Ep #36: How To Coach a Client Who Isn’t Progressing

Hey coach. If you've ever worried how to handle certain client situations, like when a client isn't progressing, then you are definitely not alone. That can be a very lonely moment as a coach because you're thinking holy smokes, what do I do here? What questions should I ask? Am I really good enough as a coach to be paid for this? 

I'm Kendall. Tune into today's episode where I'm going to show you exactly the three simple steps that I follow, example coaching questions included of course, so that you know how to handle that situation. Because yes, your skill as a coach matters more today in this market than it ever has before. Happily, you can rapidly advance your skills so that any situation a client brings to you is something that you feel equipped, confident, and ready to handle. It's all here for you in this episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. Let's dive in.

Welcome to The Money Coach School Podcast. To really excel at coaching women, you have to be skilled, confident, and even fearless at money coaching. If you're passionate about women holding genuine money power and love supporting women entrepreneurs, then this is the show for you. Now, here's your host, money feminist Kendall SummerHawk.

So today we are talking about your coaching skills. There is so little emphasis inside the coaching space on the actual craft of coaching. Yet, if you're not powerful in your coaching, if you're not confident in your coaching, if you're just winging it with your coaching then it's going to get tougher and tougher to attract and retain clients and charge premium fees for your coaching.

Okay, so I realize I just packed a lot into those couple of sentences, but here's where I'm coming from. Your skill as a coach actually matters, and I can't emphasize this enough. Because in today's market, you cannot fly by the seat of your pants with your coaching, and you cannot take dozens and dozens of coaching sessions to create a transformation.

You cannot rely on a bunch of random questions, and you definitely want to avoid feeling hesitant or overthinking or holding back in your coaching. I have a belief that if I hold back, then I'm holding my clients back. So I definitely want to be bold in my coaching.

When you're coaching women entrepreneurs, which is what I live and breathe as the best niche on the planet, then part of your coaching skill set needs to include how to coach on the emotions that your client experiences. Because for women, business isn't just business. Everything in the client's business has an emotional aspect to it.

So you're coaching your clients on their emotions, their beliefs, their self-concept, their money blocks, all that yummy, juicy transformation that you're excited to coach on and that you want to master. The women you're going to be coaching, they expect to experience results quickly and deeply, which is surprisingly easy to do when you know how. 

So what I did is brainstorm three or four of the top situations that are likely to come up for you as a coach. I'll be addressing each of these with you here in the podcast over the next couple of months of episodes. We're kicking off today with how to coach a client who isn't progressing. 

Why I chose this situation to support you with is because I think what happens in most coach trainings is that coaching is taught as this interesting, kind of vague idea of helping a client achieve their goals. While that's not inaccurate, it also doesn't even begin to address what really happens in a coaching session or over a series of coaching sessions.

What I've seen happen in observing coaches coaching using kind of that old standard coaching style that's often taught, what I call the old school style, is that when a situation like a client not progressing comes up, the coach isn't really sure what to do. So they end up either addressing it from a very surface level or they attempt to go deeper to find out the source of issue for the client, but they don't really have a methodology for doing this. So they end up just coaching in circles without any real breakthroughs happening.

Now, just to be clear, this is entirely opposite of how I teach coaching inside of my certification. Inside of certification is the courageous coaching method that I created, and it uses a systematic approach to coaching that teaches you how to tell from a client's words exactly where they're stuck.

So it's like having this x-ray vision into a client's heart and mind and thoughts and beliefs. What that results in for you, as the coach, is instead of guessing and wasting a lot of time with that guessing, you're able to ask coaching questions that quickly reveal for the client what the issue is and how to think about it differently.

The result of that is a transformation or a breakthrough typically on the spot. Then the client is clear and aligned and empowered to take action with energy and belief in themselves. This is how you're able to create results, create transformation with your clients in very short coaching sessions, which is a hallmark of what I teach. It's also how you're able to create results that really make you stand out as a coach, which makes it so much easier to attract and retain clients and charge premium coaching fees.

The other thing that I see happening with the old style of coach training, that old school style, is that it's very theoretical, which is fine in a very confined, contained training environment. But hey, in the real world, coaching real clients, that can leave the coach feeling like holy crap, what do I do now anytime a client deviates even just a little bit from being textbook perfect.

So that's why I brainstorm some of the top situations that are likely to come up for you as a coach so that you can feel prepared and confident in your coaching, so that you don't freak out when a client is just being human with all of her imperfections, and so that you can stay aligned in your energy with the energy of I've got this because you do.

So let's say you've been coaching a client, and she seems to be circling. She's coming to several coaching calls more or less in the same place. She's saying the same things. She's circling around the same issues, or she's experiencing the same issues, but maybe with just a slight change in circumstances.

So what happens next is either you start thinking she's not making progress, or she herself shares that she doesn't feel she's making progress. Either way, it can feel like responsibility for her progress has just fallen into your lap. So what do you do? Of course, she's human. You're human. So there isn't just going to be one way to look at this experience.

What I want to do is give you a few options here so that you can stay centered in your power and in that state that I call passionate detachment. Passionate detachment is one of the core philosophies I teach inside of certification, and it is the secret to creating transformational results with your clients. It's the secret to never experiencing burnout in your business, and it's the secret to not overly taking responsibility for your clients.

All right, so number one, what I do is challenge whether it's true that she isn't progressing. Even if your client says that she's not, you don't have to buy into that belief with her, because really, is it true she's not progressing at all? So the first thing I do is ask my client how do you know? Or I'll ask, what lets you know that?

What I'm listening for is what she's using as evidence. Because often a client is progressing, just not at the speed they desire, or not in that boom, voila way that she would prefer. So progress can often be slow or very small, and when a client is in the middle of progress, it can be tough to recognize that it is happening.

So when I ask what lets you know, I'm listening for what she's using to assess her progress. We know that women can be really hard on themselves. They can be perfectionistic, and they can be highly self-critical. So I want to suss out if that's what's happening.

Which leads me to number two, what is she comparing to? Everything new a client is doing, every change or transformation that she wants to make has a beginning, a middle, and a completion. A client who feels she's not progressing is usually forgetting where she was at when she started, and all she's doing is comparing where she is to where she wants to be.

Now, that's great if it's motivating her to keep progressing, but it's a motivation killer if she's using the fact that she's not complete yet, she's using that against herself. So the coaching I usually give here is to offer a different perspective than the one that she's using.

So I'll say something like so you've been focused on this goal for the past month. When you started working on it, you were starting from scratch. Now today, what you have is XYZ, you're clear about ABC, and you've already done one, two, three. Then I pause, and I let that sink in.

Then depending on the client and my rapport with them, and what I hear is their emotional state in that moment, I will either tease, a little bit teasing because that happens to be my coaching style, and say something like so where is it that you're not progressing? Because as your coach, what I see is a woman who is taking massive action, who is learning something new every step of the way. I see a woman who is committed to achieving her goal and who is fully capable.

Now, if she's more emotional in that moment, I'm not going to do the teasing part because that would not be appropriate. I'm going to say something similar, but with a totally different voice tone. I'm going to soften my voice. Instead of saying in that bit of a teasing way, so where is it you're not progressing? Instead, I'll start out by saying something like as your coach, I want to reflect for you what I've been seeing over this past month. Then I'll list all of those same things.

Either way, what you're doing is reminding her that she is capable, that she is making progress, that she is in a very different place than where she first started.

Number three, I'm going to coach her on her options. So sometimes a client just needs to stay the course because the results or completion, they're coming. They're not here yet, but they're coming. Other times, a client may want to accelerate her progress or re-evaluate how she's going about achieving her goal. Now, either way, I'm going to check that out.

So I may ask something like if there was one thing you would like to change about how this project or initiative is going, what would that one thing be? Or I might ask, if there was one thing that was going faster or smoother or was taking less time, what would that one thing be?

So basically, with questions like these, I'm not invalidating her experience that she wants to be making more or faster progress. I'm reminding her that she's in control. That she is a choice. That she has options. I also have seen so often after 23 years and literally thousands and thousands of clients that I've coached that as a client is making steps towards what she wants, that things change. Very often, she has a new perspective once she's inside of her project or inside of achieving her goal that she didn't have when she first started. So now, she may be ready to get more help or to let go of other things to free up her time or to put additional resources into what she's working on. Whereas before, at the start, those options may not have seemed possible or available to her.

So that's how I approach coaching a client who thinks that she's not progressing.  I want to wrap up with this. You are not responsible for your client. You are 100% responsible for coaching. Your client is 100% responsible for achieving her results. So in my world, it's not 50-50. It's that each of us has 100% responsibility for what is ours. So please don't slip into panic or uncertainty when a client isn't progressing.

Instead, start coaching. Get curious. Remember to hold your client as powerful no matter what. Don't hesitate to coach deeply right away. Your client usually can't see for herself what you can see so easily because you have a different perspective. You can be her mirror. You can ask the tough questions, the insightful questions, the questions that create a new perspective.

If you want more free training on coaching skills, be sure to download my new guide. It's called 31 Coaching Questions That Work With Every Client. I'll put a link for it in the show notes. Now, this is not your typical random list of coaching questions. You know me and know that the content I share with you is of a much higher caliber than that. 

So what I did in this free download is outline for you four distinct styles of coaching questions and why each works exceptionally well to create all that transformation that you desire for your clients. I included over 31 coaching questions so you can see each of the four distinct styles of coaching in action. We've already had thousands of women download it just since releasing it a couple of months ago. So I think you're going to love it.

If you want to make money coaching women entrepreneurs, be sure to check out certification as a money breakthrough business coach. This is my flagship certification that is the only certified coach training that fully trains and certifies you to become a soul driven business coach for women entrepreneurs so that you are quickly gaining that coaching edge of creating cash freedom, time freedom, and making a difference. I'll link to that in the show notes as well.

All right. Thank you so much for listening, for sharing space with me. I would love to hear any questions or thoughts that you have. You can send an email to me at podcast@kendallsummerhawk.com. Ask me any question that you want about all things money, pricing, and of course, coaching. I'm here for you. I will see you next week for our next episode together.

Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you follow so you never miss an episode. Also, I would so love and appreciate if you would leave a 5-star review. Your review supports women just like you in discovering all of the juicy tips and insights I’m sharing here on how to coach women on money.

 if you want to learn how to excel at coaching women on money, definitely go to KendallSummerHawk.com and check out the wealth of money coach trainings that we have for you. Thanks so much for being part of this money coaching movement and for tuning into the show every week.