If you’ve been hanging around the Applied Depth community, you know that today’s topic is very close to my heart — how to truly co-create change with your 1:1 clients.
The reason why I’m obsessed with this is because it has been one of the greatest honors of my life to hold space for and witness another human being reclaim who they are, find courage and resilience they never realized they had, learn to love even their most unsavory parts, speak out loud their most hidden truths.
I’m deeply committed to holding this type of space for clients and for teaching other practitioners how to hold this space.
While there are many things you want to have in place in order to do this kind of work, I want to remind you of 5 of them today:
Take Time to Lean In to Fears
Fear almost always shows up when a client is working towards a stretchy goal. Instead of bypassing it, lean into it. Work somatically with it, and help your client build the capacity to move forward with fear rather than waiting for it to disappear.
The fear work I do with clients helps them not only excitedly reach their goals (vs. avoid goals), but it transforms them in profound ways. It helps them activate deeper self-compassion and self-love. It helps them take action, reduce everyday anxiety and move through their lives from a place of regulation, groundedness and more calm.
It’s incredible to witness.
Bridge the Breakthrough to Real Life
When clients have a big breakthrough in session, their heart opens, they see something new, they feel the shift in their body. But without a bridge between that moment and real life, the old patterns can (& usually will!) creep right back in.
Homework is that bridge. It’s what helps the new awareness become lived experience.
Don’t let insights float away after the session. Co-design small, specific pieces of inner and outer “homework” that helps your client pave deeper neural and energetic pathways around it…and also live the new awareness. That bridge is where deeper transformation takes root.
Create a High-Touch Container
Create the type of space for your client where they know they, their goals and evolution are being held not just during sessions but in between sessions.
One of the many things my clients appreciate about our work together – and part of why they keep coming back again and again – is that they know I am there for them 110% during and in between sessions (of course with boundaries in place!).
In between sessions, we email, voxer, I support them, answer questions, and encourage them. I also sometimes hop on a quick call if it’s needed.
Their forward movement gets accelerated because the work we do together is so much more and all-encompassing than our sessions alone.
Help Your Clients More Deeply Own their Strengths…& Strategize from Them
Your clients greatest assets are their brilliances, strengths, skills and resources. And yet clients rarely fully own all they have inside of them.
One of our most sacred jobs: to support our clients to know, own and use their strengths. This isn’t always easy work because of the ways clients tend to criticize vs. celebrate themselves.
And, when it’s time to make a strategy, help your client build from those strengths.
Working from strengths helps clients feel more empowered and less unable. And over time, it rewires their self-concept: I’m capable. I’m worthy. I have what it takes.
Go Deep and Work Somatically
Lasting change doesn’t come from insight alone. It comes when the nervous system, emotions, and body integrate the shift.
This kind of work requires presence, patience, and attunement — but it’s where so much magic happens.
When I work with my clients privately, we go very deep. We work with shadows, compulsions, impulses, fears and so much more. It is always such an honor to witness another human come face to face with themselves in such courageous ways.
