Ep #78: When Your Client Doesn’t Get It (Part 1)

Hi, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills, episode 78.

To really compete in the coaching industry, you have to be great at coaching. That’s why every week, I will be answering your questions, sharing my stories, and offering tips and advice so you can be the best at what you do. Let’s get to work.

Hey, coach. So glad you’re here today. I have something fun I want to talk to you about and it’s just something that comes up a lot that I see in The Coach Lab, and even in my mastermind, and just with my colleagues and with a lot of coaches I know. So I’m going to talk about this and if you’re like, “Oh my gosh, yes, this happens to me,” don’t worry, you’re in good company. I think this happens to a lot of coaches, which is why I’m recording a podcast about it.

I also just happened to record a few modules about this for the coach lab. So I’m not going to go as in depth here, obviously, it would be a very, very long podcast if I did. But I am going to go over just some high level, like here’s why this happens, here’s where you can take a look at it. And here’s some general like how you can fix it and think about it.

So what I want to talk about today is when you feel like you’re kind of butting heads with your clients, or you feel maybe defensive or frustrated because they’re not understanding what you’re telling them. They’re not understanding what coaching is, they just want you to tell them what to do. They won’t believe, maybe, that their thoughts and their feelings are influencing their results. And sometimes as coaches that can feel very frustrating. I totally get it.

And I’ve heard a lot of you come to me with questions about this. So we’re just going to talk about it today. And I just want to say that even though I work with all coaches at this point, this sometimes still happens for me. I know you don’t believe that.

But no, I don’t usually butt heads with my clients because this is something that I’ve worked through a lot and I’m very aware of when it’s happening. But I do have clients who come to me who are like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s a thought, but also…” And then they just kind of want me to tell them what to do.  Wouldn’t it be easier if we just knew all the answers and we could just always tell our clients what to do?

But I don’t get upset about it, and here’s why. I think one of the reasons, one of the main reasons I don’t get upset about it is because I don’t ever have to argue with my clients. I don’t ever think that I need to prove myself right or prove them wrong because I know kind of that the truth of the universe is that always no matter who you are or what you’re doing, how you’re thinking about something and how you’re feeling in the moment is always going to affect the way you show up. Right?

It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, it doesn’t matter what the situation is, that is always true, right? If I am talking to someone and they say something I don’t like and I feel very resentful towards them, it’s going to affect the way I interact with that person, right? It’s going to affect the way I show up in that moment.

If I am thinking about my daughter and I’m feeling very proud of her, it’s going to affect the way I show up and talk to her, right? It’s going to affect the way I’m acting in my life in that moment. If something terrible happens and I feel, you know, devastated, it’s going to show by the way I’m showing up in my life, right?

This is always the truth. It doesn’t matter if your client necessarily believes that from the beginning or not. And that’s part of what I want you to understand today. And I think especially, I think this is one reason I feel very grateful that when I started coaching I didn’t have a very specific framework that I was using.

I was kind of using a compilation of a bunch of different things that I had learned, mostly from the example of my coach at the time. I didn’t have a certification in the beginning, so I didn’t have a very specific tool that I was using.

And the more specific your tool is, and the more kind of in that mindset of like this is the one tool I use in my coaching, the more down that rabbit hole you go, the more I find, at least in my experience, the more I see coaches get stuck in that like, no, no, no, but clients have to understand. They have to understand how it works or we can’t ever move forward, right? Or we have to stay here and look at their thoughts, look at their feelings before they’re allowed to take any action, right? And that’s just not true.

My opinion is that part of our job as coaches is to meet our clients where they are. So that might be them not understanding any of it, right? Part of our job as a coach is to help them understand. And sometimes especially for those of you that came into coaching and went straight into some sort of learning or certification without maybe having a lot of experience of being coached yourself, and you just went straight into the learning of it.

And so you have a very logical understanding of what coaching is and you spent months and months learning the thing, whatever the things are about coaching. And then you start coaching clients and you are like, they don’t understand on the first call. And you’re kind of trying to teach them the thing that maybe it took you months to learn. You’re trying to teach them this thing and expecting them to understand it on the first call. And that is just not usually how it works, right?

Even if logically they understand it, or intellectually they understand it, it doesn’t mean that they’re just like, “Oh, yeah, I get it. We always just want to examine our thoughts and our feelings before we take action. I’m just going to apply this to my life immediately.” Right? if it was that easy, people wouldn’t hire us as coaches. Or they would hire us for just one or two sessions. But that’s not usually how it works, right? We sell like six month coaching packages, and this is why.

I remember when I was a one on one coach and I was just a general life coach, and I would have clients come to me like three months in and tell me this whole story and say, “Oh my gosh, I just realized what you’re saying. My thoughts create my results.” And it was always we would kind of laugh about it, you know, we had been talking about this for a long time.

Now, I in my coaching, when I was doing this, when I was a one on one coach, I didn’t necessarily teach my clients any type of like thought model or any tool similar to that where we were really strategically looking at, okay, what is the circumstance? What is your thought? What is your feeling? I was coaching them thinking about these things, but I wasn’t showing them. I wasn’t like writing it out or having them write it out.

As I kept coaching and I would have clients that worked with me for a long time, they might get very curious about it and then I would maybe teach it to them if they wanted me to so that they could start using it on their own. But I didn’t teach my clients even that they needed to be able to coach themselves on their own.

I knew that that was just my job, right? I was their coach. Now I would give them homework that was just, you know, this is what I want you to think about this week. This is what I want you to notice this week. This is what I want you to be aware of or take note of this week, right?

But I wouldn’t teach them any kind of specific tool, or thought model, or anything that looked like an equation that they could go just use on their own because I know, and part of what I would love for a lot of coaches to understand is that just because you teach your clients something like that in the first couple of calls, doesn’t mean they’re going to know how to use it like you can.

Now it’s not necessarily wrong if you’re doing that. So if you are doing that, I don’t want you to think, “Oh no, I need to completely redo the way I coach my clients.” That’s not necessarily true. And depending on the types of clients you work with, it might make more sense to teach them these things, but just know that you don’t have to.

This is always optional, you do not have to teach your clients how to coach themselves. You could just say, okay, it’s my job to be the coach. And I might give them homework in between or ask them questions or just tell them to notice certain things in between sessions. But they don’t have to be able to coach themselves.

Okay, so let’s come back to why does it show up sometimes and how to solve for when your clients aren’t understanding maybe what coaching is, or understanding what you’re telling them when you’re trying to maybe examine their thoughts or ask them how they’re feeling. And they’re not really into it and they’re like, “No, no, no, I just want you to tell me what to do.”

They don’t usually say those words, right? But you can usually kind of tell when a client really just wants you to give them every action and tell them exactly what to do. Here’s why and how to prevent this from happening. You’re not going to be able to prevent it 100% of the time, but this is where we’re going to start, is things to examine if this happens for you. And especially if it happens for you a lot or if it feels really bad when it does and you’re just not really sure how to get out of it. Okay?

So the first thing I want you to think about is, this is where we always start, right? I always laugh at this because I’m like, “Oh man, they probably get so tired of me saying this.” But it’s always true. The first thing we’re going to look at is what is your understanding of coaching? What are your thoughts about coaching versus strategy, right?

And when I say coaching in this context, I mean more like mindset coaching, right? Exploring your clients mind. Exploring how are they feeling? What does it feel like in their body when they think about these things? Right, like all of that is exploring what’s happening inside of them, versus exploring what they’re doing or what’s going on on the outside.

So what is your understanding of that, right? How would you describe it? That’s where we start. And this goes all the way back to what, like episode 1, I think. Like how do we talk about coaching? So here we are, full circle moment on episode 78, but this will always be the case, right? Like your understanding of coaching is the most important thing. And you’re going to see why because the next three things I’m going to tell you are affected by your understanding of what coaching is and how you use it with your clients.

So the next place you want to look is how are you talking about coaching? And especially if you have lots of clients coming to you who just expect you to tell them steps one through 20 of a process and that’s going to create their results. If you have lots of clients coming to you like this, the next place you want to look is your marketing.

How are you talking about it in your marketing, right? Because just think about this, if you were following me, let’s say I was a marriage coach and I was posting about I am going to just teach you how to have a better marriage. I’m going to teach you how to connect better with your spouse. I’m going to, you know, and I use a lot of words like I am going to do this thing so that you have this new understanding. And then you hire me, having never worked with a coach you would probably expect that I was going to tell you how to have a better marriage.

As opposed to if in my marketing, I said things like we’re going to really examine what are your beliefs about your marriage? What are your beliefs about yourself in your marriage? What are your beliefs about your spouse, or your partner? And how are all of those things affecting how you show up every day in your marriage?

Those two things are very different, right? So that’s the next place, is to just look at that, examine your marketing. How are you selling, or how are you marketing, how are you talking about what it is that you do and what coaching is?

If you’re a business coach and you’re like, “I am going to teach you how to make $100,000 in your business.” Your clients are going to expect that they’re going to get on calls and you’re going to show them how to make money. That’s very different than talking about like what are your thoughts about money? How are you thinking about your business? How are you interacting with your business, right? Like how do you feel in your business every day?

If those things are showing up in your marketing, your clients are going to have a lot better idea of what to expect. Just examine that, right? Just check out your marketing and see like, am I saying I’m going to tell you what to do, and then I’m getting the clients in sessions and then I’m just saying, “Okay, now we’re going to look at your thoughts.” Those two things are just very different.

The next place that you can examine and see like where is this? Where am I not describing my understanding of what coaching is to my clients is in your selling. And, of course, selling and marketing are very similar but in this case what I mean is on your sales page, pages, website, anything like that, on consults, anywhere where you are very specifically selling something, selling your coaching.

I’ve seen sales pages before where my clients have said, “I just don’t understand why clients, like they come to calls and they don’t want to talk about their thoughts, they don’t want to talk about their feelings. They don’t want to talk about any of it, they just want me to tell them how to lose weight.” And then I’ll look at their sales page and I’ll see well, yeah, because your sales page says that’s what you’re going to do, you’re just going to tell them how to lose weight.

Now, you don’t have to go into every single detail of this is exactly what that looks like. But you just want to question, right? Like on a consult am I explaining to them anything about the way that they’re thinking about something? About the way that they’re feeling and how that affects the results that they’re creating? Like, is it there at all? Is it on my sales page? Just something to consider.

And then the last spot where you can think about this and examine it is in your actual coaching, right? So how often are you believing them, right? What I see happen a lot of times with some of my clients In the lab, in The Coach Lab is they’ll say, “So my clients, they just get on and they just want me to tell them what to do. And so then I do and I just end up teaching the whole time. And I don’t know how to correct that. I don’t know how to fix it.”

And so my first question is always like well, why are you doing that? It doesn’t really matter what your clients want or what they think is going to happen, you’re in charge. You are the coach. Why are you doing that? And usually it comes down to some form of, well, I’m like, kind of believing them, right? I’m believing that I should be able to just solve all their problems for them. I should be able to tell them what to do. And that just isn’t what coaching is.

Of course there are times that we help our clients decide what they want to do or we might say like, this is what I’ve tried before. But I think knowing the difference, that that isn’t truly coaching, right? The coaching piece is the part where you’re questioning them, you’re asking them questions. You’re mining their brain, not your own.

Within your coaching, the more solid you feel about your understanding of coaching your understanding about how you coach, like when you give strategy, when you coach your clients, when you teach, the more clear you will feel while you’re in sessions with your clients.

So those are kind of the ways you can look at this from, you know, how can I set myself up for this not happening, right? Like what are all the places I can look and examine to kind of set myself up for going into coaching with my clients having a better understanding of exactly what we’re doing.

And then on the other side of it, you can also say like, okay, I’ve examined all these things, I feel so great about my understanding of what coaching is and how I coach. I’ve checked my marketing. I’ve looked at my selling. In my coaching I’m pretty clear about what we’re doing here and very upfront with it with my clients.

And my clients still want to focus on the actions, or still aren’t believing that their thoughts create their results, or definitely just want me to tell them what to do. Or whatever it is, like acting in ways that you think your clients shouldn’t be acting because they should be just making your job super, super easy all the time. Right?

So now you can examine that side and say, okay, how can I just meet my client where she is? Where he is? How can I just meet them right here, right here where they are and create this amazing coach client relationship anyway, right? Regardless, irregardless of how they’re showing up, of what they’re saying, it’s still your job. Like you still get to fully understand what coaching is and they don’t have to, and that’s okay.

So I’m going to leave you here for now. And then come back next week, we’re going to do part two of this and dive a little more into what you can do when this is still happening, right? When you still aren’t quite sure how to move forward with your client because they don’t know what coaching is, and then you feel confused, maybe, or frustrated, or whatever it is. We’re going to talk about that next week. I’ll see you then. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Mastering Coaching Skills. If you want to learn more about my work, come visit me at lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. That’s Lindsay with an A, D-O-T-Z-L-A-F.com. see you next week.