|
|
|
|
||||
 |
Benefits | Origins | SuperVision | About Us | ||
| |||||||||||||
Similarly, avoid making friends with clients. Be friendly, but leave a potential deep friendship until after you have finished coaching. Avoid decreasing your objectivity and increasing the risk of transferences. Avoid building conflict, stress and codependence. Make the most of gratitude while it is still warm. People often forget after a day or two. Verbal Aikido . Professional Coach Training . Emotion Coaching Coaching Family MembersIf you want to alienate family members, push your coaching at them! Not only are you unlikely to enjoy success, the whole family may react against you, unless they perceive you as having very high authority and dripping with pearls of wisdom. Is this likely? Really? I doubt it too. And would that be a role you want? The higher your pedestal - the further you can fall. If you try to coach family members because they really need it - what are the likely consequences? It's probably much, much better to refer your family members to your coaching colleagues (perhaps with a reciprocal arrangement that you coach your colleagues' family). Coaching family members in specific behavioral tasks such as cooking or car repair is generally safe and usually very welcome, if you are acknowledged as an expert or at least as competent. But coaching family members to change their emotional baggage ... prefer to refer, prefer to refer. Mentoring and coaching children (with a parent present!) can be wonderful. We primarily coach children within interactive, isomorphic metaphors. But when you open up strong emotions - you open up enmeshments, entanglements and unconscious bonds - you may get lost. As a rule, I am careful about not coaching my own family members and about not coaching children unless a parent is in the room and I have coached the parents first. Don't learn this the hard way. Who coaches the people who coach the people? Excuses, excuses, excusesWhether you specialize in systemic coaching, life coaching, therapeutic coaching or organizational coaching ... even spiritual coaching ... you invest a huge amount of your time, your energy and your money to learn and practice these skills, to develop yourself as a coach, and to build your practice. After a few thousand hours of individual, couple and family coaching, you will likely become very good at coaching - and on hearing excuses. Some clients won't do homework and some clients will not be punctual. Some clients won't show for appointments, some may perpetually forget to pay you and one or two may try to cheat you. This will likely continue until you change your attitude.
No-ShowsHow many times have you refused or postponed motivated clients - and then a client does not show for an appointment? Or, maybe 15 minutes before, or 15 minutes after, the appointed time, the client calls and say, "I'm sorry I can't come, because ... " The most common excuses I hear are:
Sometimes the stories may even be true. Yet of those clients who did it to me once, over half did it twice. Of those whom you let do it twice, 90% will do it three times - or until you say STOP! You can print on an your appointment cards, "Change appointments at least 24 hours in advance or you will be charged for your appointment." And follow through. You might say "I cannot charge them for something they did not get". Or, after one or two events, charge them in advance (I have never had a no-show from a client who paid in advance!). With online coaching, many people pay after their session, and that's OK - but a missed payment means no more coaching until the debt is paid. Some simply won't pay ... don't encourage them. Otherwise, during the next session, irritation and suspicion may interfere with your effectiveness. And they will likely do it again. And again. If you can do this in a humorous way, so much the better. Laughter helps many people accept reality as it is. Professional ReferralsSome people have problems that you cannot coach. They may be bankrupt, immature, psychotic, brain damaged or have some horrible disease. They may need lawyers, accountants, priests, psychiatrists or medical doctors. Please refer such people to appropriate professionals.
You can also identify some friendly professionals in medicine, banking and law and make reciprocal arrangements so that they refer people who want or need systemic coaching to you. You�ve taken the first step.� �Then there�s
another first step. Plagiarism is theft. Copyright � Martyn Carruthers 2000-2011 All rights reserved. |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
