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February 20, 2022

3 Essential Questions that will Improve your Coaching & Client Work.

Of course, having our transformation skills and techniques in tip-top shape is important and really helps us go deeper and more potent with our clients.

We absolutely need those in order (this is why we learn dozens of transformational skills and techniques in Sacred Depths).

But here’s a different kind of tool that is really helpful when it comes to doing incredible client work: taking the time to assess our sessions in a very particular way. Ask yourself questions that will take you deeper into your own inner wisdom, your own self-awareness, and your own understanding of your client’s situation.

In Sacred Depths, we do a lot of this in order to support practitioners, not only to have the techniques but also to be able to show up for our clients with our full wisdom, intuition, and presence.

Here are three examples of questions I recommend journaling on after every client session you have over the next week or two.

Question 1: What is my inner wisdom telling me about this client and what she needs next?

This question may seem like an obvious one to you, but it’s such an important one. One of the many tools I teach when it comes to listening skills is to listen to our client and listen to ourselves. So long as our filters are checked, our curiosity, our inclinations, our intuitions, our visions, and our concerns provide vital information for us to know how to lead our client, how to acknowledge our client, what to ask our client, how to create awareness around for our client, and so on.

It will also help us understand better where a client needs to go next. For example, when we ask ourselves this question, we may give ourselves answers like:

“My inner wisdom is telling me she may be scared about the action steps we co-created and she needs some extra follow-up between now and our next session,” or “My inner wisdom is telling me that she is not fully seeing how amazing X accomplishment is, and it would really benefit her to be seen in it and celebrate it,” or “My inner wisdom is telling me that she’s not ready for X goal. First, she needs to work with her fear of Y.”

Such important information will help us move our clients forward!

Again, asking ourselves this question is so obvious, right? But here’s the thing: way too many practitioners tend to overlook what their inner wisdom is telling them about their client because they’re too caught up in their own “stuff,” in performing well, in being validated, in taking responsibility, and so on.

Which leads up to the next question to ask ourselves…

Question 2: What do I notice about my energy, my beliefs, and my fears as I move through the session?

When I train practitioners to be exceptional at what they do, we don’t only look at techniques like Help Clients Befriend Their Fear, Support Clients off Wheel of Self-Sabotage, or Leveraging Shadow…all of those techniques are super powerful and important, but the core, core, core foundational piece behind being a creme of the crop practitioner in any situation is being really conscious about the energy that we are bringing to each session and being uber aware of the fears, beliefs, and limiting factors we are holding.

That’s why this question can be so powerful.

For example, recently, on a Coaching Practicum call, where a participant “practice” coached and then received feedback from me and the group, I asked the coach this very question. Her response was, “Well, I notice that I was nervous while I was coaching, and the nervousness had me moving at a quicker pace than I would have liked. If I wouldn’t have been scared of not getting the client to a resolution, I would have moved slower, and created more space around each statement and question, and that would have allowed the client to go deeper.”

Bingo! Such valuable insight, right?

There is so, so much to being able to work with what I call “The Energetics of the Coaching Relationship,” and it’s a theme we keep on coming back to in Sacred Depths. This question is a great place to start.

Question 3: What didn’t I share with my client that I would have liked to share?

So, this question can be a follow-up to question one or stand on its own. It’s basically an opportunity to take stock of what might have been missing from the conversation or what our client still needs to hear. Once we clarify this, we can choose to either save it for our next session or communicate it to her before then.

Sometimes practitioners can feel like it’s a weakness to not have shared everything that was meant to be shared in the session itself, but I disagree wholeheartedly. It can often be super powerful to anecdote a session a day or two later with a new insight, and it shows our client that we’re thinking about her in between our sessions.

I hope these questions are getting you excited, and I highly recommend starting to journal on them after your sessions—as well as after your sales calls! They will help you improve your sales immediately.

~

 

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