Finishing up an Engagement? Great! Now is the time to review with your client those clear, up-front intentions!
Practically no coaches do this. Have the courage anyway, to acknowledge whichever intentions that were not fulfilled. By taking the time, you get to model for your client a way to do better than sweeping things under the rug. Show them it’s possible to have a sense of completion with whatever is and isn’t so, in a way that is more powerful then quietly taking the loss, or loudly proclaiming (pretending) they didn’t care about those unfulfilled ambitions anyway.
This is your chance to take a beat and ask after any disempowerment, any upset. Questions like:
- Tell me about how open or not open this seems to you now as a possibility for later.
- What have you since learned that would make this easier to do, or which made you realize it’s harder than you thought?
- Tell me about how important this is to you now.
- Any upset you want to express now?
It hurts more, but we clients (really) would rather show up to and lose the Super Bowl than walk out of Everyone Gets a Trophy Day with our trinket in tow.
This arrangement makes a sort of powerful-because-clearly-related-to-what’s-so post mortem easy to perform: here’s what happened, just the facts. It is a space in which it is easy to reclaim and re-promise around whatever is still desirable, and complete on and clear out whatever is not.
