The DRIVE Coaching Model

A Coaching Model By Bemene Piaro, Transformational Life Coach, UNITED STATES

DRIVE – Get in the Driver’s Seat of Your Life!

[Positive Psychology Coaching] focuses on values, strengths, and resourcefulness and clients to be more precise about their goals and desires, and by focusing on their strengths, they can see clearer paths to achieve them.– ICA Booklet: Framework & Theories.

Drive—Get in the Driver’s Seat of Your Life (DRIVE) model derives from positive psychology. Positive psychology coaching aims to “1. Improve [the] client’s life, 2. increase the client’s positivity ratio,3. give clients the tools and support needed to develop their strengths and talents, 4. nurture gratitude in the client, and 5. help clients build and maintain healthy relationships.” – ICA Booklet: Framework & Theories. One of the resources in Positive Psychology is the positivity ratio which posits that a person is in a flourishing state if they feel 3 times more positivity than negativity regularly. This flourishing state is equated to thriving in the DRIVE model.

The DRIVE Coaching Model

As in the framework of Positive Psychology, the goal of DRIVE is to help clients to thrive. In this model, thriving is when a person feels that they have the resources, tools, and ability to get where they want or do what they want in life and at the same time, experience a net positive of feelings about their everyday life. Thriving would be accomplished in Positive Psychology when a client is in the “self-actualization” phase of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or the meaning and purpose dimension in Martin Seligman’s three dimensions of happiness.

Many clients who thrive after coaching, when asked, would state that they feel in control, or in the driver’s seat, of their lives. Being in the driver’s seat of one’s life is when one feels that, rather than waiting for life circumstances to change, one is actively taking steps, having within oneself the capacity (resources, tools, and ability) to find and implement the solution for life’s challenges. In the DRIVE model, a coach helps the client to move from the passenger’s seat, or helplessness/victim approach to life, to the driver’s seat approach, where the client feels in control and that they are thriving.

The Driver’s Seat is a symbol of where you want your client at the end of a coaching engagement. It is a state of unconditional positive regard towards oneself and one’s capacity; at the end of the coaching engagement, the result is a human being who feels they can face whatever circumstance, not specific solutions to specific problems, though this is a benefit as well. It is, therefore, an attitude and approach to life that goes beyond the resolution of any specific problem or smaller goals that the client may also set. As the client successfully implements goals, their overall sense of self-efficacy increases, not only in the specific area of focus but also in their confidence in themselves to solve similar and dissimilar challenges. To ensure that this is true, the coach establishes a practice of curing the client to celebrate their accomplishments in the coaching session and between coaching sessions and employs powerful coaching questions, such as “How does this learning help you in other areas of your life,” consistently.

A client may be generally living life in the passenger’s seat of life or only approach life from the passenger’s seat in specific circumstances. A client who lives his or her life in the passenger’s seat would exhibit a similar set of emotions and attitudes toward most challenges. While another client may generally demonstrate an attitude of resourcefulness and self-assurance in most situations and then exhibit attitudes of helplessness or victimhood in specific situations. It can be the work of the coach to help the client shed light on the fact that in that specific situation, the client is coming from a frame of helplessness/victimhood or stated differently, passenger’s seat. Whether the client is in the passenger’s seat in most circumstances or a few, this model (and the accompanying coaching power tool “Driver’s Seat vs Passenger’s Seat) can be employed to shift the client into a more resourceful frame of mind. The coach inquires in the session “on a scale of 0 to 10 (or another number), when it comes to this issue, how much would you say you are in the driver’s seat?” The coach then engages with the client to identify what their role is and what specific actions/thoughts they could adopt to make changes in their situation. Additional questions as well as definitions for each side of the frame are provided in the power tool.

Driver’s Seat

Definition: Feeling one knows the solution or how to get to the solution for a situation; feeling capable, resourceful, and supported in a situation or circumstance

Feelings Associated With Driver’s Seat:

• Creativity
• curiosity
• Gratitude
• Feel skilled
• feel like the right person for the situation/job
• feel supported
• feel abundant
• Everything feels accessible
• Challenges feel like opportunities

Passenger’s Seat

Definition: Feeling that one does not have the authority or capacity to act on one’s own behalf.

Feelings Associated With Passenger’s Seat:

• Anger
• People pleasing
• Low energy or motivation
• Feeling abandoned
• Thinking “Why me?”
• frustration
• Feeling like one is making an effort but not seeing progress or results
• Feeling like there is no way forward

A sample process for how a coach could use this model follows.

1. Engaging with a new client—informational interview to find out what the problem is
2. As part of contracting, do an assessment using wheel life
3. Depending on the number of goals – set the duration of the engagement
4. Set priorities for which area(s) to focus on first and specific outcomes/feelings the client would like to get to
5. In regular coaching, the goal is to get the person to get the person into the driver’s seat in all areas of their life –confident and reassured. In each area, you can ask the question, are you the passenger or the driver in this situation?
   10. Scale of 1 to 10.
6. In the first couple of sessions/when beginning a new area and as needed throughout the engagement, use the Coaching Power Tool: Driver Seat vs. Passenger seat—ask the questions there to help shift the client. This is the link to the power tool