A therapist might be happy and pleased to say at the end of a session, “I think you learned something today.” For a coach, that isn’t quite enough. Insight is important and wonderful and we want our clients to gain clarity, better understand their own motivations, increase their self-awareness, and learn about themselves. But, human nature being what it is, insight doesn’t equal change or growth and doesn’t amount to enough help. A client who gains insight is not helped nearly as much as a client who gains insight and then takes action based on that insight.
Therapy can proceed and regularly does proceed—whether or not a client “does anything.” Coaching can’t really. Coaching is premised on the idea that your client will do something. That is why your client has come to you, and that is a centerpiece of the agreement between you. If, say, you’re a business coach and one of your client’s goals is to build his confidence, then you would want him to do things at work aligned with a “more confident him.” He wants that, you want that for him, and if he isn’t reporting that he has finally managed to ask for a raise or has finally refused those extra last-minute assignments, you would know to continue to cheerlead for those courageous actions.
Human beings are regularly eager to announce that they are “feeling really good” about having arrived at some insight, which can be their way of saying, “and can we maybe not talk about the next steps, all the work involved in turning that insight into something tangible?” Our job is to smile, congratulate them on their new insight, and then move directly on to, “and what actions align with that insight? What do you intend to do?” Our client may well sigh—and then go through the door that we’ve opened, willing himself to picture all those difficult but necessary next actions.
To cheerlead for action doesn’t mean that you must cheerlead only for large actions. Inviting a client who wants to return to the novel she’s been writing and that she’s put aside for two years might sound like, “What makes sense, given your real life? Maybe twenty minutes a day of writing?” If you were to try to lobby or cheerlead for two hours of writing a day or some other ambitious and likely unrealistic goal, your client might agree, just to be accommodating—but probably wouldn’t come close to doing any writing. Often the right-sized action is small and not giant-sized—or, as the hilarious movie What About Bob? has it, just “baby steps.”
Picture a hypothetical client scenario. You and your client are having a useful conversation about some issue and you have the sense that some movement has occurred and some insight has been gained. Feel through what it’s like to move from the comfort of that easy chatting to the prickliness of a next conversation that begins with some question like, “And what would you like to do?” Picture yourself equal to that movement and easy with that movement.
It is good to have every session end with your client having a very clear picture of the actions that she has agreed to take between now and her next session. You can summarize those for your client or you can invite her to summarize. Once they’ve been summarized, you can then cheerlead a little by saying, “Okay! I look forward to hearing how that went!” or “Okay! I look forward to your check-ins!” This simple routine of summarizing and cheerleading ends sessions on a positive, energetic note and primes clients to “get to work.”
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