Transcript
00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach, ritualist, and all-around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients. I created the Coaching Revolution podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
00:00:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
so that you can do even better client work and group work, grow your business organically, and know that you’re making a real difference in the world. This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts. Let’s get started.
00:01:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
Welcome back to the podcast. I’m so glad that you’re here. I am really excited for today’s episode. It is part 2 of a two-part conversation that we started last week all about what I call your coaching philosophies.
00:01:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
And as you’ll see, your coaching philosophies are crucial when it comes to your client work, your group work, and to your business and your marketing. So for today’s episode, I’m going to start briefly the same way I did last week and ask you this question. If someone asked you right now on the spot, what are your coaching philosophies? How would you answer?
00:01:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’m not asking about your niche. I’m not asking about your modality. I’m not asking about your knowledge or your expertise. I’m asking about your coaching philosophies, the actual things that you believe about human beings and human behavior, the things you believe about the nature of change, the things that you believe about what needs to happen inside of
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a one on one or group container so that it is meaningful and transformational and effective. Now, if you paused on this question, just want you to know you’re in very good company. Most practitioners have never been asked to sit down and articulate their coaching philosophies. Most practitioners haven’t been taught
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coaching philosophies. But what I want you to really take in is that this is something vital to be thinking about and developing. Your coaching philosophies are really core to so much of your client work in your business. They help you shape how you show up in a session. They shape what you say in your sessions, what you ask,
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how you respond to whatever a client brings to you. Your coaching philosophies basically shape every decision you make inside of your one-on-one work and inside of your group work. And they also shape what you say in your marketing and in your sales and even how you show up for your marketing and your sales.
00:03:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
When I train practitioners inside of Sacred Depths, we spend real time on coaching philosophies, not just one or two or three, but really throughout the program. And we do this because in my experience, the best practitioners, the practitioners who are able to go the deepest, who are able to co-create the best results with clients,
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It’s not only about having phenomenal skills. The skills, of course, are uber important. I teach a lot of skills and a lot of techniques, but here’s the thing. When those skills and techniques aren’t backed up with your coaching philosophies, with deep beliefs and understandings about human behavior,
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then the skills don’t mean as much. They’re not as effective. So in our last episode, I walked you through two important coaching philosophies. And in today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through two more. And as we get into the two today, I just want to say upfront
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they might be a little different or contrary to some of the things you’ve heard elsewhere in the industry. So keep an open mind with me and let’s see where they land for you. So the first philosophy for today is this one. It is okay to be wrong. And actually, it is sometimes beneficial to be wrong inside of your sessions, inside of your groups.
00:05:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
So, okay, let me ask you this and just answer for yourself honestly. When you’re in session, one-on-one or a group, are you wanting to nail it, right? Like when you offer a reflection or a suggestion or ask a question, is there a part of you that is just hoping that you got it 100% right? If yes,
00:05:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
Guess what? You’re human. It is a very human thing to want and to hope for. I’ve definitely been there and I’ve definitely been there even more so when it’s in front of a group, right? Because then you’re getting it right in front of a whole group of people. But that being said, I want to lovingly challenge the belief that is sitting underneath it, the belief that being right
00:06:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
is what makes you a good practitioner, and that being right is what helps your clients grow and succeed. Now, that might be true if you were a pure consultant, right? If someone hires you just to consult, yeah, you want to be right. But if you are coaching,
00:06:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you are doing anything that involves transformation, I want you to take a second look at this. What I’ve found over doing this work for more than two decades is that you don’t always have to be right and that in fact, sometimes the wrong reflection or the quote unquote wrong question is exactly what leads a client
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to their own right answer or to have more excitement, more motivation towards what they’re working on. I believe this with every fiber of my being that you don’t always have to be right. And let’s be honest, we can’t always be right. We’re not God. We’re not perfect, right? I believe this so much that
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I actually start all of my group programs by just naming this out right. I tell my students from day one, what I’m going to be sharing with you in this program is not the truth. It is my truth. And I’m not handing it to you so that you blindly adopt it as yours. I’m putting it into the space so that you can take it into consideration and then find your own truth.
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I also tell my students at the beginning of programs, challenge me on things. I say it outright. I’m going to get it wrong sometimes. We’re all human, right? Let’s learn together here. And by the way, I feel the same exact way about this podcast too. For you, my dear podcast listener, I want you to know
00:08:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
Everything I share on the podcast, it’s not so that you adopt it as your truth. I share it so that it will stir things up inside of you and help you find what your truth is. And I’ll tell you, some of my favorite moments inside of my one-on-one sessions with clients, my group sessions,
00:09:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
are the ones where I get it wrong, where maybe I offer something and then my client says, nope, not that, but what you’re saying made me realize X, Y, Z, right? And then they land on something that is so much more true for them, that is so much more theirs, more so than anything I ever could have handed them. I never see those moments
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as a failure ever. I see them as the work is working in exactly the ways that it should. And I’ll share with you, you know, this idea of the practitioner is not always right. It doesn’t just help you be more effective. It helps you be more ethical and trauma informed.
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Because think about it. Think about a client container where maybe there’s an unspoken belief that the practitioner is always right, that the practitioner is all-knowing, right? They’re the ones that know all the things. What kind of container is that? Does the client have empowerment inside of a container like that? Probably not.
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In any container where there’s an unspoken belief that the practitioner is always right, there’s going to be inequality. There’s going to be a hierarchy. It’s not going to work well. The other thing about being ethical and trauma informed with all of this is that there is a skill to
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offering suggestions, offering, I call it inside of sacred depths, reflecting hard truths. There is a skill to it so that you do it in a way where you’re sharing, but your client always, always, always retains their own agency. They always know
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that there is room in the container for them to feel safe enough to not take in what you say and to find what’s actually true for them. And that’s a skill to be able to make reflections in that way. It’s a skill that can be learned. It has to be practiced just like anything else. But before you even get to the skill,
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There’s the inner work on this, right? Your inner work of really embodying the understanding that you don’t need to always be right in order to be a legitimate practitioner. It’s important to do the inner work around that one.
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number one, because if you are operating with this belief that you always have to be right, how is that going to impact your sessions? Are you going to ask the bold questions or hold back because you’re worried about getting it wrong? And if you feel like you always need to be right, how is it going to impact your marketing?
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Are you going to be willing to put yourself out there to share what you believe? Or are you going to hold back because it could be wrong and then you’re going to get criticized for it? So you want to do the inner work around this. And I’ll say one more thing about this philosophy. This might be my favorite thing of all of it inside.
00:13:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
When you really do the inner work and have the skill and show up inside of your client containers willing, like truly, deeply willing to be wrong and being okay with it, guess what happens? Your client then watches you
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be wrong and be completely okay with it, your client sees that you can get it wrong and still have self love and self worth and know how valuable you are. And then they are able to start doing that for themselves. This helps give them permission
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to get it wrong sometimes, to guess, to not have it all figured out, to experiment and see, to get it wrong and keep moving forward anyway with self-love. It is such a gift that you can
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your clients, but you can only give it to them once you’ve done the inner work and you’ve given it to yourself first. All right, so that brings us to our second coaching philosophy for today that we’re going to look at. And this one I want to introduce carefully because I think it’s something that can get misunderstood a lot.
00:15:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
So there’s a lot of messaging out there, very well-intentioned messaging that says our job as practitioners is to keep our clients comfortable, to keep our clients so that they never get triggered. We actually live in a culture right now that has like trigger warnings on everything.
00:15:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
And look, I completely understand where this comes from. Nobody wants to cause harm. I know that if you are attracted to this podcast, to what I teach and share, I know that you don’t wanna cause harm, and I certainly don’t either. But that being said,
00:15:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ll tell you what I’ve seen again and again and again over all these years of working with human beings. It’s not inherently a bad thing for your client to sometimes feel uncomfortable in your sessions or even slightly triggered. And in fact, some of the most important growth happens
00:16:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
when your client inside of a safe container with you can sit with discomfort and sit with trigger. Now I want to be really precise here because this distinction is important. It really matters. There’s a real difference between discomfort and pain.
00:16:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
We never, ever, ever want to lead a client into pain. We never want to work in ways that aren’t trauma-informed. That’s a non-negotiable. And I spend a lot of time training practitioners on how to be trauma-informed because it does. It takes a lot of knowledge and skill and practice. But that being said,
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We also don’t want to play it safe with comfort inside of our client containers. We also don’t want to avoid leading clients into discomfort or sometimes even trigger. That’s not going to lead to true transformation if we play it safe. Growth requires stretch. Sometimes a little bit of stretch, in other moments a lot of stretch, but growth requires stretch.
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And stretch, almost by definition, involves some kind of discomfort, maybe even a little trigger. Again, not pain, but discomfort. Let me share a story that I think will help illustrate this. So one of my students who is fairly new to Sacred Death, she is a phenomenal relationship coach. And
00:18:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
She had a client who she’d been working with, and they were working on this client’s intimacy issues inside of her relationship. And this client wasn’t making real progress with the intimacy issues. And my student wasn’t quite sure what was going on. She was trying to figure out why.
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So one of the first things she did was she went back and watched a recording of one of their sessions together. That’s something I highly recommend. You want to improve your coaching, go back and listen to your coaching, right? But anyway, using everything that she was learning inside of Sacred Depths as she was watching the recording of one of their sessions,
00:19:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
She saw something that she hadn’t been aware of before. She was watching the session and she noticed that she was doing most of the talking. She was sharing a lot. She was giving her opinions. She was teaching. And her client was barely speaking at all inside of the sessions. The client whose biggest block to intimacy, by the way, was a fear of being vulnerable.
00:19:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
So it was really meta. What my student realized watching that recording was that without meaning to, she was keeping her own client comfortable. Her own client didn’t like to be vulnerable. And so my client as the coach was taking up all of the space inside of the session so that her client didn’t have to be vulnerable.
00:20:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
And in doing that, she was unintentionally protecting her client from the exact thing that they needed to be working on.
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The intimacy was for her to learn how to be vulnerable, how to be seen, to tolerate it.
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So as soon as my client saw this, she made a change.
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In her very next session with this client, she spoke a lot less.
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She turned the spotlight onto the client, and she made space and room for her client to be vulnerable, for her client to speak more.
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And it was uncomfortable for the both of them at first.
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At first, her client, who had a fear of vulnerability,
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got even more shy.
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She got even a little agitated.
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And my client, the coach in this situation, at first she really wanted to come to the client’s rescue to make her feel more comfortable.
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But she knew better and so she held back.
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She let
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Her clients sit in the discomfort, even a little bit in the trigger of having to take up space, of having to be seen, having to be vulnerable.
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And slowly, her client began to let herself be more vulnerable, which is, of course, exactly the muscle
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that she needed to build so that she could have what she wanted in her romantic relationship.
00:22:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
Right?
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So that’s what this coaching philosophy is all about.
00:22:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m not talking about manufacturing discomfort or trigger for its own sake.
00:22:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
Not at all.
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What I’m talking about is having the skill to recognize when you are keeping your client too safe.
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when you are avoiding leading them into the discomfort that they actually need in order to stretch and grow.
00:22:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, as I’m sharing all of this, if you are recognizing like, oh my gosh, I’ve been playing it safe.
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I have been keeping my clients comfortable.
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First of all, no self-judgment, no self-criticism.
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This too is another human thing, but we want to work on it.
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If you have been avoiding discomfort inside of your coaching sessions, it just means that it’s time for some deep inner work.
00:23:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
It means that it’s time to learn how to sit,
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with your own discomfort.
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Because if you are someone who becomes uneasy with tension in a session, with a client who is upset or triggered or uncomfortable with a session that doesn’t feel smooth and pleasant, if you want things to always just feel good and nice,
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Understandably, you’re going to avoid leading your clients into discomfort.
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But every time that you do that, you might be doing exactly what my student was doing without realizing it, protecting your client from their own growth.
00:24:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
So this is exactly why when I train practitioners,
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We go deep into learning how to become comfortable with your own discomfort.
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We work on this on the belief level.
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We work on this on the somatic level.
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We work on this on the nervous system level.
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It’s really crucial.
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Okay, so.
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There’s something that I want to point out.
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Between last week’s episode and this week’s episode, we’ve looked at four coaching philosophies.
00:24:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I want you to notice, well, let me list out what those four coaching philosophies have been first.
00:24:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
So last week we looked at there’s never a magic pill that gets client results.
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We need to build the skill and the steadiness to hold our clients through slow change sometimes.
00:25:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
Sometimes the slow change is the real change.
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Another coaching philosophy we looked at last week was that our clients are never broken, no matter how tough their situation is or what they’ve been through.
00:25:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
And we as practitioners need to build the muscle to never relate to clients as needing to be fixed.
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And then of course, in today’s session, we looked at we don’t always have to be right.
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And in fact, we shouldn’t always be right.
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And we also looked at sometimes the best thing we can do is to lead our client into discomfort, even some trigger.
00:25:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, I want you to notice that all four of these philosophies have something in common.
00:25:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
What’s in common is that they require your
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inner work first.
00:26:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
They require you to shift some messaging and beliefs that have been handed down to you from culture or from the coaching or transformational industry that don’t really work, right?
00:26:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
So what I’m trying to say is that the coaching philosophy work
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It’s not just about articulating it it’s about you working on your own beliefs and your own fears so that you can show up with these different coaching philosophies and really embody them.
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When you start to do the coaching philosophy work, that’s when
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you start to shift into who you are becoming as a coach and a practitioner.
00:27:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll say it again, I said it before, I’ll say it again.
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I really believe these coaching philosophies, along with what I teach inside of Sacred Depths, your coaching energetics, this is the heart of everything.
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This is the heart of your one-on-one work.
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This is the heart of your group work.
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This is the heart of your business.
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So if any of this has been resonating with you, then I’d love for you to explore all of this further.
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I am going to drop information about Sacred Depths into the show notes.
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Check it out.
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And here’s what I want to leave you with.
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would love for you to take some time over the next days to actually ask yourself, what are your coaching philosophies?
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What are the beliefs about how human beings work and how change work and how containers look like?
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What are the beliefs that are actually true for you?
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underneath everything.
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I hope you have fun with it and I would genuinely love to hear what you land on.
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Please feel free to write in and let me know.
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Share it.
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As always, thank you, thank you for being here.
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I don’t take it for granted.
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I hope that this episode was really valuable and helpful for you.
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00:28:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
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