What will you talk about with your client during their next session with you?
If your reflexive answer rhymes at all with “Whatever’s on their mind”, sorry, but that’s a fail, even if you find yourself in good company among fellow coaches.
This default position of “being there for the client wherever they’re at from week to week” is super common, but it’s also super weak. After all, Being a Blank Slate Isn’t Good Customer Service, It’s Lazy.
But matters of getting by with zero preparation aside, meeting us clients wherever we’re at on a week-to-week basis is a disservice in another, more subtle way. To see why, let us examine the arc of a time-bounded coaching engagement (which, by its time-boundedness, has a certain urgency, and therefore a sort of power, that indefinite coaching never does).
When a round of coaching begins, if you’re doing it right you are pushing us clients to get super specific about what we want. Specifically, what we are out to cause in our lives and the lives of others. This is what I describe as Clear, Up-Front Intentions. In the space of that conversation, energy and optimism are generally high. There’s a sense of power and agency, and a real connection to the “why” of this whole effort on our part as your client. In this beginning phase of creation, you can be reasonably assured that the person you’re talking with is empowered and present to what matters to them.
Later in that arc? When the free-flowing joy of creation has given way to the duty of being responsible for execution? Well, “whatever’s on their mind” might not be quite as empowered and committed to the vision. Because being responsible and following through can be drag. After all, Funyuns are Still Outselling Responsibilityuns.
So if you only attend to the in-the-moment, top-of-mind topics of your client, i.e. a spot check around whatever’s going on when you have that session, there’s a high chance that you’ll be getting into the weeds, giving too much airtime to whatever feelings surround the doldrums of doing the work. Our in-the-moment agenda might be to talk about whatever’s getting hard, to presence excuses, etc.
Your job is to bring an agenda of your own, namely: our agenda from those clear, up-front intentions. The one we created with you when we got clear about what this coaching was all in service of in the first place. In other words, the Big Picture.
Don’t be surprised, but we clients will lose the Big Picture over and over during the course of working with you. This is a natural consequence of being in the trenches when setbacks and hiccups arise.
The good news is that coaches underestimate how well or how willing us clients will be to bring accountability for the Big Picture progress.
By coaching us from the Big Picture, you help us to reconnect with what it’s all for, and thereby maintain proper perspective around the obstacles on the way. When we’re present to that Big Picture, those obstacles become smaller and more worth the effort to surmount.
In short: by all means engage us around whatever’s going on this week, but do it in the context of that Big Picture.
We need you for that far more than we need an indulgent and sympathetic ear.
By admitting evergreen, easy access to you and your clients, and ripe for you or your client to make updates whenever needed (with the history of drafts automatically saved and also ripe for perusal!), you’ll have a very easy time staying present to the Big Picture for your clients, which makes keeping your clients present to it as well much easier.
Savvy coaches have a ritual of specifically preparing for their sessions with their specific clients. Taking 60 seconds or less to review the Big Picture for whomever you’re about to talk to is an excellent part of such rituals.
