I’ve seen a trend happening over the last decade: coaches and transformational practitioners are doing more and more consulting in their client sessions….and asking fewer and fewer breakthrough questions.
When you hang out heavily in consulting mode, you are essentially relying solely on their expertise in their field and giving advice and “how-to” information.
When this happens, you end up blocking your ability to:
- penetrate the surface to the depths of their clients’ desires, behaviors & patterns,
- get underneath the nitty-grittys of client goals to uncover authentic visions,
- support clients to befriend their fears & resistances
- help remove blocks & obstacles with your clients
- co-create transformational awareness & self-love
- support clients to actually take steps towards their goals
Let’s be clear that consulting is just one skill & strategy within the larger context of coaching:
Consultant [k uh n-sul-tnt]: a person who gives professional or expert advice.
Coach [kohch]: a person who prepares another for mastery, transformation or achievement.
One reason for some of the “consult-more-than-coach” phenomenon is because somehow the craziness of the online marketing industry has given us the message that as coaches, we need to serve up solutions quickly in order for prospects to buy from us.
There are too many individuals who entered the coaching and healing field, truly desiring to transform others, to create deep awareness for others, and to impact others beyond one particular project or goal…
…but somehow ended up teaching surface methodology or formulaic information or simply just sharing with their clients how they achieved their own success.
When you do this, you might be able to help clients achieve certain goals, but you definitely don’t impact your clients on the heart & soul level that completely changes their lives.
And, chances are that if you are relying mostly on consulting, your work feels a little empty and surface-oriented. You’re not going as deep as you’d like to be going, you’re maybe getting a little bored by giving out the same advice over & over again, you’re longing for more magical & a-ha moments with your clients.
The antidote to all this? One antidote is to consult a little less and instead ask more questions in your client sessions!
Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong at all, whatsoever, with giving advice and how-to information. I do a ton of consulting with my clients. I share my expertise and acquired wisdom with them all the time.
And it is very valuable to my clients.
However, I do it in a beautiful balance with real, authentic, powerful questioning and creating awareness techniques.
Because the truth is that the BEST results are achieved when you combine your unique expertise & advice with masterful coaching skills.
When you combine consulting and coaching:
–you get crystal clear on your clients’ deepest desires and your expertise can be even more personalized
–you share your methodology, and then know how to walk your clients through their fear when they get stuck executing the methodology
–you create deep inner awareness & transformation while also supporting your clients to achieve their greatest goals
It is a total, baloney, BS online marketing myth that in order to succeed as a coach you must deliver the “solution” right away – whether you work 1:1 or with groups.
Real clients – the clients that really want to be impacted on a heart, mind and soul level – know that true transformation takes time and that real learning and goal-achieving requires deep learning, not surface solutions.
The practitioners that are remembered the most by their clients – and the practitioners who manifest the most referrals and re-signs – are the ones that give fantastic information, but consistently go beyond advice-giving into creating spaces for valuable self-reflection and inner change.
If this conversation is piquing your interest, here’s an assignment for you: over the next week, track your client sessions, classes and interactions and begin to notice what percentage of the time you are consulting and what percentage of the time you are coaching and see how that’s working for you.
