“I feel like I’ve gotten what I need and I’m not sure what else I want to focus on...”
Most people sign up for coaching for a specific reason. New venture, career change, healthier lifestyle, better understanding of themselves – the list goes on. They attend the first couple sessions, gain insight which leads to improvements in their life and then; voila, they’ve solved the problem they initially sought coaching for.
While this seems to happen for different clients at different times throughout the coaching engagement, in many cases, clients often get to a point where they show up to a session and are unsure of what they want coaching on. To be clear, the client is responsible for bringing a topic to each session. With that said, the coach is responsible for training them on what they should and could bring.
I find too often that as coaches we make the assumption that our client knows more than they actually do about what they can and should bring as a topic to our sessions. Below is a non-exhaustive reference list for clients and coaches alike on how we can most effectively spend our time together.
- Take some time to reflect on your progress. If you’ve ‘gotten what you need’, I’m hoping that means you’ve made some change. Let’s explore that and spend time ‘patting you on back’. Most of us don’t spend enough (or any) time feeling good about our accomplishments and there is a lot of additional learning/reinforcement in that space.
- Pick an area of your life that you think is good and make it great. There is always room for improvement and although we all know that in theory we too often subscribe to the perspective of ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’. Where are you settling for just good?
- Identify another thought pattern you weren’t aware of. While we never want to go looking for a problem to fix in coaching, it’s amazing how adept our saboteurs (negative thought patterns) are at disguising themselves in plain sight without us realizing it. If your perspective is that you don’t have anything to work on, my sense is that you’re limiting yourself somewhere inside. Where, how and why? As a side note, this process works for positive thought patterns as well.
- Identify an operational approach to sustaining your new insights. Significant improvements in performance and happiness are often not sustained over a long period of time. Unless you plan on having a coach for the rest of your life to keep you on track, it’s important to have a clear understanding of how you plan to integrate the new you into your world and ensure that the unavoidable roadblocks won’t diminish your progress.
While this list could certainly go on, I believe it’s a great start for those ‘looking for a topic’ for an upcoming coaching session. The items listed are different but, thematically, they all point to the same question – how can you become the very best version of yourself for yourself, others and the world around you? If that’s not something that excites you, perhaps you need a life coach.
