How to Help a Client who asks a Question you don’t have an Answer for

Let’s say a client hired you so that they could learn to feel more confident and motivated in their work, and in a session, they happen to bring forward an issue about a parenting situation…but you don’t have kids or know anything about parenting!

Or, you’re working with a client on supporting them to achieve their business goals and the topic of whether or not they should run Facebook ads comes up…but you’re not an expert on ads!

We may have a particular expertise and types of goals that we help our clients with, but that doesn’t mean that they’re only always going to stay on those exact topics in our work together. Life is messier than that – nothing in life is totally compartmentalized. Work relates to home life. And home life relates to work, etc etc. And so a variety of issues are going to come up in your client sessions. And this is how it should be!

Over the decades, as I’ve supported my clients on the inner and outer work of growing their businesses and leadership, as well as their transformational skills, they’ve brought forward pretty much every situation under the sun – parenting, caring for aging parents, wanting to leave marriages, deciding if they should move from their hometown, illness, figuring out how to write their one woman show, and on and on. And each and every one of these topics were important in the work we were doing together. And…OF COURSE there is no way I could EVER be an expert in all of these things. And I would end up making myself miserable if I tried. And yet, I’ve been able to support my clients in every single one of these situations.

How do you do that? How do you support clients in realms and situations that are out of your area of expertise? We explore that topic on today’s episode and you’re going to walk away with some specific ideas and instructions on what to do next!

Some topics we cover:

==an important shift in understanding what coaching means

==practitioner fears around “being smart enough”

==the difference between consulting and coaching

==Breakthrough questions that help clients find their own answers

==what it means to help clients find resources

==and much more!

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