What Do You Do In A Life Coaching Session?

Often people’s curiosity sparks many questions such as what are we going to do in the coaching session or how is it going to work?

Well, the answer is simple, the coach asks questions, and the client answers them. Usually, it is not the other way round.

All the answers are hidden within the client’s mind related to the problem that they’re facing. During the coaching session, the coach acts as a facilitator to bring out what is already an underlying issue in the client’s subconscious mind.

The methods used in life coaching sessions are different from conventional coaching methods, we know you have questions so let’s dive a little deeper:

What Is a Life Coach

Let us first understand what we mean by the word “life coach”.
A life coach is a professional who aims to help people bring out the best in themselves. Life coaches aid their clientele to make sufficient progress in their personal and professional lives.
These mentors also help you set achievable goals, determine the hurdles that are preventing you from achieving those goals, and work with you through the process by devising strategies to overcome these limitations.

Most people confuse a life coach with a therapist. It leads us to another critical topic.

Difference between Coaching and Therapy

While both, Coaching and therapy work for their clients’ well-being, some differences distinguish them from one another.

Therapy Improves Mental Health; Life Coaching directory Prioritizes Your Goals

The most significant difference between therapy and life coaching is that therapy focuses on healing, whereas coaching focuses on goals and achievements. A therapist is a mental health professional who has a license to deal with people’s emotional conditions. A Life Coach is not trained to deal with people’s mental health, instead he works to empower and motivate people; to help them break free from whatever is limiting their potential.

Therapy Focuses On the Past and Present; Coaching Focuses On the Future

In therapy sessions, the therapist helps you resolve the questions that damage you and move forward. You get to know what is happening inside you, emotionally and psychologically.

Sometimes, past experiences or some trauma tends to scar our minds, this affects our present state. Therapy helps identify those events and understand more about what is causing the disturbance at present and works with you to find the solution.

In coaching sessions, you work on where you are now and where you wish to go. The past experiences are used as a reference so that you do not repeat the same mistakes again.

Therapy Has No Time Limit; Coaching Has A Defined Period

Therapy sessions continue for a long time, primarily months and years. The therapist keeps working with the patient until they’re back to full health.
Coaching sessions are short-term and have a minimum period of three months. The length of the agreement is set depending on the severity of the case. After resolving a particular issue, sometimes people extend their coaching session agreement to solve another problem.

As we have developed a little perspective of who a life coach is, we must understand what happens in these life coaching templates .

What Do You Do In a Coaching Session?

The first and the most important thing that a coach does during a coaching session is to develop a rapport with the client. The rapport building leads to the relationship of trust between the two and this is how the clients will feel comfortable enough to open up to the coach.
Here is what happens in the coaching session:

Coach Encourages Client To Talk

The best way to create a bond with your client is to make them talk. The coach breaks the ice by starting with some casual questions.

For instance, the coach asks questions such as:

● How are you?
● How was your day?
● What has brought you to a coaching session?
● What do you do in life?
● What are your expectations from the coaching session?

And many more questions to keep the conversation flowing. In this initial period, the coach usually gets to know why his client has come to him. He started to understand his client’s life, habits, needs and wants.

Move towards More Specific Questions

The next step in the coaching session is to understand the problem in detail, and for this, the coach asks more probing questions.

Most of the coaching sessions go this direction; the coach asks questions, and the client answers them instead of the other way around. One way flow of question is because sessions are conducted to solve the client’s problem, so discussing the coach’s life is useless.
Suppose the client has visited the coach for some problem related to his career or professional life. The coach can ask the following questions.

● Who inspires you in your workplace?
● What is your relationship with that person?
● What habits of this person inspire you?
● Who are other people close to you?
● Do they support you?
● What are your thoughts about them?
● What do you do in your free time?

These questions help the coach to sieve the insights from the client’s mind. The coach tries to get deep into the client’s life to know his priorities, interests, thoughts, behavior, motivation, etc.
Gathering this information is essential because the coach needs to develop the overall picture of what is going on in the client’s life. Here is when the coach decides how he needs to guide his client.

Dig Deeper into The Client’s Mind

At this stage, the coach explores the client’s psychology. He gets to know why his client is the way he is. Coach asks questions related to the strengths and weaknesses, trust and insecurities, beliefs, and perspective, etc.

Understanding the mindset is essential because sometimes it is not the problem affecting our growth but the attitude that is holding us back from resolving it.
Knowing the beliefs and attitude of the client, the coach starts to make connections between the problem and the circumstances that have put his client in this situation.
The coach asks questions such as:
What are your thoughts about this problem?
What do you believe is the leading cause of this issue?
What do you do when you usually face some problem? (Identifying the behavior pattern)
What is the most demotivating thing about your situation?
What do you do the best? (Get to know the strength)
How can you utilize your power in this situation?
The coach asks more questions but maintains the relevance of the pattern. They keep their questions around the topic to get more insightful answers.

After exploring the mindset to the deepest level, the coach motivates and empowers the client to fight against the said issues and overcome the hurdles.

Set Goals and Develop Strategies

Now that the coach thoroughly knows the problem and his client, he starts to work with the client to find the solution. They set short-term goals which are easy to achieve, and by making actionable plans, they move slowly towards the solution.
The coach does not advise or imply his perspective on any issue. He motivates the client to find the answers to all the questions and mostly the solution is found hidden inside the responses of the client.

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