Coaching Case Study: Focus On Desired Outcome

Coaching Case Study By Jessica Kosine
(Life Coach, UNITED STATES)

1. Who are the main players in this case study?

There are two main players in this case study, Angela and myself, life coach Jessica. As a life purpose and self-love coach, Angela is my ideal client, and I was incredibly excited to work with her. Angela is extremely gifted in music, and she has been a performing musician for most of her life. A few years ago, Angela decided her love for yoga was passionate enough to go to India to get certified as a yoga teacher. She pursued her passion for both music and yoga, but then put some of her goals on hold after getting married and having another child. Therefore, Angela has been a stay at home mom for the past year to tend to the children. Angela is now in a place where she wants to work again, but she doesn’t just want a job. She wants to create a career and an income from her music and yoga certification, along with setting goals, making better decisions and becoming more disciplined.

2. What is the core problem or challenge you applied your coaching skills to?

Angela has a lot of limiting beliefs that have held her back for a long time and a lot of different directions she wants to go in. She has a history of past trauma, anxiety, anger and depression. She defined herself as “scatterbrained, under-rested, really nervous to talk about myself” and “I don’t believe in myself most of the time.”I was very clear about what coaching was in our original coaching agreement, so she knew what to use our space for. Angela also talks very fast and jumps around from subject to subject, so I had to pay close attention and keep her focused on her desired outcomes for each session while creating the new awareness she was seeking and challenging any inconsistencies.

3. What specific coaching skills or approach did you use in this case?

Active Listening–Angela came to the coaching space wanting to dig deeper into self-awareness and understanding the reasons she was not moving forward in life, so I had to rely on active listening to pick up on those things that were holding her back and then continue to dig deeper until she could discover root causes and limiting beliefs.

Powerful Questioning – Angela was really great at talking about what was going on, so with powerful questioning, Angela was able to answer things she had never thought of which in turn helped her to break free from negative thought patterns.

Creating Awareness – A combination of the active listening and powerful questioning led to a new awareness for Angela about herself, realizing that she didn’t have to accept being unhappy and unfulfilled, she was able to create empowering alternate beliefs which have boosted her happiness and purpose in life.

Designing Actions – Angela wanted to have tools and homework to do between coaching sessions, along with other action steps to get her music career going again. By giving Angela the coaching space, she was able to speak out her action plans to move forward and look at anything that would prevent her from taking action.

Accountability – Angela committed to action in each coaching session and in order to keep her accountable, she thought it would be best to use me as an accountability partner. This was the commitment she needed in order to complete her daily action plan.

4. Explain your process in detail.

The first step with Angela, after our exploratory session, was to understand what her values were, along with what she wanted to accomplish through our coaching together so I knew who I was working with. She filled out an intake form with coaching and life goals and also a values assessment to discover her values. Angela valued freedom the most, and I could definitely see this in our coaching conversations and the goals she has for herself. Angela is a free spirit and has a lot of awareness about herself, through her yoga and meditation practice and seeking therapy to work through some deeper issues. Angela was in a good place to be a life coaching client.

In her coaching sessions, she had goals to create a morning routine for “me time,” shifting out of negativity, taking action towards her music, having more patience for herself and tools to overcome thoughts of worry. We went pretty deep into our coaching conversations and were able to achieve all of her desired outcomes, along with shifting her energy from being heavy (at the beginning) to be much lighter and excited about life (by the end of the session). It really came down to challenging some of Angela’s thoughts and guiding her to shift out of those beliefs. This coaching experience was definitely heavy on the active listening and powerful questioning because Angela wanted to create some deep awareness and she wasn’t afraid to go deep in our coaching conversations. I could tell she felt safe in our space together and that made it easier for her to open up and get honest about the things that were holding her back.

I asked a lot of questions that really made Angela think. She was in a place where she was making herself feel guilty for wanting to pursue her dreams, thinking that she was disappointing her family. So we had to look at those beliefs so she could learn acceptance of herself and of others while focusing on gratitude for where she is at instead of being upset that she wasn’t further along with her music career. Angela also wanted some extra homework and tools for shifting out of negative beliefs by using affirmations and visualizations. So she committed to daily affirmations and visualization and texted me every day for accountability, which she stuck to.

5. What were the results of your process? Was your coaching/program effective? 

The results of my coaching process exceeded my expectations! Each week I talked to Angela, I could hear a shift in her overall demeanour, being lighter with a more optimistic view of life. Angela’s affirmations and visualizations helped her to get two new paid music gigs that are ideal for her current circumstances. She told me that she felt an overall acceptance of the things in her life and could see the universe working in her favour opening new doors. She will also be moving to California with her family, which is a place she’s dreamed of living for a long time. She told me she has been speaking highly of life coaching and telling her friends and family that they also need to hire a life coach. She gave me many thanks and I was incredibly grateful for having the opportunity to work with her and even more grateful she was able to improve so much in our 5 sessions together.

6. If you could approach this problem again, what would you do differently?

I would have some other self-awareness tools and homework to do between sessions for my client. Angela was very committed to improving her circumstances and I believe that she could have benefited from a little extra homework in between sessions to keep her on track for reaching her goals.

7. What are the top 3 things you learned from this experience?

I learned that my coaching process is very effective for my ideal client, that I too, must continue to do the personal development work on myself in order to show up as the best possible coach to my clients, and that even if my client is happy, there is still so much room for improvement. This was such a wonderful experience to attract my ideal client and seeing her improvement and hearing her excitement about all the wonderful things happening in her life made me realize I definitely chose the right niche. I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to go to life coaching school to gain the knowledge and experience using the ICF competencies.