Ep #79: When Your Client Doesn’t Get It (Part 2)

Hey, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills, episode 79.

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, it’s Lindsay and before we dive into today’s episode I wanted to just let you in on an upcoming launch for Coaching Masters Mastermind. It’s a six month mastermind for coaches who are working with clients who are ready to master their coaching skills on a deeper level, who are ready to create or recreate a process or a new process for your coaching. And kind of dive into what are your values as a human? What are your values as a coach? How does that play into the way you coach your clients?

And those are just a few teasers, there’s a lot more. And the launch is coming the week of May 23rd. So if you’re interested, make sure to get on the wait list, we will have the link for that hooked up in the show notes. And if you think that’s for you, or you think it just might be for you, go ahead and join the wait list.

The applications will actually open to the wait list before opening to the public, to anyone else. So if this is for you, make sure to get your name there and I’m not going to take up any more of your time. Have fun listening to today’s episode.

Hey, Coach. So today we’re going to talk, finish talking about what I started last week. Last week I talked a little bit about what to do kind of ahead of time to help your clients really understand what coaching is and really show up for coaching in a way that is useful for them and useful for you, right? And how to kind of prepare that ahead of time.

I talked a little bit about places to look to see what are your thoughts about coaching, right? What are your thoughts about telling your clients what to do? Do you understand the difference between teaching and coaching? So just really examining your brain and then looking at your marketing and how you’re talking about what coaching is and what you do.

Looking at your selling, your sales pages, examining how you talk about it on consults. And then the last step is really looking at the beginning of a coaching relationship, right? Like do you agree with your clients sometimes when they tell you that they just want you to tell them what to do or that they don’t think that their thoughts create their results?

And so today I’m going to dive a little more into the next part, which would be what do you actually do in your coaching when your client keeps coming to you with, you know, just only wanting to focus on the actions, not wanting to think about thoughts or feelings, or really just wants you to tell them, okay, what’s the next step? Just tell me what to do. What should I do?

I’m going to give you a few tips, but they all stem around the same thing, which is meeting your client where they are, right? Like being willing to kind of set your agenda aside, if you have one, and to say like, “Okay, let’s start where you are and dive in there.” So I’m going to give you some examples where this might show up.

And I’m going to give you examples that are more broad, talking about each thing. But then also give you some very specific examples where I’ve seen this show up in my own coaching in the past, or where I’ve seen clients ask questions about this.

So there are lots of places this can show up, right? It could be that you have a very specific tool that you use. Last time I mentioned I’m certified through the Life Coach School, so I know the model. And I know a lot of coaches who use the model, but I also know because I’ve worked with so many coaches from all over the industry, that every certification that I know of teaches some sort of tool that is like the model, right?

It’s really just creating awareness for what’s happening, like what are you thinking? How are you feeling? How is that influencing your actions and creating results in your life? And pretty much every coach certification has something similar.

So I have a master coach certification, which is brand new by the way. I’m officially master coach certified. So I have a master coach certification through the Life Coach School, but I also am currently in the Institute of Equity Centered Coaching. I’m doing a certification through there and we’re examining all different styles of coaching.

And within every style there is some sort of, here are your thoughts, here’s how you’re feeling, let’s look inside of you. Which is the basics of what coaching is. When you’re leaving out like the strategy or consulting piece of coaching, the rest, the actual coaching is just really examining your client’s mind.

And sometimes clients will come and be a little resistant to that. And they’ll just say like, I thought I was just hiring you more as a, they won’t say maybe these words, but they’re thinking that coaching is more like consulting, right? Which is like I’ve done this thing, I’m very good at it, I know how to do it. And now I’m going to tell you how to do it and kind of guide you along the way.

But when you think about that tool that is similar to the model, or whatever you call it, however you have learned it, kind of each step of that tool are where clients could have some resistance, right? So, for example, in the model they teach that there is a circumstance and the circumstance is just the thing that’s happening in the world, right?

It’s just like it’s facts, we would all agree that it is happening or that it exists. Maybe someone says words to you, someone acts a certain way, like does something specific. Like really anything in the world that you just want to examine, I describe it as the thing you want to examine your thoughts about.

Some of you are believing that you have to like really convince a client that this is true, right? That there are circumstances, or situations, or things that happen that are neutral, and you like start there day one. And I would encourage you to maybe ease into that a little bit. Because sometimes it’s easy to get into this mode of where you almost think it’s like a math equation.

But when a client is coming to you with, like as a coach, we might know it’s a circumstance. We might know that it’s just a thing that is happening in the world. But when you use the word neutral, and if your clients don’t have a good understanding of what that means, which I have a whole podcast about that. So if you aren’t sure, you can even go listen to the podcast, I don’t remember what number it is, but something about neutral is in the title.

But if your clients don’t know what that means and they hear you saying, “Your brother said really terrible words to you, right, said these words.” And in their mind, they’re like, “No, this is a fact that these are terrible, I don’t understand why you would ever say that this is neutral.”

Or something happens that they feel very negative emotion about, and you’re trying to explain to them how it’s neutral. That just brings up so much opportunity for a client to argue with you or to push back, right? Or to just not fully lean into the coaching. Not that it isn’t a good, an amazing thing to show your clients, you just want to think about when you’re doing it, right? And maybe it doesn’t need to be done in the beginning.

Another place that clients could have some resistance is when you’re saying like, “Okay, first, before we move forward we need to really examine your thoughts.” Now, some clients, and I know I have talked about this before about myself. Like my thoughts are very accessible for me, I live in my brain. I overthink things, I just sit around thinking about things. Like my thoughts are very, very accessible for me.

What I have learned is that that isn’t true for everyone. Sometimes you might go into it just asking, “Okay, what are your thoughts about this?” And if your client isn’t able to immediately tell you or they’re just not used to isolating thoughts like that and they might have a hard time, that’s okay. It is okay to just move on and meet them where they are, right?

They also might just have a bunch of thoughts. They might not be able to say like, “Oh, here’s my one, my main thought about it,” right? They might give you a list of 100 thoughts, and that’s also okay. The same is true for feelings. So sometimes we’re like, “Okay, here we’ve got the thought. Now, when you think this, how do you feel?”

This is not a normal human question, right? I just want you to, I want every coach to like really acknowledge that. Sometimes I think we get to the place where as coaches we’ve had years and years of thinking about things like this, right? We have a thought, it creates a feeling, but really that is an oversimplification.

We’re not usually just having one isolated thought and one isolated feeling, right? The human experience is very different than that and can be very mixed up and you have a stream of consciousness or thoughts after thoughts after thoughts, and you might feel one way and then you feel another way. You might feel one way about something one week and feel totally differently about it the next week.

Your clients are the same, but without the years of experience of learning to think like a coach. Unless you coach coaches, and then sometimes, even then, if you do coach coaches, you will probably have had this experience. Sometimes coaches will love to like coach themselves or get really into like, “Okay, here’s my thought and here’s my feeling.” And even that can take like the real human experience out of it.

Some clients will be able to easily access their feelings. It will be more easy for them than it is to access like what are you thinking about this thing, right? So if you’re asking your clients like, how are you thinking about this?  What are your thoughts about it? Or even in the future, like what do you think you want to think about this thing? And they can’t easily find their thought or find the thought they want to have, you can start in the middle and say, how are you feeling right now? Or how do you want to feel? Or how do you not want to feel, right?

You can even do the opposite, like explore if they can’t access what are they thinking or what are they feeling, you could ask them what do you not want to believe right now? Or what do you not want to feel right now, right? And you could start there.

All right, and then the next place, so there’s a circumstance, you have a thought about it. Your thought creates a feeling from that, from those things. Now you are taking action in the world, right? And those things are influencing all of the actions that you’re taking. That is always true, no matter what.

You never have to prove to your client that that’s true, right? As humans, this is what’s happening. That’s a very simplified version of it, but we’re always having thoughts, we’re always having feelings from those places, from our beliefs, from our experience as humans, we are taking action, right? We decide, okay, this is the action I think I should be taking right now, this is the best action, this is the action I think that’s going to work.

And this is probably the number one place where my clients come to me with questions, right? They’re like, “My clients just want to go straight to action. They don’t want to talk about thoughts, they don’t want to talk about feelings, they just want to go straight to action.” And I think it’s okay to do that. Starting there, because these things always go together, you can start at any place.

Even I, as someone who coaches coaches, and someone who has coached for a very long time, I never argue with my clients when they’re like, “No, but let’s like start with the action. Just tell me what to do. What should I be doing?” If that’s where my client wants to start, sometimes I’ll say, “Okay, well, what do you want to do? Let’s explore that first.” Right? You can start there.

It doesn’t mean, just because in your mind you’re like skipping some steps, it doesn’t mean that you can never go back to those other steps, right? You can just start there and say like, “Okay, when you’re doing that…” or like, “Okay, go do that. Go experiment, go try it.” And then when they come back, did it work? Did it not work? Why not?

Then you can start to maybe examine some thoughts, some feelings. How were you feeling when you were doing that action? How were you feeling when you were doing that thing? You can even start coaching by thinking about a result that someone wants to create, which is actually kind of what I teach, right?

Because one of the things that I teach in The Coach Lab and in Coaching Masters, I say like when you start with a client, the first thing you want to do is get really clear about where they want to go. We talk a lot about goals, and goal setting, and what that could look like. All the different ways you can do it, all the different ways it can look. And this is basically what you’re doing, right? Saying like, okay, at the end of this, like, what is the result that you want to create?

So you can start there. You can start at any place. Meet your client wherever they want to go when, especially when they are being a little resistant, or they are feeling doubtful, or you can tell that they’re like, “I don’t really know what’s happening here. Why are we talking about thoughts?” That’s okay, just skip that part for now. You can come back to it. There’s no right way.

And I know sometimes it’s hard because in a certification or in a lot of the places where they teach you to coach, like the first step always is a little bit of teaching a right way. I do this in The Coach Lab. I’m like, “Here’s how I do it, here’s this way. First, let’s set a goal. Then let’s think about where are they now. Let’s create awareness of where are they now. Then, eventually, you want to evaluate and decide what you’re going to do differently moving forward. Check back in with the goal, right?” Like I’m like, “Here’s the process.”

But you have to learn a process first in order to be able to now kind of loosen your grip on that process a little bit. So whatever tool you use, whatever way you have been taught, okay, that’s great. That’s one way it can work. Now, how can you approach it from wherever your client is?

Another way this can show up where you can kind of meet your client where they are is, that was more talking about like specific tools. But another way this shows up is when you might have a way that your sessions usually go, right?

Like, okay, this is what happens, we start our sessions, I give you a bunch of homework, maybe you do the homework, we check in on the homework. And then I’ll have clients come to me saying, “Oh no, my clients aren’t doing their homework.”

Well, that’s fine, meet them where they are. Ask them why they’re not doing their homework. Do it with them on the call, maybe they don’t want to do homework. What if they didn’t have to? Like really examining what is necessary and what isn’t will be very useful in this situation.

Another very specific example, sometimes I’ll have clients that are like, “No, this is how I structure my calls. The first thing we do is we celebrate their wins.” But imagine, you as the coach, you’re like, “Okay, at the start of every session, we celebrate the wins over the last week.” So you get on a session with a client and you’re like, “Okay, let’s celebrate. What do we have to celebrate?” And your client immediately starts crying.

Maybe something has just happened, right? Maybe they had an argument with their partner, they found out some bad news. Something bad happened to their kid at school, right? Like whatever it is, and their emotions are very high.

And I know some of you are like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but still we have to celebrate, it’s important.” But that’s not true in that moment, right? This is where it’s like, okay, today, we’re going to throw that structure out the window and we’re going to figure out what does the client need today?

All right, I hope this has been helpful, the two parts of kind of how to show up ahead of time to kind of teach your clients what coaching is and how it’s going to go. And then how to show up in sessions while you’re working with your clients when they are being a little resistant or they do show up in ways that you aren’t expecting.

I hope it was helpful, let me know what questions you have. And I have a couple of amazing interviews for you lined up coming up soon. So those are in the plans, and I will talk to you next week. 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.