Wendy McCallum (02:06)
When your client asks, should I leave my job? That's not what they're really asking. Underneath that question is usually something else. Maybe am I allowed to want something different when this is all I've ever done? Or will I be okay if I take this risk? Or do you think I'm capable of more? Same thing when they ask, what do you think I should do? They're rarely asking for your opinion. They're asking for permission or reassurance or help trusting themselves. Or when they ask the question, who am I if I'm not a lawyer anymore?
Who am I if I'm not a wife anymore? Who am I if I'm not a mother anymore? What they're really asking is, is there anything underneath all these roles that I've built my identity around? Am I anyone without my labels? The best coaching happens when you stop answering the surface question and you start responding to the question that's underneath. And that is what we're going to be talking about in today's episode of The Coaching Edge.
It's one of these skills that takes time to develop. And it's something that I'm constantly working on with the coaches that I support, particularly inside any coach-led versions of the CCSI, which is my confident coaching skills intensive. And so today I wanted to just give you a taste of what this looks like. I just want to raise this for you, give you something to be thinking about and to be working on practicing yourself inside your coaching sessions, whether those are paid coaching sessions or you're still doing practice coaching because you're at the beginning of your
β of your coaching journey. Okay, why does it matter? Why does this like idea of getting to the question under the question, why does that matter? It's because if you only answer the surface question, you almost always miss the moment. You might give some good advice, but you're really missing the opportunity for some deeper transformation because you're keeping things really intellectual. So for example, if a client asks you like, should I take this promotion,
You can spend 20 minutes helping them by help, you know, getting them to build a pro and con list of the promotion. But the real question underneath it was probably something more along the lines of like, am I allowed to say no to something that everybody expects me to want? Like, what if I'm actually good with where I am? Right? If you miss that, then you've answered the question technically, but the wrong one. And
When you respond to the real question, the question under the question, something shifts. The client feels seen in a way that they didn't expect. You bypass a lot of the defensive stuff that comes up sometimes, and you get to the heart of things. And this is where that real transformation happens. And I think this is what separates good coaches from great coaches, honestly. It's not about more certifications or training. it's not about a fancier framework.
It is about the ability to really hear what someone is is saying or asking and then to respond to that. Anyone can answer the question, should I leave my job by guiding somebody through a pros and cons exercise? But a great coach hears the fear and anxiety that's under that, the longing maybe that's there, or the identity crisis that's underneath that and goes there.
Now, why do we miss this a lot? Why do we end up answering the surface question and not the question under the question? Well, it's because we're trained to be helpful, for one thing. And so it feels helpful to give advice. It feels helpful to answer the first question that we hear. but as I've said, and you've heard me talk about this in other podcast episodes, the most helpful thing as a coach is often in not answering. It's in not providing advice. In fact, I think that that's
what really good coaching is. We're talking about pure coaching. It's about not giving the answers. It's about staying curious and asking the right next question. I also think we miss this a lot in terms of the the the real question under the question because we're so uncomfortable with silence. And we're always trying to fill the silence silence as coaches because we're afraid that when it's quiet, we're not providing value. And so we just jump into the into the answer.
To the first surface question that comes up. And so this is another reason why getting comfortable with quiet and silence in coaching sessions is so important. I also think this is a skill, as I said earlier, we need to really practice it intentionally. It's not something that is usually learned from one coach training or certification. It's something that we learn by doing. And I'm here today to just remind you of the importance of doing this and hopefully.
β get you really starting to get more intentional about this in the coaching that you are currently doing and in your future coaching. Again, most of the coach training covers frameworks. It gives you like X coaching exercises or a way to approach a certain type of challenge that somebody might be struggling with, but it doesn't focus on the deep listening and practicing that deep listening. And that again is a skill that you really need to develop through practice.
I also think for most of us, we're afraid to go deep. And I see this a lot in the coaches, especially newer coaches that I support, but sometimes coaches who've been doing this for a lot longer. β the thing that's underneath that big identity question or a values conflict or something that feels like kind of an existential crisis for this client, we're not sure we're qualified to go there. And so we stay away from it. We stay on the surface where it feels safer. This is why, if you've heard me talking about the confident
Coaching Skills Intensive, which is something that you can do self-guided now. There's also an option to put your own group together and have me lead you through it and provide you with mentorship and feedback. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that later. But this is exactly why I created that program. Because knowing how to coach on paper is really different from knowing how to coach when you're actually in the session, in the room. Okay, so now I want to talk about how do we hear what's underneath the question? How do we get
to the nub of the issue. How do we get better at doing that? The very first thing you have to do as a coach is slow the F down. You just have to stay calm and slow yourself down. And this is really hard sometimes. It's hard in first sessions with clients, you know, you're really trying to make sure they get value and you want to make sure that you're asking them the right questions and you're probably really focused on what you're doing and a whole lot less focused on what's happening on the client side of things.
Slowing yourself down consciously and intentionally is going to help you with that. If you need to write, this is a trick I got from my dad. I've talked talk about my dad a lot on this podcast, but my dad was an English teacher and he was a very good public speaker, and I was a very nervous public speaker for a very, very long time. And one of the things he taught me to do was put a post-it note on the podium if I was talking or on the screen that said slow down, or to write that at the top of my notes and then have that.
In my speaking notes, embedded in my speaking notes. Slow down, slow down, slow down. If you need to do that, if you need to put put a post-it on your computer to remind you to slow down, to remind you to sit with some silence, do that if that's going to be helpful to you. The real question rarely arrives in the first sentence. So resist the urge to response immediately and let there be a pause. This is something that I have learned through my own experience as a coach.
Letting people say the next thing is often what gives me the clue as to what they actually want to be talking about, what the real issue is or what the question behind the question is. So for that reason, if I try to fill that space right away, I'm gonna miss that. So slowing down and letting there be a pause is really, really helpful. Also listening for what's not being said, and this is this happens through.
really good global listening. So when you're paying attention to not just the words, but the emotion that's behind the words, the emotion that's showing up on the other side of the screen if you coach on Zoom. and also the body language that you're seeing. β it can help you to identify whether there might be some fear or anxiety there. and also help you figure out whether they're holding something back. so I I I really
I think this is also a really important piece of coaching and is also only available if you've slowed down. If you're rushing through the session, you are not going to notice these things. Taking your time, sitting back, really practicing deep global listening, watching what's happening on the other side of the screen, not being distracted by other things on your desk is going to be really, really helpful when it comes to β hearing what is underneath the question or the statement.
Ask yourself, like, what's actually happening here? Might what might this actually be about? And now this is where your intuition as a coach comes in a lot of the time. And a lot of my new coaches, when I'm coaching them, are nervous about relying on their intuition because they're worried they're gonna be wrong. And so I always say, so what? You might be wrong. But if you leave space for the fact that you might be wrong and you can actually say to your client, My intuition is telling me that maybe there's something else going on here and that it might be that you're afraid of making this decision. And your client says,
You know, no, that's not correct. You get to say, okay, what is correct? What does feel true to you? You can also say to them, you know, I've got a gut feeling about this. I'm not always right, but I want to throw it out there. And if I've got it wrong or I'm not quite there, I'd love to hear from you what's going on and how you're feeling about this. So you can own the fact that your intuition isn't perfect, but use it, dig into it, because your gut will almost always get you to a deeper place with your client.
So this is really all about forming a hypothesis, not a diagnosis. So you're not trying to nail it here. You're just trying to get curious and go a little bit deeper. And you can do that by asking questions about the question itself. You can say, what's prompting you to ask that question right now? Or if you had the answer to that question, what do you think would change for you? Or what are you hoping that I'll say in response to this question? Or what would be the hardest answer for you to hear right now?
All of those questions are really good, open-ended, powerful questions that are probably going to lead to a deepening in the area that you're talking to your client about. Again, you also want to be able to trust your gut as a coach and to learn how to lean into that. And you can you can either name the thing, like I just said, you can say, My gut's telling me it's this. or you can just say, My gut's telling me that there's something deeper going on here. When I say that, how does that feel?
Or my gets telling me that there's something completely different here that's keeping you stuck, right?
You're also going to be listening for identity and values language. And this comes up all the time. And the more you coach in this area, the better you get at hearing this language and identifying it right away. When people start saying things about, like, this is all I am, or this is the only thing I know how to be, or who am I if I stop doing this? What's left? they are talking about.
Their identity and their values. And that's a time to really pay close attention because that will often lead you into a really interesting conversation. Okay. I want to talk about some of the questions that I hear regularly in coaching and what's underneath them, just to give you some examples of how this how this can play out. So these are questions that get asked, but are not the actual question, not actually what the client's looking for. So what should I do? That's a direct
Cry for advice, right? And again, if you're practicing pure coaching, your job is not to provide advice, your job is not to provide the solutions or answers. You believe that your client is inherently creative, resourceful, and whole and can answer their own questions best. They're the best, they are the expert on themselves. And so when that question, what should I do? get asked, usually means I don't trust myself to make this decision or I am scared of making the wrong decision. Or
I want to put someone else on the hook here in case this doesn't work. And so that's a time to be really calling out that self-trust issue, really be asking them, I'm curious, what about this decision has you not trusting yourself? Or what is it that you're actually looking for here? Or, and if they say, well, I think I'm looking for permission to do this, well, who do you really need permission from?
and just taking that a little bit deeper. Another question that you will get asked and I get asked is, Do you think this is gonna work? Which usually means I am really scared it's not gonna work. and therefore I need permission to try, even if it even if I fail. and this is often rooted, there's some fear there, obviously, but the fear is often connected to perfectionism when someone says that is this gonna work? They are afraid of failing, and that is connected.
to their identity as a perfectionist and their the way that they value themselves. And so there's lots more that can be talked about there. Some version of this question comes up almost every week for me in coaching sessions. Should I stay or should I go? Now this might be in relation to a job, a relationship, some other sort of situation, your geographical, the person's geographical location, but it's usually not
the question of should I stay or should I go, it's usually something else. And sometimes it's am I allowed to do something different? So again, that it's an identity thing. They've always only done it one way or they've always only been with this one person and they have no idea who they would be without it. Right. So that it's that, you know, am I allowed to want something different, but also who would I be or who will I be if I leave? And then oftentimes also there's a will people judge me piece to this that comes in.
And so what you're doing there as a good coach is you're actually going to dig into the whole permission and identity piece of it. I often get asked, like, because people know how long I've been coaching and that I coach in a specific sort of niche area, I work with professional, usually professional women who are kind of at the end of the rope, they're overwhelmed, they're burnt out, and they're starting to question a lot of the decisions that they've made for themselves and oftentimes on the brink of a big transition.
Or maybe even more than one transition. And so because my clients know that that's the area that I work in, they often ask me, like, do you have other clients who are struggling with this? How do your other clients handle this? So that question of how do other people handle this comes up. And usually what that question actually means is, Am I normal? is it okay that I'm struggling with this, that I'm finding this thing hard? Or I feel really alone in this and I just need to know that I'm not, right? So
That is a really great time to get in with the normalizing. I just did this with a client this morning, normalizing the client was feeling overwhelmed with the mental load and feeling like it was incredibly unfair, how things, responsibilities, and β emotional and mental load were being shared in her household, and was having like angry outbursts as a result of not being able to communicate that clearly and not being able to start changing that dynamic and
What she really wanted to know right out of the gate was like whether she was normal, whether it was normal that she was having this quite heightened emotional response to this area of challenge in her life. so sometimes that reassurance and normalizing is really pretty helpful and key. and actually what they're asking for. Sometimes clients will ask you some version of this question: Am I being too sensitive or unreasonable?
And that usually means not that they're asking for you to say yes or no, but that someone else has made that person feel like they are, like their needs aren't valid or they're too much. and so that is a good time to dig into maybe the need for validation and you know, how where the where their self-worth worth comes from and and other questions. and then oftentimes people ask me what I would do.
Which is the most obvious question to not answer, honestly. Like when someone says, What would you do? That is the clearest request for advice, and not even advice for them, but advice based on my life, my experience, and my lens and my perspective. So I am never gonna answer that question. because what they're usually asking is I wanna know that this is possible.
I'm not sure again, I can trust myself here. My instincts are trustworthy, or I need some modeling here, not advice. And so again, this is where I would go back and I would say this would be a time for me to help them build up their own confidence based on their own history of making good decisions, for example, and help them see through their own lens and through their own experience and history that this.
that it is, you know, and help them get some clarity as to what they should do instead of answering the question of what I would do in their situation. so the again, like these are the types of things that once you start seeing these patterns, you will hear them all the time. You're going to hear these all the time in coaching sessions. So I wanted to raise some of those examples. Now the questions that go deeper that often are like the questions under the questions, I want to talk a little bit about those. These are the
Identity, values, and life's purpose questions. And almost always all of these surface questions that I was just talking about, we come down to this and we end up getting into these things. So those questions like, what should I do? Who am I if I'm not this? you know, what would other another person do in this situation? Those types of questions often underneath them end up being identity questions, values questions. People are lacking confidence in.
what the right thing is for them in that moment. And so getting into some work, some coaching work around identity, around life's purpose, around personal values is really, really helpful. I have touched on this, I think, in some other episodes, but I want to spend a little time talking about why those deeper questions can feel scary, but are also often the most important.
So when once you get into and you dig you either dig in or the client actually asks you straight up because sometimes that happens too. The client actually knows what the real question is and asks it or asks a version of it. And you're getting into these things. like who am I if I'm not a lawyer? Or who am I if I'm not a wife? Or who am I if I'm not a mother? If they're about to empty nest, for example. or maybe they're grieving. Who am I if I'm not
daughter or I'm not a spouse. this is going to come up all the time. It comes up all the time in transitions. So I have a program that I offer on the like personal coaching side of my business called Change Your Fucking Life. And one of the modules in this program is all about labels. It's all about figuring out who you are without your labels. And this is a really rich area of coaching. And when you get to this place where you realize the real question is
Who are they if they're not an ex. There's so much that you can do here. this, you know, is it comes up when people are doing career transitions, it comes up when people are leaving long-term relationships, it comes up with empty nesting, you know, it comes up in all kinds of like very common life situations. And so this becomes.
much deeper and much more existential in coaching, right? When you start asking questions like, if you stripped away all the roles, all the things that you do, what's left? Who are you? This is actually an exercise that I do with my coaching clients and it's one that I teach inside the CCSI. and that is to get my clients to actually start identifying and writing and creating and building a list of who they are, but they cannot reference anything they do.
So it's just about who they are as a human being, what the things are that make them uniquely them. Now, this is also connected to personal values, and we're doing usually doing that work at the same time, but it's a really interesting question to ask someone and a really interesting exercise for somebody to do. If you're not a wife, mother, teacher, daughter, volunteer, who are you? How can you describe yourself without talking about all the doing?
One of the things I also do with clients sometimes is I get them to ask other people in their lives what they would say about that. I get them to ask other people who they are, but I get them to say, like, don't, you can't say anything that I do. It has to just be qualities about me that make me uniquely me. That can be a really interesting exercise, too. some clients have spent years, maybe even decades, doing what they thought they should. β that happens a lot in the particular niche that I coach in, the career that looked good, the life that meant that that.
That seemed like the life that they wanted and that made sense on paper and that people told them they should pursue. β maybe it was to please their parents or it was in alignment with social norms. but now they're not sure it's what they actually want for themselves. And this is where coaching can get really pretty pretty special and magical. When they are asking, what do I actually want?
What they are really asking is like, am I allowed to want something different than what I have? And also, what if I don't know who I am? This comes up a lot with the clients that I work with. They just really don't have a sense of who they are outside of other people's expectations and all of these labels. How do I figure out what I value, what I've been living my life, aligned with someone else's values? So this sometimes happens when people go through a separation, for example.
So as a coach, questions that you might ask to help support this would be: if no one else's opinion mattered, what would you want? No one else's opinion mattered. Let's just wave a magic wand and say no one else's opinion matters. What would you want for yourself? It's also sometimes helpful to ask people what they used to love to do or what brought them joy before they started doing all the things they thought they should. And for most of the women I work with, we have to go back to before university or before, you
Any certainly before kids, before their first big job, whatever that looks like. We have to go way back in time. And I ask them, what did you used to do that brought you joy? Sometimes it's even childhood we go back to because it's been so long since that person has actually chosen something for themselves purely because it brings them joy, makes them happy. They've been doing the things that everybody's been telling them they should do. So what did you love doing before you started doing what you should is a really great question.
And then once we do the work around personal values, which is like a whole other podcast episode I could do, but once we start doing work around personal values, β you can start asking them what their life would look like if they designed it to be in alignment with those values instead of their obligations and responsibilities. Again, just like exercises where you leave behind the shoulds, you leave behind the judgment, and you just work through like.
In an absolutely perfect world with no judgment, no expectations from anyone else, and it didn't matter what anyone else thought, what kind of life would I create for myself? Another question that we often get to is like, what's the purpose of this? What's the point of my life? This is a biggie, obviously. β and it comes up a lot during burnout. It also comes out a lot up a lot during midlife. I happen to support women in midlife who are burnt out, so it happens a lot in my practice.
It also happens with big transitions and losses. people will often get to that point where they're asking, really, underneath it all, does my life mean anything? Am I just wasting my time? What am I even doing? What am I here for? now it's not your job to answer this question, obviously, as a coach, but you can help them sit with it. You can ask curious questions and help them explore it and find their own meaning. And there are also lots of really good exercises that I teach inside the CCSI around.
Helping people get clear on their life's purpose. and and so there are lots of more like structured things you can do with clients, but just staying curious is the first step. β what would make your life feel more meaningful? Not impressive, but meaningful. That's a really important caveat for them. So, what would make your life feel more meaningful? I'm not talking about making it more impressive, but more meaningful, because oftentimes people will go to sort of
some of the sort of typical metrics of success that would involve accomplishments that would be impressive, but probably wouldn't add much meaning to their life. So staying away from things that are impressing or for other people, but what would make your life feel more meaningful to you? Also asking them that question, like when have you felt most alive? And this is where I do an exercise called Peak Experiences with my client, which helps them to tap into a time in their life when everything felt like it was exactly the way it was supposed to be.
And it's a really good exercise to remind them, first of all, that they can feel that way, but also to help them reconnect with the things in their life that bring them that feeling and have allowed them to feel that way. And I don't mean things like objects, I mean experiences and people. That's usually what it is. but also help them to identify what was present in that moment that isn't present for them now in terms of values, for example. and then another great question is what do you want to be?
able to say about your life. What do you need to be or want to be true about the way that you lived your life? And again, I have lots of questions that I ask about this. And I have a whole module that I teach inside the CCSI about helping people tap into this. And this involves a lot of future self-work and really like putting themselves in the future, looking back on their life and getting really clear on what's going to matter to them about how they lived their life and the choices that they made 10 years from now, 20 years from now, when they're on their deathbed. Right. So
These questions and this work requires you to be totally comfortable with not knowing the answers, which by the way, you don't ever have as a coach. I've I don't know if I can stress that enough. You don't have the answers to other people's questions, and you're not supposed to. But you have to get really comfortable with that if you're doing this deeper work. You can't give them their identity, you can't give them their life's purpose, but you can hold space and stay curious and help them to discover it. And that is really coaching. That is really the work. Okay. β
How do you respond to someone? So, how do you practically deal with it when someone is raising a question and you're pretty sure it's not the real question? How do you name what it is you think is happening? Is this really like another version of or iteration of the elephant in the room that I've talked about on other podcasts? You name what you're sensing really gently. I wanna emphasize that. You this is not a, you're not like, you're not the elephant, you're not.
Coming in and knocking everything down. You're staying really gentle and supportive in this conversation. You're asking me what you should do, but I'm wondering if the real question is whether you can trust yourself to decide. Right? Or you're asking me if this will work, but it sounds like there's some fear. You've got some fear and anxiety that it won't work.
I hear you asking about the job, but my gut's telling me that there's an identity question underneath. Like you're wondering who you'd be without it. Right? So again, you're just gently naming the thing that you're sensing. And they might say, β my God, you nailed it. Or they might say, I don't think that's it. Okay. What do you think it is? And they may say something else, but you're getting deeper and you're staying curious.
You can also reflect the emotion that you are sensing and seeing in a gentle way. sometimes there's grief there. There oftentimes is. And the work that I do sounds like you might be grieving something, maybe a version of yourself or a path that you you thought that you were gonna take, a future that you thought you were gonna have. How does that feel when I when I suggest that? How does that land with you? Right? Or I'm sensing that you might be looking for permission. Who do you need permission from?
To make this change or to take this step, right? and then of course, you also can just ask the question under the question, you know, whatever you think the question under the question is. Like, what do you think it would mean if you did trust yourself here? Or what are you really afraid of? Or what do you need to hear right now? Who do you need to hear that from? Who do you need permission from? Whose voice are you hearing is also a good question oftentimes.
Who are you if you take away all the labels? Again, there's that exercise I do with clients where I say you gotta list all the things you are, but none of them can be things you do. it is a hard exercise for a lot of people.
And then you need to hold space. Again, this comes back to what I was talking about at the beginning, practicing silence, being comfortable with that, because things are going to open up here when you really get to the real question. And this is where it's really important to remind yourself that you're not coaching with an agenda. You don't have an outcome that you're looking for for this client. β and that you're just gonna stay curious and you're gonna follow the client where this goes, right?
They might get emotional, they might go really quiet. Don't rush to fix it. Let them feel whatever they're feeling. Sometimes this is the first time they've become aware of the fact that they actually are afraid, that they don't know who they are. And if that's the case, this session's probably not going to be the session where they get the great clarity and insight and have the big aha moment. It's probably going to come in sessions down the road. So this might just be a space for allowing them to process whatever emotion goes along with their insight.
Into the fact that they don't know who they are, or they're really feeling afraid of making this decision or whatever it is. β and this is the part that's really hard to learn from a book. This is the part that really takes the practice. and this is the thing that I am I'm always looking to try to help my coaches, support my coaches in building as a skill and to building their confidence around. Now.
As I said earlier, you might get it wrong sometimes, and that's okay. I just want to come back to that for a second. if it doesn't land what you say, you just get to say, okay, I can tell that doesn't seem right to you. What is it for you, or what do you think is at play here? β you have still shown them that you are listening at a deeper level, which is so important in building that trust and in them actually feeling comfortable opening up. So that's really important and it matters.
and often your wrong guess won't be completely wrong and it will like trigger, lead them to whatever, you know, is actually going on and being able to articulate that. Every once in a while, the client just isn't ready to go there. That's also okay okay. They might deflect from the topic. β and that is information. You know, you can circle back later. You don't need to deal with it. You have to kind of trust your intuition there as a coach as to whether like another question is warranted or whether it's a good time to just take a break, step back and
You know, ask a different question. The goal is not to be a mind reader, the goal is to be genuinely curious. This is so important. Nobody expects us to be mind readers. We are not mind readers as coaches. That's not what we do. But if we stay genuinely curious and we make that the cornerstone of every coaching session, we are going to take the client where they need to go.
So we have to stay curious and then we have to create the space. Again, we don't want to fill all the space. We want to create some space for them to explore the thing. So in order to do that, that requires some things from us. It requires us to be present. It requires that really deep listening. You can't be distracted by other things. I've talked about this before. Clean off your desk, put your phone away. You can't hear the real question. If you are formulating the response, you have to be with them.
It also requires you to set aside your agenda. Hopefully you don't have one. I have been yammering on about this now a lot this year inside the coaching edge, how agenda-based coaching is not great coaching. That's not what we should be striving to do. We should be coming into every session without an agenda. It's absolutely okay to have as a go a goal. And the goal is for me always for my client to feel better at the end of the session than they did at the beginning, and for my client to feel better about whatever the area of challenges that they're in at the end of our
Coaching engagement, which might be six sessions or 12 sessions, than they did the first day I met them. But in terms of how they do that and the roadmap to that for them, I do not pretend or want to know what that is, frankly. because that's agenda-based coaching. And I'm not in the business of that. And I don't want you to be either. I want you to set aside your agenda, be willing to follow wherever they are going. β and it's probably not where you thought they were gonna go. And your session plan, if you have one, might need to change.
And that's okay. What I usually do when things start to get onto a tack that feels like a different tack, this happened to me right before this session. I was coaching a client. We ended up talking about something that wasn't really what I thought we were going to talk about. And she said, like, this is something that we're not talking about right now, but it came up for me today and I just want to raise it. And we started talking about it. And I said, Okay, we have a half an hour left in the session. This isn't what we started talking about, but does this feel like something that is valuable for you to talk about today? Would you like to talk about this today?
And she was like, absolutely, this is the thing I want talk about. So you can ask permission to switch too. β if you have a plan or if you've made a plan that your client's involved in as to what you're going to be talking about in that session. You have to be okay with not knowing. This is just all good coaching, frankly, because you don't know. You don't have the answers. You're not supposed to have the answers. You're not a mind reader. Your job is to help them find their own answers because they are their own best expert. And that requires you guys.
That really requires us to be sitting in uncertainty a lot of the time.
I also think it's important to do your own work. You know, the more you understand your own patterns, the more you understand your own identity questions, the more you get clear on your own values and your own relationship to your life's purpose, the better you hear other people's. And this is one of the reasons why I encourage every coach that I work with to get coaching. Coaching for coaches is incredibly helpful and incredibly important. And this actually, the coach, the
Client I was working with this morning is a coach. And I said to her, this is why I keep getting coaching. Because I I know that working through my own stuff is really helpful to me and how I show up for other people. because first of all, it shows me the value of doing that. It also shows me not just of working through my stuff, but the value of coaching also. and it provides me with an opportunity to share some story and to normalize an experience often, which is something that I do do β occasionally in my coaching.
Okay, β and the last thing, I have said this already a couple times in this episode, is you just need to practice this. This is just a practiced thing. So the confidence piece in this is probably what's holding you back. most coaches know intellectually that they should listen more deeply, but in the moment they don't trust themselves enough to do it. And that's okay. I'm normalizing that. That is part of being a newer coach.
You're afraid of getting it wrong, you don't like the silence, you're afraid that maybe you're gonna go too deep and end up in an area that you don't really feel qualified to coach around, or that the client's not gonna think that you're being helpful. And so you just stick with the surface question because that feels a lot safer. And this is why confidence and skill are connected. When you trust your coaching instincts, you can take the risk of going deeper. when you have practiced enough that it feels natural.
You can stop second guessing yourself because you'll have enough experience on your belt to know that when you go with your gut, when you say the thing, that that always leads to something much richer in the coaching, in the coaching session. And that is really what the confident coaching skills intensive is all about. So I'm just throwing a plug out for this right now. If you're listening to this episode and you're thinking, I want to get better at this, I know that I don't have the confidence that I could have and that would benefit both me and my clients in the coaching sessions.
Think about the CCSI. Yes, we work on specific skills like deep listening and powerful questions and responding to the real question, but underneath all of it, we're building confidence. And you're getting like real support from someone who's been there that helps you to build your flexibility as a coach. You're getting specific exercises. I give you lots of worksheets and things.
ways to approach with like curious open-ended questions some of the most common challenges that come up in life coaching, no matter what your niche is. And coaches who participate in the CCSI or take the self-guided version of the course always have the same feedback, which is I feel completely different than I did before I started this course. I feel so much better in my client sessions, but I also feel really excited about the programming that I know I can create.
As a result of doing this training. So again, if you want to go deeper on this, if you want to practice these skills more intentionally with some support, that's what I do inside the confident coaching skills intensive. You can take it as a self-guided course. I'll put the link in the show notes. I just started making that available this year. You can work through it at your own pace on your own schedule. You can practice the things that you're learning with your clients or with practice clients as you're doing that.
It's the same content, the same frameworks, the same skill building, and it's just offered in a way that fits with your real life where you don't come to live coach sessions with it. But the thing is, is that most coaches learn best with live practice. That's the truth of it. And so I also take small groups for the CCSI in a live coached format, usually six to ten coaches.
you have to come up with the coaching group. So if you're part of a group of coaches, maybe from your certification or training or some community that you're already connected to and you'd like to go through CCSI together as a private group, just reach out to me and I will chat with you about what that would look like. But whether you go with a self-guided route or a live cohort, the CCSI will absolutely change the way you coach. And so if this episode is sparking something for you, then that might be your your right next step.
As always, thank you so much for listening to the Coaching Edge. Love having you. July is almost over. We're moving into August. August, I'm I am going to feature some like best of archives episodes in August because I'm going to take a little break. I'm going to step away for a few weeks. So probably episodes you haven't heard from heard of or listened to. A lot of them are going to be from the earlier seasons of the coaching edge, but I'm going to go back and look for some fan favorites and β re-release those in the
first few weeks of August, and then I'll be back towards the end of August with new episodes. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
