[I’d love to get questions from you about the craft of coaching and your work with clients. Drop your question to me at ericmaisel@hotmail.com, please include your name or initials and where you’re located (e.g., Anna Dubois, Paris, France), and I’ll select the occasional question to answer in this space. I look forward to your questions! (P.S. I won’t be able to answer all of your questions personally, but I hope you find the ones I select interesting!)
Interrupting your client’s “usual story”
From Alison in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: “I’ve been feeling like my clients sometimes go on and on with their stories and I just want to interrupt them and say, ‘Enough already!’ But is that sort of interrupting permitted? Is it a good idea or a bad idea?
Hello, Alison:
From my point of view, it is absolutely permitted—and often required. Clients sometimes really need a certain kind of “interruption.” Is it really supportive or helpful to let our client stubbornly “tell her story” over and over again? Probably not that much.
We do not want to get seduced, deflected, or bogged down by the story-telling abilities of our clients, who sometimes have honed and perfected their stories and now repeat them without any real investment in what they are saying. For us to invest in a “canned” story of that sort is to misplace our energy.
For instance, a client may have a long, prepared story about what happened to make her first album of songs unsuccessful. Rather than “do anything” with that story or let it run on and on, one approach might be to find a place to “interrupt” and ask, “What do you think you learned from that experience?” or “What do you want to do differently this time?”
We are interested in the person telling the story, not in the story per se, and our interest in the person sometimes means that we ask a single simple, eloquent, rhetorically strong question rather than rush around trying to respond to every aspect of a client’s story.
Don’t imagine that you are “being rude” if you carefully interrupt your client and bring him back to the here-and-now. Yes, you must learn how to do this carefully; but once you’ve mastered the tactic of “strategic interrupting,” you can help your clients make a great deal of progress. By virtue of interrupting, you can help them focus on “now” and not on the past.
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They won’t do my exercises! |
From John in Brighton, England: “I have two clients right now and I’m finding with both of them that I respond to what they bring up with exercises they can try (for example, I’ve suggested mantras, thought-substitution, getting a snow-globe, hushing and holding, writing first thing in the morning, etc.). They both say, ‘Great idea!’—and then they don’t do it. Then I scramble to try something else. I feel like I’m not getting anywhere with either of them, so I guess my question is, how do you coach people who won’t do the work!?”
Hello, John:
I have two suggestions. First, I would simply say to a client who is reporting that she didn’t get her work done, “Sorry you couldn’t get to it this past week. Shall we put it on your agenda again for next week?” That is, I would simply relax and make the offer again.
if your client agrees that an exercise sounds worthwhile but doesn’t get to it, you can just ask her to try again. No need to feel frustrated, to doubt that progress is being made, or to be upset with her, as she may have a lot going on in her life. Just put the work back on the agenda.
A second approach is to ask a question of the following sort, said in your own way: “I wonder if exercises of the sort I’m presenting are really useful to you or would it be better if we focused in some other area or in some other way?” That is, you might want to get “client buy in” on whether or not she really thinks that exercises matter to her—and if they really don’t, then you can discuss what might matter more and what might help her more.
So, the two approaches would be to simply invite her to try again or to wonder aloud whether she finds the exercises valuable. If she doesn’t, ask what she thinks she might like to try instead. In either case, don’t get down on you, your client, or the process. Be easy … progress may be slow, but it is likely coming!
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