Ep #41: When Your Client Isn’t Ready for Coaching

Hey, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf, and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills episode 41.

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.

Hello, hello, welcome. So happy you’re here today for another episode of working on our coaching skills. And today I want to talk to you about something that comes up quite a bit in my mastermind and just with clients in general. I get this email on occasion and I just thought it would be fun to talk about on the podcast today.

So here’s the topic, how do you know when a client is really ready to be coached through something and to move on, to move through something versus when is it appropriate or more appropriate to not move forward? To kind of help them just be where they are just in the humanity of being a human. Just experiencing the emotions and just kind of being, “Yeah, this just sucks.”

So if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, or if you’ve never had this happen, you probably have, and you may just have not noticed. So I want you to think about this, sometimes clients come to us as coaches, and something has just happened. Maybe it’s like a fresh thing.

There’s a circumstance in their life that feels pretty heavy or pretty bad to them. And their emotions are very heightened. And they may even come to a coaching session and say, “Okay, I need coaching on this.”

And I think it’s so important that part of our job as coaches isn’t always to just say, “Okay, great, how do we get out of this? Let’s move forward.” But to also sometimes know when it’s appropriate to, even if a client is telling us they want to move out of it, to kind of know when that isn’t the best thing for them.

So I’ll give you a couple examples. Maybe this has happened to you or something similar like this has probably happened. So maybe a client comes to a coaching session and something kind of bad, like you would even agree it’s a bad thing, has happened in their life. Maybe there’s a death in their family. Maybe their partner just broke off a relationship with them. Maybe they got fired from a job that they loved, and they didn’t see it coming. Maybe they found out that their pregnancy isn’t viable.

Maybe someone said really, really hurtful words to them. Maybe someone said words to them that were racist, or sexist, or homophobic. Or they experienced something in their life and they’re coming to you kind of fresh off of the thing, whatever it was, and their emotions are heightened. They don’t want to feel the way they’re feeling but they’re coming to you thinking they need coaching.

So I just think it’s so important as coaches that we really kind of take a look at this and say when is it appropriate to just say, “You’re right, let’s move on. What are your thoughts about this thing? Okay, yes, the thing is true, but how can we think about it in order to help you move forward?” Versus, “You know what? Maybe it’s okay, that you just feel awful right now.”

So, here’s what I want you to kind of consider. The first thing to keep in mind, this is the way I kind of think of it, as a coach, I know that I have a very zoomed out look at a lot of things. Especially because I’ve been a coach for a while. I’ve coached so many clients on so many different things, all over the gamut of things that can be coached on.

And I know when someone comes to me devastated because someone broke up with them. Or devastated because they just lost a job. Or devastated because someone said really hurtful words to them. I know like big picture, later they’re going to be okay, right? They’re going to work through it, they’re going to handle the situation.

Now, I’m not saying they’re going to just accept that whatever happened was okay. I think there’s a distinction there that I want you to hear. That’s not what I’m saying.

But I just know that however they handle it in their life, big picture, they’re going to be able to move forward and not be just stuck in this place forever. Which is how it kind of feels when you’re in that place of very heightened emotion. It’s just like an “Oh my gosh, what if I’m stuck here forever in this pain?”

And so, as coaches we kind of have that zoomed out view and it can be easy if we forget, if we think about coaching a little more like it’s a math equation where we can just change our thoughts and change our feelings, which isn’t true because we’re just humans being human. It’s not always easy to just change the things.

And when we think about it like that, as a coach, when it becomes more like a math equation, we lose all of the humanity in the coaching. And to a client that can sometimes feel really bad. Especially if they’re in a place of very heightened emotion.

So the first thing is to just notice your thoughts in the moment. When a client comes to you, and they are very distraught and very upset about something. And emotions are very heightened, they’re feeling terrible, they’re in pain. The first thing is to really check in with your own compassion of, “Of course, this is a human experience, and my client is really in it right now.”

And remind yourself of when was the last time I felt this deep pain? And was I ready for someone to just say like, “Oh, let’s just look at your thoughts. What are your thoughts about this? Let’s move on.” Probably not. Right?

So here’s kind of how I think about it, when clients come to me in this position, even when they say, “Help, I need coaching.” I always want to take a step back and just really check in with them. Just like, “Tell me how you’re feeling right now.” I don’t need to know the thoughts. I don’t start with the thoughts. I don’t lead with the thoughts.

When a client’s emotion is very heightened, one of the first questions I will always ask them is just how are you feeling right now? And just kind of let them talk and see what comes up. Because I know for me when I very first started working with a life coach, and even still to this day, one of the most important things that I have learned through coaching is that whatever emotion I’m experiencing is okay. And to really trust my emotions.

And I know I’ve talked about this in the past, but one reason I got into coaching is because my anxiety was so bad, and I was having frequent anxiety attacks. And looking back now, a lot of the actual anxiety attacks were coming from my resistance to just feeling the emotion.

So I still feel anxiety today. I know, again, I know I’ve talked about this on some episodes. I still experiencing anxiety, it’s just no longer a problem. It doesn’t feel amazing. I’m not like, “Yay, anxiety, welcome to the party, this is so great.” But I’m able to experience it and trust it and know it’ll go away. And know I’ll be on the other side of it.

So there’s something so powerful about showing your clients you don’t actually always have to just move through an emotion. Sometimes we just want to be there and know it’s okay.

So let’s go back to some of those examples I said. Let’s say a client comes to a coaching session and they start telling you that someone they love is very sick. And they’re like, “I need coaching on this, I feel terrible.” And what they’re kind of thinking in the moment is coaching is just going to make them feel better.

Again, the first thing you can do is just really explore how are you feeling right now? Tell me about it. Not what is the thought that is creating this feeling? But just how are you feeling? And then getting really curious, and you could ask this in a bunch of different ways, but getting really curious about like, “Would you want to feel differently about this?”

So let’s say someone they love is very sick. They are feeling scared and maybe terrified and helpless. And there might be a mix of emotions. Something that’s so interesting to explore, and most humans are just not used to thinking about emotions this way unless they’ve experienced coaching before or some other form of really exploring their emotions.

But it’s just so interesting to think like would you actually want to feel differently if someone you really love is suffering? Would you want to be happy? No, probably not. Would you want any other emotion? Would you want to be experiencing joy or relief or pride? Or we could just keep going down the list of naming all the emotions. No, you would probably say, “Of course I feel sad. No, I don’t want to move out of that.”

So sometimes it’s like clients think that coaching is like the miracle cure. And coaches can get caught up in this too. Coaching isn’t the miracle cure for just feeling better. You can’t change your circumstances when it’s something that’s outside of you.

You can’t make someone not sick. You can’t make someone not homophobic. You can’t make someone else not break up with you. You can’t control the outside world. Those things are still going happen. Coaching isn’t about just being happy all the time and finding the positivity and experiencing what I would call a kind of fake joy all the time.

Now, sometimes that’s definitely available and it’s amazing. And it’s a great side of coaching. But I do think, sometimes I think even coaching gets a bad rap for this because some of you guys, some coaches, some of just the industry there is, there can be a hint of coaching is just like all the time positivity. Like find the positive look for the good. That’s not always true.

Sometimes it really is a deep experience, a deep emotional experience. And that is what it needs to be and it’s okay. That is part of showing a client, “Hey, you are feeling awful right now. You’re feeling sad. You’re feeling devastated. You’re feeling anger. You’re feeling rage, whatever it is, and you don’t actually want to move out of it. And that’s okay. And when you’re ready, we’ll be here with coaching.”

I want everyone to really take a second and think about this. And don’t judge yourself. But just question, have there been times as a coach when I have been kind of in a hurry to get my client out of a negative emotion, because it makes me a better coach? Or if I can help them just feel better, the quicker the better, right? Then I get to be a better coach. It’s just not true.

Especially depending on what type of coach you are, you might experience this with clients more than others. So if you’re a coach that works with relationships, or medical diagnoses, or anything related to pregnancy, or marriage. Or anything where there is a lot of outside influence that we can’t do anything about.

We can’t control the things going on outside of us and sometimes just crappy stuff happens. That’s just true. It’s just part of life, and it gets to be there. And we get to feel negative emotion without thinking we have to immediately get out of it.

Now, here’s a couple ways to kind of tell when it’s maybe more appropriate to just be with your client in the moment to really make sure they feel
seen and held and you hold that space for them of just it’s okay to be here. Here are a couple signs.

When emotion is extremely heightened, it’s not the best time to try to say like, “What thoughts are you having that’s creating this emotion?” That’s just not a thing that clients a lot of times have access to. Or even yourself, even when you’re self-coaching. It’s not something you have access to in your brain.

There are so many other things going on in your body. Hormones, endorphins, just things firing in your body. Emotions are very high, your logical brain you might as well have just taken it out and set it on the table. It’s just we don’t have access to it in that moment.

So when you’re the coach and your client shows up with extremely heightened emotion, one of the worst things you can do is act like it’s not there or they can just move right out of it. Because it will feel so terrible to them even if you do have a solution available.

Even if you can see with your kind of zoomed out coach view like, “Okay, these things in your life, they might be true. And the way you’re thinking about it is really not helpful.” That doesn’t matter. Clients do not have access to that in a moment of very heightened emotion.

Another way that it could show up is kind of the opposite, a client who’s extremely closed off. Some people, their emotions are focused very outward and some people their emotions are going to be a lot more on the inside.

And you can kind of tell, especially if you’ve been working with a client for a while, when a client just seems very shut down and maybe very quiet. Maybe like they’re on the verge of tears, but they’re not saying anything, and you can’t really tell why. Such a good time to just explore, just how are you feeling right now?

Just literally starting there. And just being with them in that moment of like, “Okay, you’re feeling angry, you’re feeling sad.” Just really sitting there maybe having them just put their hand on their chest, their hand on their heart. And just really being there with them and showing them it’s okay to feel this way. There’s nothing wrong with you because you’re feeling this way. There’s nothing wrong with you that this thing happened in your life and you’re experiencing emotion around it.

I have said this before many times, our job as coaches is not to turn ourselves or our clients into robots with no emotion. I think it’s actually the opposite. Our job as coaches is to help our clients trust their emotion.

And by the way, I don’t care what kind of coach you are, I don’t care if you’re a business coach, I don’t care if you’re like, “All I do is help people make money, this doesn’t come up for me.” It definitely comes up for you. Your clients will show up like this, especially if you’re open to hearing it.

So no matter what kind of coach you, I want you to really listen to this. Our job as coaches is to help our clients trust their emotions. Not to get them out of them as quickly as possible, Not to turn them into robots.

And I have a theory, I should probably Google this and see. There’s probably some sort of research around that talks about this. But I have a theory and I noticed it with myself when I very first started working with a coach, over a year or more when I was working with my first coach. And I’ve noticed it in clients that I really think our capacity to experience an emotion, positive or negative, affects the other end of the spectrum.

So for example, if we refuse to feel any negative emotion, I think it affects how much real positive emotion we are able to experience.

A lot of times when you think about emotion, I’m just going all deep on the emotions today. But when you think about an emotion, the way I think about it is we all kind of have a baseline where it’s like this is kind of where we land if we think about like positive to negative emotions. I’m trying to think of who it is, possibly Tim Ferriss, I don’t know. Someone talks about where you can rate an emotion. Like today I’m a positive one or positive two. Today I’m a zero, which would just be totally neutral. Today I’m a negative one or a negative two. I’m not saying that you should do this, I just think it’s an interesting way to think about it.

But I think that neutral, that’s just our baseline. That’s just where we fall on like, do we tend to be generally pretty happy? Do we tend to be a little on the negative emotion side? There’s like that middle line and that’s our baseline. And our ability to experience, let’s say, positive emotion, like how far above the baseline can we go? We have to also be able to experience the opposite.

This is how I think about it. Again, I just want to be very clear, this is not science. It might be backed by science, but I’ve never actually looked it up. Okay? But I just think it’s useful as coaches to think about it like this, because sometimes we get really freaked out when our clients come with extreme negative emotion.

And the reason it has been so useful for me to really think about emotion like this is, I know if I can help a client experience that negative emotion and be okay in it, it also increases their ability to experience positive emotion and feel good in that. Which I know it sounds weird to say feel good in a positive emotion.

But I will tell you my experience with having anxiety in the past, the anxiety felt so bad just in my body. And excitement feels very similar to anxiety in your body. And so I would be very excited for something, and it would very quickly turn into anxiety. And I didn’t like the way either of them felt so I would just try to not feel either.

Which is really interesting, right? Most of us would think, why wouldn’t you want to be excited? Now, as I have really been able to work through my feelings of anxiety and just be able to experience it without kind of panicking and resisting it and feeling the need to get out of it, it’s also way more fun now to experience excitement. Even though it feels very similar in my body, it feels very positive.

Anyway, that was a side note. I just think it’s fascinating. I could talk about this stuff all day. And with my background in psychology and just human development, it’s like I have seen a lot of research into some of these things. And I just think it is fascinating. I could read the research all day. I could talk to you about it all day.

But what I want to really leave you with and really kind of let sink in is when your client shows up in extreme negative emotion, my goal here today is to plant the seed, they do not have to move out of it immediately. Sometimes we just pause and take a breath.

Sometimes, even in that session, maybe they don’t leave with a different emotion, but they just leave feeling better experiencing whatever emotion it is. And a lot of you have probably heard once you kind of process an emotion, which is kind of what I’m talking about right now, is just to me thinking about processing an emotion is just being willing and able to experience the emotion and just kind of stay there and not need to get out of it.

But once they’re really able to process that emotion, they might not feel so like, “Oh, I need to get out of this right now.” It’s just although that negative emotion will still be there, it may not feel as strong, right. So they may still be leaving a session with you still with negative emotion. But it won’t feel possibly so overwhelming. You’re just going to really help them be in it.

Now, on the other side of this is knowing when to kind of gently help a client work through something that isn’t new, maybe. So let’s say they come to calls with similar thoughts, similar emotions, that are very different than the kind of extreme heightened emotion of a situation that has just happened. But more like something that they come back to and back to and back to.

I’m going to do a totally different episode about this next, coming up anyway. But I just want to note that this is different. These are thoughts they’ve been practicing their entire life and it always brings up the same emotion for them. I think that’s a good time to maybe find the awareness first of like, “Where is this coming from? What are the thoughts that you’re having?”

Even if the circumstance is true, like something bad happened. Or let’s say, for example, their partner left them 10 years ago and they’re still having thoughts that are like, “I’m never going to find anyone as great as them.” Or something like that.

Where it’s like, okay, it’s not the extreme emotion of this thing just happened. But it’s something that they’ve just been practicing and telling themselves for the last however many years. Maybe since they were little. Maybe since they were teenagers. Maybe since 10 years ago when something happened.

And this is where we get a little bit into thinking about trauma, thinking about things that we can be sensitive to and need to be sensitive to as coaches. But I still think that there’s a way to move through these things. And I’ll be, like I said, talking about this a lot more. But the first thing to just notice, you don’t ever have to actually change your client’s thoughts about a situation.

So for example, let’s say something really terrible happened to them when they were young. Maybe they were in a bad accident, or someone did something awful to them, or something along those lines. Your job as a coach is never, never ever, ever, ever, ever, I can’t even say it enough times, to get your clients to believe that those things weren’t bad, or that they didn’t happen or that they don’t deserve any place in their life now or in their thoughts.

There are ways to move clients through these things, through these situations that happened a long time ago, that aren’t just like, “Okay, well let’s just change your thoughts about the thing that happened.”

I’m going to leave you there because I know this may be a lot to digest if you’ve never really heard anyone talk about coaching in this way. So I’m going to leave you there. And I’m going to come back next week with kind of talking about the second piece. Which is how to help a client work through some of the things without them having to change their thoughts about the bad thing that happened.

All right, thank you so much. It was so great talking to you today. And I will see you next week. Goodbye.

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.