Ep #2: Get Inside Your Client’s Mind

Hey, I’m Lindsay Dotzlaf and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills, episode two.

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 coaches. So I really hope you enjoyed the first episode and that maybe you’ve already had a big takeaway just from the one short episode. I am recording these first few episodes specifically to give you tangible things to walk away with and apply to your business immediately to be a better coach for your clients starting today.

This week, this month, let’s do it. All the clients deserve an amazing coach, right? So today I want to talk to you about the second step to being the best coach for your clients, but first, I have two things I want to talk about.

Number one, I do have a request from you. In some of the upcoming episodes, I plan to answer listener questions. So in order to do that obviously, I need to know what they are. So if you have a specific question regarding something you hear in episodes, or just general questions about coaching or handling certain coach-client situations, please, please I would love it if you send an email to podcast@lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com.

That’s podcast@lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. I think this will be super fun and a great way for you guys to be engaged and to get your questions answered. And it’ll really help me get a great idea of what you want to know and I will – what I will do is I will read through them, I will choose some to answer here on the podcast.

So it’s also an opportunity to get a little shout-out, which is always fun. The second thing is I want to offer you something today. Sometimes throughout this podcast, I will maybe present a concept or a skill that you haven’t spent a lot of time on, or that you haven’t really focused on before.

And it will probably feel like I’m presenting it in a way that makes it sound super simple. And then what may happen is that you get off the podcast, you stop listening to the podcast, and you either do the exercise I recommend or try to answer some of the questions that I ask in the podcast, and it feels really hard.

And maybe not for some of you, some of these are going to be like yeah, of course, I know exactly what I’m doing. But just remember, when it does feel hard, if it’s something you’ve never done before or something you haven’t asked your brain to spend a lot of time thinking on, of course it feels hard. This is not a problem.

Just keep going, keep practicing, and I promise that one, it will get easier, and two, it will improve your coaching. The reason that I thought I might offer you this advice, of course ironically is because of the difficulties I have had creating these podcast episodes for you.

And I can see how this could also show up for you while you’re listening. I tend to work with a lot of clients who love to be really good at what they do. And this is true for me too, so sometimes I really have to slow myself down, remind myself, of course this feels a little hard, it’s something I’ve never done before.

So, so far this is what my process looks like for recording these podcasts. Step one is I think this is going to be super easy. Then I write the episode, then I spend time editing and honing in on the message. Then I record it a few times, and then I decide it needs to be totally redone.

So if this resonates with you, just know you are in good company. Because then I record something drastically different than what I had planned. I know that over time, that this will get easier and easier. But it does look very different than what I thought.

And I could feel super discouraged by this or I could just decide that I’m learning a new skill and for now, this, all of those things I just said, those are just part of my process. And when I allow for the messiness of all of it, it doesn’t actually feel that bad. So just in case that’s you, I just wanted to offer that up today.

So step two to being the best coach for your clients. Let’s dive in. It is spend more time in your client’s head than in your own. This is a ninja coaching trick. It will not only make your coaching better but also easier to sell, which of course is a bonus.

I don’t care if you have made two dollars as a coach or two million. This step is always, always important and it’s important to keep coming back to and revisiting. Over time, your clients will change or evolve, and maybe your niche becomes more clear or a little more dialed in, so this is always something you’ll want to come back to and keep challenging yourself to answer questions about your client.

So when I say spend time in your client’s head, what I mean by that is spend time thinking about them. Think about your current clients, particularly the ones that are your ideal clients. Think about your future clients, the ones that match your idea of who your best client will be.

And you can even think back to who you were, who you used to be if you were your ideal client in the past. So just to be clear, if you were in the past, the person who would now be your ideal clients, that’s such an amazing brain to have access to, right? Because you were her. You can immediately step into that person, remember who she was, and remember her inner most thoughts.

So what this looks like for me is I actually schedule this in as part of my routine. It may accompany or follow my self-coaching, and I usually do it at least a couple times a week. When I was a newer coach and when I was really working on building my business, I would actually do it sometimes five days a week, even if it was only for five or 10 or 15 minutes.

Sometimes I spend a lot longer doing that, and the way I do it is I have specific questions that I ask myself about my clients. I spend time thinking about the results these clients have now, like what are the results that they’re getting now and what are the results they want in the future.

Then I have a list that I always just come back to, and I’ll give you some examples. My list is very different now because I’m a lot more niched in, so my questions are very specific to who my people are now. But in the beginning, I would just ask myself questions like, what is the first thing my client thought of when she woke up this morning? That’s a good one.

What are her secret desires that she hasn’t told anyone else? What are her biggest fears? What is she really hoping someone can help her with? Obviously, these questions are all very general, so if you are just a general life coach and you coach all different people on all different things, and you have clients that are all very different from one another, that’s not a problem. Just keep the questions general like this and see what you come up with.

And even your answers might be different, depending on which clients you’re thinking about. If you’re a more seasoned coach or you are super niched in, I would suggest creating a list of questions that’s very specific for your people.

So for example, if let’s say you are a weight loss coach, you might ask yourself questions more pertaining to your clients’ daily habits, or what is she – what’s her number one fear when it comes to weight loss, or why hasn’t she lost the weight already, what’s the thing that’s holding her back?

Just coming up with those questions for yourself that are specific to your clients will be very helpful. Side note, I actually have a couple journals full of the answers to all of these questions. So I’ve saved them and it is incredible, especially now as I am creating these podcasts, it’s literally pages and pages full of content, which feels so fun and I’m glad I kept them.

So start doing that. Grab a journal, one that you can always just use for that, and just start asking yourself questions about your clients, spending time in her mind, and write out the answers.

So what happens when you do this and why is it important? So much goodness will happen. That is what happens. Over time, you will become a better and better coach for your clients, and when you’re a better coach, your clients will get bigger results, better results, and faster results.

And it just becomes this snowball of you thinking about them, their results getting better, you continuing to think about them, being in their head, getting even more clear about what they’re thinking and who they are, and that will just improve your coaching over time. It’s a very simple and free way to make your coaching better.

The second thing that happens is as you spend time thinking about them, you get so much better at speaking to them and finding your ideal clients. So the more you practice being in their head, the more it will feel like you’re speaking directly to them.

And these two things, when you mix them together, they just feed off of each other. So you become a better coach, your clients get better results, you get better and better at speaking to them and finding your idea clients. Now you have more clients to think about, those clients get better results, it just all feeds off of each other and helps you build your business, helps you make more money, while feeling more and more clear about what you do.

The cherry on top of all of this, which is one of my favorite parts is that the more time you spend thinking about your clients, the less time you spend in your own head with your own drama. So for example, when you’re a newer coach and you’re wanting to sign more clients or when you are really working hard on building your business, thinking about your clients and spending time in their mind will keep you from obsessing over your business, over making money, it will just keep you out of the drama that most new coaches have.

And even when you’re an established coach with an established business, and you’re making all of the money, thinking about your clients will always, always recenter you. So whether you’re headed into a big launch or you’re creating a new program, spending time in your clients’ mind will always bring you back to why you do this as a coach, why you work with these clients, just why, the whole why of why you do what you do.

And spending time there is always a great place, rather than stressing over the launch, having drama about the launch, having drama about creating a new program, which just isn’t useful.

And one thing I will tell you is I’ll share a quick story about how this has actually been my go-to practice over the last few weeks in my business, and I’ll tell you the results it has created. So as I’m recording these first few podcast episodes, I’m actually right in the middle of a launch also for my mastermind called Coaching Masters.

This is actually the third time I’ve launched the mastermind and each time I get more and more clear about who the clients are that will join and who the ideal client is for the mastermind. So over the last couple weeks, I’ve been sending emails to my list and posting on social media, and the really, really fun part and the proof that spending time thinking about my clients and spending time in their brain is really paying off is that at least 10 current or past clients have emailed me or have messaged me and said oh my gosh, how did you remember this? This is about me, or it’s like you’re in my brain, or how did you know I needed the answer to this today?

And not only that, but people who I’ve never met ever who happen to be on my email list or happen to follow me on social media, they have also messaged me and said this is exactly what I needed to hear today. So it’s not even people that I know, that I’ve ever worked with. Just people out in the world reading my emails, reading my posts, thinking how does she know exactly what I’m thinking?

And this is why. Because I purposefully spend time thinking about what they’re thinking. It sounds so obvious but most coaches I know don’t do this on a regular basis, or they only do it when they’re already having drama about what they do or about a launch or about signing clients.

So what I’m proposing is that you do it before the drama. Just do it regularly. It’s such a powerful exercise and the more and more you do this, you will start to experience the things that I was just describing where people message you and they say oh my gosh, you’re in my head.

And so doing this over time just creates this opportunity for you to really step into the coach that you are and really understand your clients on a totally different level. So I hope you found this episode today really helpful.

Go spend time thinking about your clients, get out of your own head. Get into theirs. And I promise, you will notice a payoff pretty quickly. Even if you have been a coach for a long time, this exercise will be super useful, so don’t write it off. Go practice and let me know what you think.

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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.