Results
The Client realized what she would really like to do professionally and started to move energetically towards the new goal. She maintained the initial goal of becoming a coach, however, she gained more insight as to what field or kind of company she would like to work in as a coach. I am confident that with her enthusiasm, discipline and work ethic she will be able to reach her goal.
Reflections – what I learned
I realized that I need to pay closer attention to whether the values of the client match the goal they say they want to achieve. In my situation, since the Client reported she would like to become a wellness/fitness coach and at the same time indicated that beauty, attractiveness and fitness were among her most important values, I did not feel there was any contradiction. However, I think I could have explored her main values more thoroughly in the beginning of the coaching process. Maybe then the breakthrough we achieved during the seventh session would have come much earlier.
On the other hand, I realized that mental changes that occur after administering a technique or asking really powerful questions take quite a long time – in this case one week or more. This is another important realization for me – to give the client enough space and time for changes in perspective to occur.
Perhaps the most surprising realization for me was that the coaching process can go in a very different direction than that imagined by both the coach and the client in the beginning. After working with some tools – especially visualization and the Cartesian questions – a very powerful shift of perspective manifested itself in the Client who subsequently changed the goal of the coaching process. However, that perspective was not changed immediately after completing the exercise. In fact, it felt like taking two steps back rather than moving forward at first, since for the first couple of sessions after the exercises, Emily practically made a reversal and started appreciating her current situation more – the situation that she had wanted to change when she contacted me at first. I think the reason was that working deeply on her real needs triggered her negative beliefs about not being able to fulfill those needs and the financial consequences of a radical career move. All this led to a lot of rationalization (a defense mechanism) about how her current situation was not that bad for her at all.
However, the fact that she still continued to pursue her dreams is an indication that she is in fact in touch with her needs and values and just needs more work with her negative beliefs in order to feel safer about the change. She also needs a financial plan for the future. These are the main two points on which we decided to concentrate in the follow-up to which we will dedicate as many sessions as she needs.