Life coaching skills aren’t only highly transferable, but are also exceedingly valuable. With conscious effort, life coaches can drive people to listen more attentively, communicate better, and motivate others to grow.
Effective coaching enhances and enables people to overcome roadblocks, reach their full potential, and help them accomplish sustainable success. Great coaching, however, goes beyond asking the right questions in the perfect order. Expert coaches effectively guide their clients through the entire process of change.
Life coaches can only motivate their clients to a certain point. It holds even for those who have taken lots of certification courses, like the iNLP Center life coaching course. Clients still need to take responsibility. They have to be fully committed to achieving their goals for the whole program to succeed. While coaches can’t accomplish the goals of their clients for them, they can employ strategies to help them stay on track. Listed below are the life coaching techniques one can apply to be successful in motivating people.
- Design Appropriate Goals
In life coaching, goal-setting involves tapping into an individual’s values. Check what your client holds dear and transform it into a clear, concrete commitment. Keep in mind that helping people design appropriate goals is a crucial motivational technique in itself.
Avoid overwhelming, excessively difficult goals. Dull, overly-simple goals also aren’t a good idea. Make sure that the goals set are appropriately challenging. Make them actionable and explicit.
To sustain momentum, build in rewards and feedback. Chart a pathway for success by breaking everything down into sub-goals. Also, create a positive approach that emphasizes achievement and success. Most importantly, collaborate with your client to brainstorm pathways and alternatives.
- Create The Right Environment
If the client wants to start doing intermittent fasting, ask them to download an app or manually set alarms to help remind them of their fasting and eating windows. That way, they won’t be tempted to eat when they should be in a fasted state.
If your coachee is trying to start a writing career and publish a book, make sure they set a workspace up that’s conducive for writing.
If the client wants to start eating healthy, have them remove any junk food from the kitchen.
Whatever their respective goals or priorities are, make sure they’re creating the right environment for themselves and are setting it up for success. Remind them to limit their exposure to individuals who will only distract or deter them from their goals. Encourage them to be around positive people instead, those who will support their goals.
- Understand Your Client’s Extrinsic Or Intrinsic Motivational Drivers
Intrinsic motivation is where the coachee is more driven by internal motivations, such as a feeling of accomplishment. For instance, you’re running a life coaching business because you love seeing people reach their true potential. What you’re after are the rewards of your efforts.
Conversely, extrinsic motivation is when things outside of the coachee drive them more. These include praise, celebrity status, money, etc. For example, you’re doing what you’re doing because you love getting thousands of likes and shares on your Facebook page. When you’re extrinsically motivated, the drivers are the external outcomes or rewards. Here, the client doesn’t mind if they enjoy the process of what they do.
Surely, you’ve already heard about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Again, you’ll need to consider what’s really important to a client when working with them. One becomes a dominant driver, even if people get motivated differently in different situations.
- Work With Momentum
One of the keys to actually getting motivated is making one small change in behavior–a change that can help in creating the momentum needed for the bigger changes.
Getting started through small ways is one form of active inspiration. It naturally produces momentum. As you probably already know, resistance to a task often comes at the beginning. Progress occurs more readily once it starts.
Momentum is about action, while motivation is about feeling. The desire and willingness of your coachee to do something can wane with time. When that happens and when motivation is lacking, ask them what’s one small, simple action they can work on towards their goal at the moment. Once they get started or pick up back with that once simple task, it’s likely to be followed by momentum and progress.
- Follow-Up With The Client And Use Ongoing Feedback
Ongoing feedback as a follow-up strategy between sessions is the perfect way to monitor the progress of the client. It also helps in evaluating the effectiveness of your coaching. Check the client using regular questionnaires. Make sure they can share not only their progress, but also their experiences and the challenges they might be facing. By doing this, you’ll show your coachee that you truly care about them. It gives your clients the feeling that they’re not alone in whatever challenges that might come their way.
Conclusion
The coaching techniques above, if utilized the right way, can surely change the direction of your clients’ lives. These can help them achieve prosperity, continuous growth, and sustainable success.
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