Letter to a coach: is coaching therapy?

This was my response to a coach who was struggling with a client who refused to connect with her emotions in coaching, a client who believed emotions are belong in therapy instead.

Here’s what I wrote:

There are different styles and different opinions on what it is to be coached.

ICF says:
“Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.

Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has.”

Your client is not wrong in her expectations. ICF doesn’t say a word about emotions. She could probably find a coach out there who only works superficially (not a good coach). Her expectations don’t match your approach. She needs to be educated without making her wrong. I recommend you have a conversation with her about how you work, and why you use your approach.

Here’s an example. I received a great email response from a listener to one of my Financial Alchemy teleclasses. The writer wanted to know why she had to go “down the well” if she already knew her limiting beliefs.

The first step of Financial Alchemy is to take a client down the tube, much farther than they knew was there. This may look counterintuitive–isn’t the point of the process to reconnect clients to the abundance and prosperity of the universe? We have to create POLARITY. The first step of Alchemy is “negridio,” the blackening. It works.

Stuff may show up here around child abuse or other hurts, just by digging into negative memories of money. It’s all related. (For those of you who are freaking out right now and thinking I’m overstepping my role as a coach, my clients are creative, resourceful, and whole. I’m very careful to tune into clients who are not well, and to steer them to something other than coaching. I’ve done this hundreds and hundreds of times, and I’ve never had a problem.)

Here’s my “why” for dragging my clients down the well in the beginning, insisting that they set aside every positive thought they have about Money: I’m firing up there neurology for change. Einstein said, “We cannot solve problems with the same consciousness which created them.” Information comes to us and new neurological connections are created during heightened states of emotional excitement. This is NLP talk for why we do process coaching.

Here’s a quick and easy HOW for getting a client out of her head. I do this a lot with professional women in traditionally masculine fields–lawyers, accountants, CPAs. I ask my client to stand with her feet spread as wide as her shoulders, and to bend her knees and rock at her pelvis, as if she were hula dancing. “Speak from your hips,” I’ll say.

There are a few reasons this works–I learned this from a coach who spoke at my local PCMA chapter. She has a book on “Four Energies.” I’m taking clients who are stuck in fire (Just do it!) energy into water (give and take) energy. There’s a whole area of somatic coaching that uses body wisdom. One of my coaching students is a trained somatic coach.

I suspect your client wants more from coaching than she’s allowing herself, but the last thing you want to do is push when she resists.

Tags: abundance and prosperity, alchemy, coaches, Financial Alchemy, ICF, negridio, strong emotions, therapy