[This User’s Guide to Coaching series explains everything you need to know to successfully engage and work with a coach—a life coach, a creativity coach, an executive coach, any sort of coach. It accompanies Dr. Maisel’s latest book, The Coach’s Way, described as “the finest resource available for anyone who wants to develop or enrich their coaching abilities.” Grab your copy now!]
When working with your coach, you may notice that during your first session something in you will have shifted.
You will feel yourself a little happier, a little lighter, a little more hopeful. Even if your coach is proposing work for you to do—work that you yourself have put on the table as important to you—it will feel less like work and more like devotion. You’ll find yourself reacquainting yourself with some lost feelings of meaningfulness, self-worth, and self-compassion. Achieving goals is wonderful, but these feelings are the gold of coaching.
I can easily sense this shift in session. Maybe my client has been explaining why he can’t decide which of the four novels he would like to write he ought to choose to work on first. As the shift I’m describing occurs, his resistance to choosing melts away and he begins to settle into thinking about one of the novels, not all four at once. Previously, he’d been holding the task of choosing as akin to grief work, as he grieved the three novels he would have to put aside in favor of the fourth. Now, his focus had shifted to love of the fourth, rather than grief over the other three.
If this shift doesn’t occur, that signals that we are still just talking, maybe profitably and maybe about exactly the right things, but that we are not yet fully working. It’s akin to the shift in energy, tone, and depth when two people chatting at a cocktail move from idle chitchat to a subject of importance. Maybe the one, opening up and standing vulnerable, shares with the other a cancer diagnosis or the fear that her partner is having an affair. They naturally lower their voices; they naturally move to a quiet corner; in this context and for this limited amount of time, they have become intimates.
When the shift occurs, relationship forms. Something is shared that shifts two people from strangers to fellow human beings, dropped into this world together. At some point, the client will likely smile, maybe for the first time that session and maybe only tentatively. Some warmth has been generated and some hope has returned. There is a new spring to his step. In fact, he has now come a mile closer to achieving his goals, even though he hasn’t budged an inch.
A perfectly solid and profitable session can proceed without this shift occurring. Maybe you’ve been chatting with your coach about the details of your plan to lose weight, advance at work, or finish your screenplay. You’ve both been focusing on refining the details of the plan so that it feels smart and workable. Maybe you’ve been more moving along than diving deeply. That’s good work also! There’s nothing about such a useful session to disparage. That amounts to a profitable session.
And sometimes the shift I’ve been describing will occur. Take notice of it, if it does, because that is big news and the first lines of a success story. Whether or not you accomplish all of the tasks associated with your new plan, you will now be standing in better relationship to those tasks and to the goals they support. Notice that shift: it is the equivalent of great news.
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“The Coach’s Way is possibly the finest resource available for anyone who wants to develop or enrich their coaching abilities. This new book is designed to give coaches the confidence and structure in their practice that will generate real results for their clients. Any- one who makes a living in the coaching arena will benefit from Dr. Maisel’s tremendous experience and training as a therapist, coach, and human. I’m so glad to have this book as a guide for my own coaching work and will recommend it to many others in the helping professions.”— Jacob Nordby, author of The Creative Cure: How Finding and Freeing Your Inner Artist Can Heal Your Life
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Read Part One Here: The Coach’s Way: User’s Guide to Coaching
Read Part Two Here: Can You Tolerate the Truth?
Read Part Three Here: Can I Collaborate?
Read Part Four Here: Picking a Kind of Helper
Read Part Five Here: Picking Your Coach
Read Part Six Here: Don’t Worry If Your Worldviews Differ
Read Part Seven Here: Check Your Expectations
Read Part Eight Here: Provide Your Coach With Information
Read Part Nine Here: Be Prepared to Be Psychological
Read Part Ten Here: Schedule a Session
Read Part Eleven Here: Right Before Your First Session
Read Part Twelve Here: Your First Session Begins
Read Part Thirteen Here: Don’t Expect Your Coach to Mind Read
Read Part Fourteen Here: Think Goals
Read Part Fifteen Here: Co-create Plans
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock