What I've Learning from Coaching Others

Although my husband Pete and I have been mentoring and discipling people for over 20 years. It started at Kidder Creek Camp where Pete was the director. At Kidder, we coached counselors and staff and counselors. Post-Kidder, Pete and I completed our coaching certifications through John Maxwell and New Life Coaching, which enabled us to bump our work to a professional level, and we now coach individuals and groups through our True North ministry.

One thing my NLCI mentor coaches have taught me is that if I try to offer advice to people and they don't resonate with that advice, two things will happen: First, they may "settle" on accepting a piece of my wise counsel, but not follow through because they lack ownership in my idea; Second, I will eventually run out of ideas to give them. Looking back at my attempts to mentor and counsel people in the past, this is exactly what happened and it sometimes left us feeling frustrated and unfulfilled. Life coaching is brilliant in that we are trained to listen more actively and intently (way easier said than done) and ask key, open-ended questions that prompt the client to think more deeply about their situations and come up with their own solutions to problems.

Actively listening to clients hasn't been as difficult as I expected. My strategy is to type what they are saying as they talk so that I can maintain better focus and mirror back what they have said for greater clarity and understanding. If I'm not sitting at a computer, active listening definitely requires more concentration on my part, but it's getting easier with practice. What has been more challenging (and yet also the most rewarding) for me is picking up on a client's key words or phrases and asking more penetrating, open-ended questions that cannot be answered with a mere "yes" or "no" response--questions that really stop a person, making them go silent for a few moments, pondering, wondering, and thinking more deeply about their lives in a new way and saying, "No one has ever asked me that before." or "I've never considered that before in my life."

"Baby steps." The phrase reminds me of the movie, What about Bob? (Great, funny movie.) Humor aside, life coaching is about taking baby steps. It's helping a client set SMART goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-specific. The emphasis in this case is on the word "attainable." And it's about helping you set one or two simple, attainable "WOW" (within one week) goals at a time. Many of my clients are stuck and feel overwhelmed with clutter or unfinished projects or losing weight. They look at the whole of all that they need to do and feel like they can't even take the first step forward toward tackling the problem, so they procrastinate, berate themselves, and sink deeper into a hole of guilt and regret. By setting and achieving one or two easily attainable goals per week, they can start feeling successful. What's that quote? "A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." --Lao Tzu. That's how it is with life coaching. As you life coach, I encourage you to keep your eyes on the end goal, visualizing what you want your life to be and where you want to go, and then coax you to take that first step and then the second, one week at a time.

Life coaching is asking clients to open up and share their struggles with me. I consider that an honor and privilege. It's not something most people do easily. But, in that sharing time, I have heard time and again, "You made me think of something I never thought of before." It is my clients' "Aha!" moments that keep me motivated and excited as a life coach. In fact, if my clients don't get emotional in some way during a session, I can tend to feel like I've failed (which is not necessarily true, since not everyone is emotionally expressive). I love it when I client gets choked up or is super pumped up and motivated at the end of a session. That feels like success to me. I also enjoy getting texts from my clients stating, "I completed my goal for the day!" and I can text back, "Yay! Congratulations! Don't forget to celebrate!"

I think other life coaches are probably like me in that they get an emotional high from helping others. So, whether you decide to coach with me or someone else, I encourage you to try it out. See what you think. Hopefully, it will be as rewarding for you as it is for us!