Professional Partner Content

2 Psychological Practices to Integrate into Your Coaching Services

As a coach, your goal is to help maximize your clients' personal and professional potential. Just like a therapist has tools and techniques they use to challenge a client's thinking and behavior, you have your own toolbox of techniques to help improve and enhance your clients' personal and professional lives. While your clients don't expect you to be a coach and a therapist, some insight into psychology can help you improve your coaching services.

Best Possible Self Exercise

While it sounds like helping people better understand their unique strengths should be easy, it's often a difficult technique to put into practice. Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, conducted a research lab to study the science behind helping people visualize their ideal future selves, and she experienced some promising results. The lab participants reported an increase in positive mood and even a decrease in illness.

So how can you harness this research for your coaching practice? To start off, have your clients take a moment to reflect on what they believe to be their best possible future selves. Have them ponder their most important goals for various areas of their life (for example, interpersonal relationships, physical and mental health, professional development and career). Next, have them imagine what their life would be like if everything was executed in a way to make those goals come to fruition.

Finally, get them to articulate, either vocally or on paper, what that best possible self would look like to your clients. This is where powerful questions can come into play, for example:

  • What would your behavior look like in that instance, what would you be doing?
  • What would your living situation look like, where would you be living?
  • What would a day in the life of your best possible future-self look like, how would it play out?
  • What would your best possible future-self feel like, how would you feel?

Getting clients to enunciate these goals adds an interactive approach to the coaching process that will also help them take responsibility for meeting their goals. But what if your clients don't know where start or have trouble envisioning a best possible self? A good starting place is to have them focus on their personal strengths.

Recognizing Character Strengths

One of the most critical jobs a coach has is to help their clients understand and embrace their individual strengths. The recognition of one's personal strengths is not only extremely effective for a client's professional well-being, it has long-term benefits on their physical well-being. Even if a client doesn't readily believe it, each of them brings their own unique blend of strengths to a coaching session. Once the coach helps their clients determine what these strengths are, they can help clients embrace them.

Even something as arbitrary and uncontrollable as a client's age is enough to create feelings of incompetence among the most talented of people. Today's coaches are involved with a workforce that contains people from five generations, and it's not uncommon for one of those people to feel somehow inadequate because they're either too old or too young. Members of each generation have distinct strengths that, once determined, can be developed into higher levels of professional skill. While coaching multigenerational clients presents its own set of challenges, it's not only possible, it's valuable.

By helping clients paint a vivid picture of their best future selves and investing time in showing them how their present-day strengths can help bring that picture to fruition, coaches can create an effective combination of visualization and self-efficacy.

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