How to work with clients towards creating Understanding
Imagine the following situation:
Grace just found out that she keeps going back to this feeling of helplessness and frustration every time that she can’t control a situation, the last episode was after the kids went to bed and while she was preparing to go to bed herself with her husband the lights went off, no power in the house, they looked outside and the whole block was affected by the power outage, her kids were asleep regardless of the temperature inside the house, but she started feeling this sensation of frustration for not being able to solve the situation and provide her kids with a good night sleep, she started feeling overwhelmed by all the ideas racing her mind and finally she burst out crying and the feeling of I’M HELPLESS filled her, after she noticed that temperature at home wasn’t that bad, and that the kids were sleeping soundly, she realized that she was overreacting but the feelings were so real that she knew there was something else going on there. She wants to find the root of this feeling and solve it, release it, and move on.
The following are questions that can help discover the root of this feeling and to put together an action plan to confront it:
- How often this feeling appears in your life?
- When does it happen?
- Do you always end up crying?
- Can you remember feeling like these 5 years ago? 10? 15? 20?
- What was going on then? (you ask this question when she says she remembers feeling like this at any moment)
- Going back to that situation, was there something you could do to change it? If yes, what is it? If not, how can you relate that past experience to what happens to you now?
- Do you think you can live your life free of this feeling under situations that you can’t control? If yes, what can you do today to achieve this goal?
- What do you need to be reminded about this action you can take when a situation of “no control” comes along?
- And here you start putting together a plan of action with your client to confront this situation, now she understand that it is possible to see it from another perspective, and to chose how to react to it.
- If not, do you think you can go down a notch on the way you react under this type of situations?
- If you could avoid just one thing or one feeling about this what would it be? Then the client will say what they will like to avoid when going through a situation of “no control”, let’s imagine she said: I will avoid the crying part.
- Do you think you can stop yourself from crying when the feeling starts to fill you? How? At the specific moment what will you like to hear to make you stop from crying? Can you say it to yourself? How does it feel?
- And then you co-create the plan of action according to the client needs.
The beautiful part of this practice is that as a coach, when you believe and understand the flow of the process, it will take you where you need to go, the client will guide you; you’re just flowing with the process.
Key resources to maintain yourself Understanding
- Use previous experience- this will let you know that you can do it again.
- Focus on reality- make it a task everyday to see reality behind judgment or blocks.
- Reminders- use as many reminders as you need to allow yourself to have the tools handy when needed, can be visual aid, positive affirmations, empowerment quotes, whatever stimulates positive thinking.
- Kindness and acceptance- allow yourself to calm down, breathe, forgive yourself for not succeeding, if that happens, try again until you master it, that is a way of gaining experience and will serve you for the next time. Accept and love yourself for who you are, allow yourself to be free of your own judgment and limitations.