What are you there to do for your clients?
No seriously, take a moment to really get present to the “why” of your work. And let me help guide your thought process here a little, because of course there are several, not just plausible but outright factual, “whys”.
There are, for example, the obvious base ones that rhyme with “because I have bills to pay and I figured coaching would be a pleasant career”.
Get present to the highest of high-rung “whys” of what you do. This is the stuff that probably made it somewhere to the copy on your website.
The proudest “why” you do what you do for your clients probably goes something like one or more of these:
To have your clients lives’ work; to have your clients be powerful; to have them be happy, fulfilled, self-expressed, with relationships that work; to experience love, joy and abundance.
To pursue and fulfill on what matters to them.
To win.
A few rungs lower, these “whys” devolve into things more like:
To have your clients feel safe, secure, heard.
To have them be comfortable.
These are nice enough, to be sure, until they devolve further into:
To have your clients not be confronted.
To not rock the boat.
To get by. Keep up, and maintain the status quo without getting upset.
And these are just a scant distance from the purely self-serving:
To have them like you.
To have them keep working with you.
Selling our your clients is what you’re doing as you descend this ladder of “whys”.
It’s when you stop holding your clients as big and capable, stop relating to them as able to forge and life a live that is powerful, and instead relate to them as delicate: needing zero confrontation and endless accommodation.
Remember, coaching is for people who are already well, and are looking to expand beyond what they know is possible. Therapy is, by definition, for people who are unwell, and therefore (arguably) rightly require such accommodation.
So if you’re doing coaching (and because you’re reading this I assume that you are), you have implicit license to hold us as big and capable. Anything less is selling us out. And selling us out, as your clients, is boring and ordinary.
It’s boring, for it means we’re just plodding along in a ho-hum existence, staying safe but living less powerfully than we could.
It’s ordinary, because my god do a lot of coaches sell out their clients. Because they wanna not rock the boat. Because they wanna keep ‘em on as clients.
Which rungs of your “why” will you honor?
Honoring the higher rungs can be scary, you might worry we’ll be turned off. But here’s the thing: you can make it way less scary by sharing those rungs with us, and explaining what you’re committed to and why.
We’ll understand.
Action plans that keep things moving along make things real and results-centric.
With this pair of core CoachAccountable functionality you have a clear and unambiguous area for the creating and working on plans and measures that move your client forward.
In other words, with these structures in place your clients have a difference-making game to play. It’s not just about the feelings.
