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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Let’s get started.
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Welcome back to the podcast.
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So there’s a moment that happens every now and again in a client session.
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And if you’ve been coaching for a while, you probably know exactly the one that I mean.
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Here is what it looks like.
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Your client is talking about something and they finish speaking, and then there’s a pause.
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And suddenly,
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you don’t know what to say next.
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Your mind kind of goes blank, or you just feel like you’ve come to the end of the road and you have no idea what’s next or what to say next to the client.
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Or maybe your brain is going in five different directions, telling you lots of diverging or conflicting things that you should say or ask next.
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And
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You don’t know what to say next because nothing obvious or nothing that you feel confident about is arising.
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And often, right on the heels of that pause, you might notice that you start to tighten up internally.
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And you might even start to feel a little bit of anxiousness or even panic.
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And
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you start hearing some messages inside of your head.
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And they might sound as follows.
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Why don’t I know what to say to my client?
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Or maybe you say to yourself, I need to say something or do something immediately.
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Or, oh my goodness, I’m not doing a good job right now because I don’t know what to say next.
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So if any of this sounds familiar to you or if you are worried that you may find yourself in a situation like this where you don’t know what to say next and you start panicking, we are going to talk about that today.
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That is the topic of our episode because it is one of the most misunderstood moments in one-on-one client work and also in group work too.
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it can come up.
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And I actually think that it’s one of the most important moments.
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And what I mean by that is that sometimes the moments in our client sessions when we don’t know what to say next,
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Those moments can actually end up leading to the biggest insights and inspiration inside of any given session.
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And you’ll understand why I say this as we move through this episode.
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So let’s dive in.
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And let’s start with why it can feel so uncomfortable when as coaches and practitioners, we don’t know what to say next.
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Most of us were trained, either explicitly or implicitly, to equate being a good coach or a good practitioner with having a response, a question, an insight, a direction, something helpful to say.
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And by the way, we equate being a good coach or practitioner not just with having any response,
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But oftentimes we equate it with having a really smart response.
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So when that smart response doesn’t immediately come, when we feel like, oh, I don’t have a home run here, the nervous system might interpret that as problem.
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or even as a threat to survival.
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And it sounds so silly to talk about it, but it can feel so real for some practitioners when this is happening to them.
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It’s like, you’re not sure what to say next in a session, and then all of a sudden, the not knowing what to say next,
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You make it mean everything.
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You make it mean that you suck as a practitioner, that you’re not good at what you do, or that your client is going to be upset with you or disappointed in the work you do together, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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We can make it mean way too much.
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And there’s also another layer that I want to name here.
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Sometimes we don’t know what to say because we know that our client is stuck, and we just don’t know what else to say in the moment.
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Maybe they’ve been circling the same issue round and round, and they understand it intellectually.
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They’ve talked about it before, but nothing has been shifting for them.
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And as a practitioner,
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we may be left feeling like, my gosh, I don’t have anything else to say or ask here.
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I feel stuck along with my client.
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And this scenario can create a particular kind of pressure inside of us, a subtle or not so subtle sense that if we don’t do something different or better,
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or smarter right away, then we’re going to fail and our client is going to fail.
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OK, so I want to pause here and say this.
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If you’ve felt any of this before, any of what I’m describing, the fear or anxiety or self-judgment when you go blank inside of a client session,
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please, know that first of all, you’re not alone.
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You are not the only coach or practitioner in the history of coaching who has not known what to say next or ask next or reflect next, et cetera.
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And also, please know that in those moments, you haven’t done anything wrong and that there are no deficits.
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even if you’re not yet sure what to say next.
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Nothing has gone wrong, no deficits.
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And in fact, what I want you to consider is what if that moment that you don’t know what to say next, what if it isn’t a problem at all in any way?
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What if in that moment
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is actually an opportunity.
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So here’s the reframe that I want to offer on this.
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Not knowing what to say, in most cases, it’s not a failure of skill.
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And again, it’s not that something is going wrong with you or with the coaching or with your client.
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Instead,
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Very often, not knowing what to say is a sign that you’ve arrived at the edge of something.
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An edge where some of the old strategies maybe don’t quite apply, or where the same approaches or perspectives don’t exactly apply.
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In other words, what if not knowing
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what to say or do right away in a client session is a moment where a new level of depth or understanding is ready to occur.
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And what if in that moment, your work as the coach, as the practitioner,
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isn’t to quick grasp for what brilliant reflection to make or what penetrating question to ask or what next technique to use.
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But instead, maybe the first piece of work in those moments is for you to get more present.
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Present to your client, present to their situation, and present to yourself.
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And presence, it doesn’t always come with words right away.
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In fact, presence pretty much always starts without words.
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Because presence is less about the head, where words are formed, and more about the body, where we can feel emotion, energy,
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and intuition.
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So let’s take a step back for a moment so I can break all of this down a little bit more.
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When we feel that discomfort as practitioners of needing to say something at any given moment inside of a session, it’s very human to want to move quickly.
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to ask a default question, to offer an insight, to gently redirect, to do something that restores a sense of momentum.
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And again, that’s not wrong necessarily.
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And it’s very understandable to want to move quickly.
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But one of the things I see
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with practitioners is that the urge to act quickly is often tied to being attached to a particular outcome.
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So what I mean by that is if you as the coach want the session to flow in a very particular way, that’s being attached to an outcome.
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Or if you as the practitioner want the client
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to have a big breakthrough, that’s being attached to a particular outcome.
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Or if you, as the practitioner, want progress to be immediate and visible for your client, that’s being attached to a particular outcome.
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And that attachment to outcome, even if it’s well-intentioned– and I know it is almost always very well-intentioned–
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But that attachment to outcome, it can lead to pushing, or to rushing, or to intervening before something deeper has had a chance to emerge for your client.
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Sometimes the most skillful thing we can do is notice our own urgency
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and not let that urgency drive the session.
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I want to say that again because it is so important.
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Sometimes the most skillful thing we can do is to notice our own urgency, our own reactions, and not let them drive the session.
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Because when our own urgency or attachment to outcome leads a session, guess what?
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Then the session becomes about us and not about our clients.
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It becomes about our own fears, our own insecurities, our own need to prove, our own agenda.
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The other thing is that when we get caught in our own fears and needs inside of a client session,
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That’s when our brilliance, our wisdom, our intuition, and our best instincts get blurred.
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Now, inside of the Sacred Depths Transformational Practitioner Training, we talk a lot about what I call mastering your energetics as a practitioner.
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And one part of that is learning how to stay regulated, unattached, and present, even when you don’t know what comes next in a session.
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Because your internal state is always shaping the session.
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Energy follows energy.
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So when you can stay grounded instead of urgent,
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When you can get curious instead of feeling pressured to say the next thing, then the work with your client is going to unfold very, very differently.
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So again, instead of rushing to fill the space right away and having that rush be fueled by your own needs or fears as a practitioner,
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In those moments where you’re not sure what to say next, it is an opportunity, like we said before, to get more present.
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And this is where curiosity becomes so important.
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Because presence begins with curiosity.
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Curiosity slows us down.
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It brings us back into relationship with the present moment.
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It also brings us back into relationship with our clients and our deeper wisdom.
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Curiosity helps us stay with what is rather than worry about what we think should be happening.
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So here are some questions
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based on curiosity versus pressure or fear, that we can ask ourselves in those moments where we’re not sure what to say next, right?
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So we want to slow down.
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We want to get curious and bring presence.
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And we can ask ourselves things like, what feels important about what my client just said or where they’re at?
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Or we can ask ourselves with curiosity, what feels alive here, even if it’s subtle?
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Or we can ask ourselves with curiosity, what hasn’t been said yet?
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Or we can look even deeper inside ourselves, what’s happening in me right now?
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What am I wanting for this client?
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What does my heart want to tell me about my client and what they might need in this moment?
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So curiosity, it doesn’t demand answers to any of these questions or others, but it creates space.
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And
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we actually want to create space in sessions, whether we know what to say next or not.
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Now, a big piece of being able to get curious is releasing the belief that you need to know what comes next and that you need to have all of the answers as the coach or practitioners.
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Because
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If you believe that you need to have all of the answers or that you need to know all of the things, then guess what?
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There’s no space for curiosity.
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If you believe that you need to have all of the answers or need to know all of the things, there’s only space for you feeling like you need to prove yourself.
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So what I want to really toss to you, my dear listener,
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is that not needing to have all of the answers in a client session is by no means a lack of competence.
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And actually, when you don’t need to have all of the answers, when you don’t believe that you need to have all of the answers, it’s actually a sign of confidence.
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I want to say
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that again, because it’s so important.
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It’s one of the many energetics principles that we go deep into inside of Sacred Depths, because this is so key to doing effective, transformative, and also to doing ethical coaching work.
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Not needing to have all of the answers is not a lack of competence.
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It’s actually a sign of confidence.
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Confidence that you can stay present, like we spoke about before.
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Confidence that the process doesn’t depend solely on you, but instead that you’re in beautiful collaboration with your client.
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Confidence that something meaningful can emerge without you needing to force it inside of the session.
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I remember when I first started working with clients almost 25 years ago, I really believed down to my toes that I needed to be a smarty pants.
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I really believed when I first started that the only way that I could be legitimate as a practitioner, that the only way
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to show my clients and myself that I was a good coach, and to show my clients that they had made the right decision by hiring me, was for me to know exactly the right, brilliant thing to say in all moments, and for me to have all the answers, and to always know exactly where I was going to lead my client next.
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This
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was not helpful for my client work at all, for all of the reasons we’ve been talking about.
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And it was also uber stressful for me, so much pressure.
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And it took big inner work over the years for me to really, really understand and embody that as someone’s coach or as a group leader,
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I don’t need to have all of the answers.
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And to go even further with that, it took me a while to really, really understand and embody that my client has way more answers for themselves than I have for them.
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And that there are some answers
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that neither me nor my client knows yet.
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And that’s okay.
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It’s okay for some pieces to be in the mystery and that we can figure them out together, me and my client together.
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The not needing to always know everything
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the not needing to impress by being a smarty pants all the time, the ability to get into a place of curiosity with my client instead of needing to be in certainty all the time inside of my sessions.
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Not only has it made me such a better coach, it just feels so much better.
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It’s less stressful, it’s less pressure.
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It’s less holding myself to impossible expectations, and it helps activate so much more freedom and flow and creativity, which is not only what my nervous system needs, but really, truly what my client sessions need.
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And I’ll also add this.
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Some of the deepest work inside of a client session happens
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when we stop trying to lead our clients somewhere, and instead when we start walking with them where they already are.
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Okay, so we’ve already covered a lot in a short period of time in this episode.
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We’ve looked at the fact that it’s very normal to have a moment in a client session where you don’t know what to do or say next.
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And we’ve looked at how that moment can make some coaches or practitioners feel a lot of pressure, how it can bring up all of our stuff around not being good enough, et cetera.
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And we’ve also looked at how we really want to catch ourselves in all of that and in that pressure, because the pressure, the self-judgment, it’s going to push us to rush and to try to say something that isn’t quite what the moment needs or what our client needs.
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And then our fear and our worry and our pressure is going to be driving the session versus our wisdom and our clients’ wisdom driving the session.
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We also looked at the importance of meeting the moment with presence and curiosity.
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Those are really the first steps that you want to take that will help you and your clients discover
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where a session needs to go next.
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Now, once you’ve met the moment with presence and with curiosity, there are a few different directions that the session might naturally want to go in next, and I want to lay them out for you.
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First of all,
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There’s actually a really big chance that once you meet the moment where you don’t know what to say next with presence and curiosity, that once you get out of your own way about not being good enough, and when you show up to see what’s actually there in that moment, in the session, and for your client,
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there’s a really big chance that the next inspired step is going to come to you.
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The next step might be a breakthrough question.
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Or it might be an important and insightful reflection.
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Or the next step might be the exact acknowledgment that your client needs in that moment, et cetera, et cetera.
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So again, a lot of times when we pause, when we just get really good with not knowing and meet the moment with presence and curiosity, the next really great idea comes.
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But that being said, sometimes the next question, reflection, idea, technique, et cetera,
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It’s not meant to come from you.
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It’s actually meant to come from your client.
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And allowing for a few extra moments of silence instead of jumping to say the next thing might be exactly what’s needed for your client to surface what they want to say next, for your client to share their next thought or insight,
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or connection that they’re making, or inspired idea.
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I always tell my Sacred Depth students, don’t be afraid of a little bit of silence in a session.
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Get really comfortable with silence.
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Because sometimes that space of silence is exactly what’s needed.
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That pause is exactly what’s needed.
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for your client to come to their next place.
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And your job as a coach, as a practitioner in those moments is to hold strong, loving space in the silence, in the pause for your clients to have their process.
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Now, once you’ve brought presence and curiosity, if
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you’re not sure what to say next still, or it doesn’t come to your client to say something next, like we just talked about, then there’s another thing you can do, a really very powerful next thing you can do.
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And that is to directly invite your client’s own agency and awareness to move forward.
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And sometimes
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That can be as simple as just asking your client one of these questions.
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For example, to ask your client, what are you curious about here, about what you’ve just said?
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Or you can say this to a client.
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Take a moment and connect in with your heart.
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What feels important for you right now?
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Or here are some other ideas for bringing it back to your client’s wisdom.
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You can ask a client, what are you feeling in your body right now?
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Or what’s standing out to you about what you just shared?
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Or you could even ask your client something like this.
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If you were the coach in this session, what would you say or ask next?
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So none of these are throwaway questions, I promise you.
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They are invitations, and often they allow your client to access something that just wasn’t available when you were trying to steer the conversation yourself or figure it out for your client what’s next on your own.
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And then finally, I’ll share one other tip for those moments where you’re not sure what to say next.
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Sometimes inside of a client session, I have an idea of what I want to say next or ask next, but I’m not 100% sure it’s a winner.
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Or I might also have two different ideas at once, and I’m not sure which one to pick.
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So in either of those situations, I just ask my client, right?
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So it’s okay to say, here’s what I think I want to ask you next and then share the question.
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But does that sound right to you?
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Or is there something else that sparks, right?
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Or I’ll say, okay, I have two different ideas for how we can move forward in this session.
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We can move forward in this way.
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And I’ll briefly share, you know, pathway one.
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Or we could move forward in this way.
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And I’ll briefly share a pathway too.
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And I’ll say, which one of those feels right for you?
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Or does a third passageway show up for you as I share these, right?
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So we can always, always ask our clients, collaborate with our clients.
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We don’t need to have certainty.
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It is a partnership and a collaboration.
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And I hope that you can really see
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that so much of this, again, it’s not about you needing to know.
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It’s really about co-creating the session with your client.
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Those are the most powerful sessions when we can be partners and collaborators in the progress and in the forward movement.
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So
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I want to say this clearly as we start wrapping up here.
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These moments that we’ve been talking about on our episode today, the pauses, the not knowing, these moments are often one of the types of moments that can build the deepest trust and lead to so, so much.
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Our clients may not remember exactly what we said in those moments, but they remember how it felt to be with someone who didn’t rush them, who didn’t panic to the next thing, who didn’t try to take control and fix things.
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They remember how it felt to be with someone who stayed present with them and curious with them and patient with them.
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These moments build trust and can lead to such important places, not because you always had the perfect response, but because you knew how to be with your client when things were tender,
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or unclear.
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And take a moment and think about this for yourself, right, about the value of having coaches, practitioners, or even family members or friends who can be with you when things are messy and not quite clear.
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who can stay regulated, even when it’s not obvious what the next thing is or where things should be going or what the solution is, right?
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But even in that mystery, this other person believes in you and believes in your goals and believes that together you’ll get to the next place in the right timing.
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Sometimes when another human being can sit with us in the mess, in the confusion, in the not knowing, that’s the greatest gift of all.
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So I hope that
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You got exactly what you needed from this podcast episode today.
00:33:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
And if you walk away with just one thing, hopefully you’re walking away with a lot, but if you walk away with just one thing from this episode, my hope is that you walk away with the knowing that you can learn to trust yourself and your clients in the moments when things aren’t clear.
00:33:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
That it doesn’t prove you’re a better coach or a more worthy human being to just jump to the next thing to say.
00:34:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
The more that you can get comfortable with the not knowing, the more you’re also going to be poised to go deeper in your work.
00:34:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
Because depth requires us to be willing to not know.
00:34:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
to be willing to hold our client’s hand and step into the dark together.
00:34:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
Trusting that in the partnership, the next step is going to reveal itself.
00:34:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if you loved today’s episode, then there’s a really big chance that you would also really love the Sacred Depths Transformational Practitioner Training.
00:34:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
In Sacred Depths, we get to all the nooks and crannies, techniques and skills of how to be an exceptional coach or transformational practitioner.
00:34:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
We learn how to go deep with our clients.
00:35:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
We learn how to do somatic work with fear, resistance, unhelpful beliefs, and so much more.
00:35:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
The next cohort of Sacred Depths doesn’t begin until the beginning of April, but there are some folks who have been waiting to step in and who are right now quietly stepping in at the lowest rates that I’m going to be offering on the next cohort.
00:35:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if you are curious about Sacred Depths, I’m going to drop a link in the show notes and you can take a look.
00:35:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
And
00:35:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you loved today’s episode, would you do me a favor?
00:35:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
Actually, a few favors.
00:35:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
Number one, would you give us a five-star review if you’re listening on a podcast platform?
00:35:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
Number 2,
00:35:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
Would you tell a friend about this podcast and about this episode?
00:35:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Share it.
00:35:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
Your sharing about the podcast is my best way to get the word out and to get all of this information and inspiration to people who need it.
00:36:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
And also, one more favor.
00:36:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you really love today’s episode, would you drop me an e-mail or a DM?
00:36:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
and let me know that you loved it, and let me know what you loved about it, or what you learned from this episode, or what questions, follow-up questions you have for me, it would really, really mean the world to me to hear from you, to know that this podcast that I put so much love and dedication into is making an impact.
00:36:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
All right, that is it for today, and I will see you next time.
