Coaching Case Study By Kellie Lynch
(Career Coach, UNITED STATES)
I was working with a client, we’ll call her Jamie for confidentiality purposes, and Jamie came to me to discuss her want/need for a change in a career. I always offer a 20 minutes complimentary session for potential clients to meet with me and see if we are a match but she declined and had wanted to go right into our first coaching session. She stated that she knew “I would be the one to help her.” Before we met for that first session I had sent her my “Getting to Know You Questionnaire” and asked her to bring it with her to our first session so that we could talk through some of the questions together and get a better understanding of her goals.
** side note: I wish I had it beforehand to review so now all clients answer the questionnaire and return it back to me via email before meeting **
Jamie showed up and she is a woman in her early thirties who is looking to return to work after being home with her children for their formative years. Now that her two boys were school age she has been feeling restless at home not caring for them and is wanting to contribute to her and her husband’s household income. After talking with her a bit more I discovered she used to work in a hospital handling the billing department to send bills to patients. She truly hated it. She worked in the bottom floor, of the hospital prepping the bills to be mailed to former patients and often received calls from people who were struggling to pay their medical costs and needed assistance setting up payment plans and such in order to pay for their medical care. Jamie proceeded to tell me how much it broke her heart daily to hear their stories.
She explained that she was grateful her husband was able to be the sole provider for the family for about 7 years to give her time to be home and raise their babies and give her time to try and focus on what she truly wanted to do. During that time she did try to do work for a couple of different MLM companies trying to find her niche and bring in some extra money to help. She explained that her main passion was helping people but she could not quite place where “helping people” began and ended for her in a sense of career. Over the course of that first session and the second session, we did a lot of talking, breaking down her routine, time, and the support she had etc. Then at the end of our second session, I told her to go home and I wanted her to envision what she wanted for her life in terms of her career. I told her to make a vision board, or write it down, or copy and paste pictures from Google into a word document. I did not care how she envisioned it but I wanted her to have a tangible item with her vision instead of it just being her mind. I wanted her to explore what skills she had that she could use in addition to her passion for helping people and envision what a career with those core pieces would look like. When we discussed what skills she had, she found it hard to list them. I helped her to think outside the box of “work skills, career skills, and experience skills” and to focus on all skills. Being a stay at home mom takes a lot of skills! I told her not to discount herself and all the works she’s done these past 6 years while being home. Ultimately when we regrouped, I was shocked to see she not only had sat down and truly worked her brain, this woman had creative skills too! She brought me the best thought out vision board I think I had ever seen. To the point she had it colour coordinated! Hello! More skills, creative and organized! I was so impressed and when we sat down I felt like I was no longer meeting with the same woman I met with initially 2 weeks prior. She had so much fire, passion and excitement that was fueling her from the inside out about her future and what she wanted to do. She has a passion for health and eating foods that fuel her body and preparing foods for her family that fuel them. She also enjoyed being a “Beach body” coach and helping people reach their fitness goals. By asking questions and diving in with her I discovered her passion was about helping people be healthy which is why she ultimately ended up in her previous role in the medical field. But handling the billing just did not satisfy her soul because she felt as though she wasn’t helping people. So she turned inward and flipped her perception to, “Healthy people do not need doctors, therefore it starts with them”. We decided to figure out how she could help and turn this into a career. We got that she loved helping people, being a “Beach body” coach, love to eat healthy yet yummy foods that fuel her and her family, and would like people to be their healthiest self. Now came time for Action/Getting Uncomfortable. She decided the actions she could take would be to promote more of her own healthy lifestyle and routine using social media to bring awareness to her passion, Jamie also decided to look into health, fitness, nutrition classes/seminars, and ultimately knew she needed to have a conversation with her husband about not returning to the medical field the way he had thought. By asking some questions, role-playing and keeping her accountable, our 4th meeting she had spoken with her husband, began posting her meals and workout routines and had found a local technical school that offered classes to become a certified personal trainer and nutrition coach.
She came into our 4th meeting and said, “I figured it out! I know what I want to do!” And she laid out all of her research onto the table and explained that by breaking it down and doing some research she decided she wanted to be a personal trainer and work with clients around eating healthy and staying in shape. She made step 5 even easier because with my help, she “tied it all together” on her own. We sat down and ironed out a few more details and she decided she would take the classes she discovered and talk to her gym about becoming a personal training there once she was complete. Jamie enrolled in classes and then began working at the gym as a personal trainer for about 6 months and then her following had grown and she began her own personal fitness business and her next goal… is to open her own fitness studio! She is confidently living her best life. She is home with her children when she needs to be, makes her own schedule, and is doing what she is passionate about.
This was one of my first extremely successful coaching interactions. I do believe that my coaching technique was definitely effective in this situation. The only things I feel like I would tweak would be asking for the questionnaire to be filled out and returned before meeting so I could be better prepared. I also have worked on my role-playing technique because I personally did not feel I was my best during our interaction when discussing how to confront her husband about the changes she wanted to make. Luckily her husband was pretty supportive and that did not become a larger issue at hand because I was a little unsure navigating those grounds as relationship coaching and such is not my niche. I think overall this interaction allowed me to work my whole coaching model through which was a huge success for me and helped me to really narrow down my model and solidify it. This coaching experience was a little over a year and now after going through classes at ICA, I am more confident in approaching my model especially around Visualization. I personally have always loved it but I know it can be a difficult concept for some people to understand and not everyone is willing. However, I find it a crucial part in developing a positive mindset and to practice the power of positive thinking and positive psychology.
“Positive Psychology” is a somewhat newer term in the psychology world. But basically, it is focusing on strengths, virtues, happiness, possibility, goals, and dreams etc. in order to retrain your brain to think positively at any given moment. Your brain does most of its work subconsciously and out of habit. A habit is based off a trigger, action and reward. All habits, good or bad. While we cannot change what the trigger is, we can, in turn, change our action and make our reward a more positive, long-lasting reward instead of a “quick fix” that’ll you may regret later. Think of it along the lines of the following:
Trigger- You get stressed out at work due to a deadline
Action- You take a 10-minute smoke break
Reward- You feel mellower after that cigarette but you know it’s not good for you.
Trigger- You get in an argument with your significant other
Action- You go binge eat ice cream and watch a movie
Reward- ice cream makes you feel better, but you’re already stressing about fitting into those pair of favourite jeans in the back of your closet
Neither of those situations is beneficial to you in the long wrong. Let’s look at the same scenarios in a different way:
Trigger- You get stressed out at work due to a deadline
Action- You take a 10-minute walk away from your cluttered desk to clear your mind and refocus yourself
Reward- You feel more in control when you come back to your desk. Sometimes staring at the stack of paperwork can feel overwhelming or hearing your email ding every 3 minutes. By taking 10 mins to yourself to gather your thoughts you come back more clear headed and ready to tackle the job at hand
Trigger- You get in an argument with your significant other
Action– You go take a relaxing bubble bath with some candles and music and relax with some essential oils
Reward– You feel more relaxed and controlled in your emotions after some R&R. Now you may feel like you can talk to your significant other about what occurred and speak from a place of clarity and love instead of the initial anger or sadness.
Now with positive psychology, you are forming a new habit so that when a trigger happens your brain does not react to it in a form of panic, “why me?”, ‘I never catch a break” or whatever negative reaction you may tell yourself. Instead, you train your brain when being triggered by a negative (because you cannot change the trigger remember) that despite a negative occurrence you can choose how to react and how to flip the script. It’s not being fake or unrealistic. You are not taking a terrible situation and finding all the rainbows and making yourself numb to it or ignoring the situation, instead, you are changing your perception into acceptance and growth from any given situation.
You choose how much power something can hold over you and how you allow it to affect your life. Get out there and turn your crazy life into BEAUTY!