves back with our self-limiting beliefs. As a Life Leadership Coach, I’ve been fortunate to touch the lives of many through the power of coaching. I use a combination of leadership, philosophy, psychological models, and mindfulness to add immense value to my coaching sessions. I partner with other coaches to enable them to get the most out of their coaching sessions bringing greater satisfaction to the client-coach relationship. As a Coach Supervisor, I’ve worked on ensuring coaches improve their coaching methods to achieve greater satisfaction.
So, how do I do this? I use my own frameworks and techniques. A client who approaches a coach comes from his space of tremendous worry, anxiety, depressed feelings, preconceived notions, and more. As coaching is client-driven, there is a need for the coach to be a catalyst for change. The coach needs to connect with the client ensuring the awareness level is increased while bringing about that change.
Here, I aim to highlight how a coach can help a client to access the inner depths of their subconscious mind. Coaching is indeed a powerful tool if used wisely. A coach, with the powerful tools and techniques of exploration, can easily work with the client to bring that transformational change in a client.
How can a Coach increase Awareness levels in a Client?
One of the core competencies of the ICF coaching methods includes the power of questioning. Powerful questioning enables the client to view one’s thought patterns, beliefs, values, needs, and more.
For e.g.: a coach may be approached by a client who wants to pursue a hobby (music) but has no time for the same. A coach, with the skillful questioning methods, can explore and expand on these spaces to understand the root cause of the problem. A coach gently checks what the client wants (learn music in this case) but may realize the client has an answer/excuse to avoid learning the same. Here, the coach has to expand the needs of the client to make him/her find a solution. The coach needs to challenge the self-limiting beliefs of the client and help him/her overpower the idea that there is no time to learn music.
With an exploration of one’s own space, the client will have an awareness that self-discipline is the key here to ensure there is time to learn a new hobby.
What does a coach do here? He/she uses the power of questioning to create a space that gives clarity to a client on what needs to be done. A client has a realization about the available options - those not visible before. Coaching empowers the client to overcome these very blind spots that restrict his/her vision to form a goal statement.
What deters a client from seeing this goal statement?
Often, clients have plenty of assumptions and beliefs that restrict them from reaching their goal. The focus of the client here is entirely upon what they cannot do. The coach, using exploration and expansion, has to create a dialogue in the client-coach relationship. This brings attention to the client’s goal statement, wherein the client realizes what he/she needs to focus on and work towards achieving the goal.
An excellent way to initiate this dialogue and partner with a client to bypass the critical filters is the integration of the NLP meta-model in the sessions. Fears, doubts, anxiety, worry, and more form critical filters in life. This universal model includes Distortion, Generalization, and Deletion that challenges the assumptions a client may have. Using this model, a client opens up the thought processes to develop more opportunities for self.
A coach who partners with the client to help him/her access the subconscious mind also raises the awareness levels of the filters a client has set in his/her mind. When a coach uses the power of questioning, the client receives greater clarity in thinking by understanding what the self-limiting beliefs are, and what was standing between the current state and the goal. A coach acts as a catalyst for change. Most often, clients realize it is their own limited thinking that restricts them from growth leading to negative thoughts, actions, and feelings.
Scarf Model by David Rock
The SCARF model is another highly effective coaching model. This includes 5 domains useful for the client to recognize the core functions that drive human behavior. It demonstrates the areas that influence our behavior in every situation.
Coaching, thus creates a new neuro-pathway when successful conversations occur between the coach and the client. A coach who contributes and works with the client to raise his/her awareness levels enables the client to achieve the goal statement. A coach here has a greater chance of enriching coaching sessions with successful results.
Which coaching models have lent more value to your coaching journey? Do write in the comments below. If you are looking to be a certified coach, do view our courses here. You can also write to [email protected]. Stay connected on our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages.
