Session 2: Creating Safety and Connection

Transcription

1 Session 2: Creating Safety and Connection This is Christian Mickelsen. This call is the Rapid Coaching Academy Session Two. Our primary focus for tonight s call is on helping potential clients or anyone that you would coach. I m going to use the word clients and I m going to mean clients or anyone that you would coach because you might coach friends, you might coach loved ones, employees, co-workers, etc. Our main focus is helping clients feel totally safe so that they can open up, how to get rapport and maintain rapport with your clients. We ll be talking about the science of momentum and the importance of momentum in working with clients. Participant: All done. Participant: Yes, all of it. Participant: Yes. Participant: Yes, done. Participant: Some of it. Participant: Some of it. Participant: Most. We will also be talking about the psychology of performance and I ll be teaching you a technique on how to immediately change your mental and emotional state in a heartbeat and how to help your clients do the same thing. It s a way to get courage when you re feeling fearful, it s a way to feel powerful when you might have otherwise been feeling nervous and it s also a way to feel immediately peaceful and centered. So, we ll be talking about that, it s a little piece about mastering your psychology. It s probably the most surface level of everything that you ll be learning on mastering your psychology but it is also super powerful and very useful. We will also be talking about creating well formed outcomes, well formed goals and setting direction for yourself and for clients. That s in a nutshell what we re covering here. I want to just go ahead and just check back in and see how everyone did with the homework. Did anyone on the call get your homework done from last time?

2 Participant: All of it. Participant: All of it. Good. I figured everyone would do either none of it, some of it, most of it or all of it or maybe the dog would eat it. I wanted to make sure that I said that because it is totally okay to do any amount or none of the homework. Whatever is good for you is good for me. Generally, the more action you take, the more that you do the better, but this is your life, and that s an important distinction when you re working with your clients that it is their life. Participant: Sure did. A lot of coaches get really in to this whole idea about holding clients accountable and trying to push them in to taking action and succeeding somehow. I just find that for one, it can often times put you out of rapport with your client, which I ll be talking about later on, but for another thing there is no judgment. Again, we want to have our coaching space with our clients be as judgment free as it possibly can be so everything is good, all is good. That is one of the places I come from when coaching, all is good. All is good from me as a coach, all is good. From you as a client, if you were the client, or from the client, all may not be good. They may be mad at themselves for not completing the homework, or completing an assignment, or taking action or whatever. They may be mad at themselves, they may be blaming themselves, they might be calling themselves lazy, they might be calling themselves whatever, chicken, who knows what. The more you can be comfortable with whatever they end up achieving or accomplishing, the better, the more you can make them feel comfortable with themselves for whatever they do. Just a quick foreshadow or preview about what we ll be talking about here. So I wanted to see here We mentioned that one part of the homework assignment was to notice how you felt during each part of the homework. So did you guys notice how you felt maybe during the first piece of the homework which was writing down and setting some goals? Did you guys notice how you felt as you were doing that? Anyone else?

3 Participant: I felt much more focused being able to write it down instead of just having it roll around in my head really helped me to focus and I did accomplish some things this week so it was empowering. Great. Participant: Cathy and I talked about our dream boards today. It was beautiful, it felt great. Awesome. That was the optional homework so you guys get extra credit for that. I should have everyone go out and buy yourself gold stars but you can only give yourself one when I say to. You get a gold star. Actually, I would probably give everyone a gold star anyway. Great, anyone else do the homework and notice how it felt to do it? Participant: Well I noticed that I put the goal setting off for a couple of days and I would think about it and come back to it and think about it and come back to it. I noticed that I was more concerned about getting it right than just sitting down and starting so once I worked through that I just went ahead and putting something down. I actually wound up going back and changing it some as the week went on but just getting the process started for me seemed to be an obstacle. Yeah, great. Thank you for sharing that. Participant: I wanted to say I had similar problems. I remember the first time I ever tried to do a goal setting exercise, I think I was listening to Tony Robbins and you know how he gets so excited and he s talking about swimming with dolphins and everything I m like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then he stopped talking and was like, All right write down your goals, and my mind went blank and I had nothing to say. I was freaked out. Every time I do these types of exercises I always find myself, I don t know if it is I feel inadequate, or I just don t let my mind go. Participant: I wasn t on the call and I didn t have the homework but I think I did it anyway. I actually was in the process last week of putting together some goals and objectives and have been kind of tuning a plan that I have in terms of a coaching business and developing some different phases to it. But, I think some of the comments that folks have mentioned, those were things that I had to get by too, the limiting thoughts or the folks that say, Oh you can t do that. Really kind of not tuning that out but hearing it and not listening to it and letting that not hold my vision back. That s helped.

4 The other thing it has helped has actually been telling people, Hey this is what I want to do. Boy, if that doesn t hold you accountable with a few of your close friends if you tell them that. Now, they re starting to ask me about it. The genie is out of the bottle now. Yeah. Participant: Some people though want to rain on your parade so I found that I had to not tell some people also what I was thinking about. Participant: Yeah, I agree I was very selective I only told a couple of people who I considered to be enabling, people who had enabled me and strengthened me and encouraged me not anybody who had a need to knock me down or anything like that. Good. I want you to remember later on in this program that at a certain point it will be a really good idea to tell all the naysayers about what you re doing. Whatever your goals are, to tell all the most negative people around you who you think would judge you and rain on your parade, to go ahead and tell them. I m not saying to do that now but later on in our program it will be very appropriate. I hadn t thought to make this an assignment but if I don t remember when we get deeper in to the mastering your psychology part that would be a great, great exercise to do so if I don t remember it somebody please when you see notes about mastering your psychology aside from today s session, we ll probably get deeper in to that, there will probably be sprinkles throughout, but we ll be doing more of it in the second half of the program, so if you can remind me that would be great, because that would be a great exercise for you. Participant: As I mentioned to you I wasn t on the call because I decided that I need to go back in to medical, so I don t have to be desperate when I m looking for people for coaching. I wanted you to know that when I was there interviewing with this huge corporation and they asked me what I was doing, I just pulled out my card and said, I m a life coach. The CEO of the company was very interested in that so that was amazing. Wow. Participant: I gave him my card and I said, This is what I am doing on the side but I m kind of back in medical because I decided I wanted to be able to coach from a loving place not wondering where my rent is coming from.

5 I love that. I think that s a great idea. I know for me in my coaching business starting out, I went from one business that I was very much in debt with, right in to the coaching business with no real secure solid income. It was tough and I don t wish that on anyone, but having gone through it, maybe I needed to in order to get where I am today. Then, if that s the case, was it worth while? Of course, but I definitely don t wish that on anyone, so that sounds like a really smart idea. Participant: I have a question about dream boards, is that just your board or could it be like mine and my husband s dream board or do you just have one that is just yours? That s a good question. It depends, if you guys do one together I think that s a fantastic thing. It s probably great for your relationship, great for your marriage although you may have some things that you want that your husband doesn t want and your husband may have some things that he wants that you don t want, so maybe you have one for yourselves as a couple, and maybe some separate ones that are you that are your wants, and some for him that he wants. Participant: That makes sense. Or one big board and you put the group stuff together in the middle and put your stuff on the right and his stuff on the left. Participant: Thanks. No exact science, whatever feels right for you. Good question. Again, somebody who did all the homework just how you felt through the whole process, somebody please jump in here? Participant: I did the goals even after wrestling with getting started with it and then I ve created vision boards before but this time I did one in PowerPoint and I just wanted to see if that would be as much fun and actually it was. I really enjoyed it. I was able to pull some photographs in and use some clip art and it was a lot of fun doing it that way and I could actually do it where you know how you can make things come in from the side and they fizzle in and fizzle out and do different things like that. That turned out to be a lot of fun so it made the rest of it I think a lot easier as far as picking the three small actions to move me closer to my goals and then actually doing them. I really began to feel

6 more empowered the more I started looking for small things to do rather than thinking I had to go out and do something big to move me towards my goal; realizing that I can just do small things. Yeah, yeah. Good, good. Participant: Even though I did not know this, I did something on a piece of paper writing all the things that I want from the company that I went to interview for. I wrote them all down, I put a little circle in the center and had like spokes coming from it writing exactly what I want in the present tense. Even though this whole thing is not to completion yet but it s getting there, 85% of what I put on that piece of paper, I found it when I went to look at this company. It was all I am, it was all in the present moment and I did that for myself. Good job. The reason why I was asking everyone to start noticing how it felt to work on your goals, how it felt to write down the actions, how to felt to take action is because I m a big believer in emotional awareness. I think a lot of times we re very unaware of how we feel. We re just so caught up in our routines, our patterns, the way that we normally think, the way that we normally behave, that we can be feeling uncomfortable but not really know what is this discomfort that we re feeling. So, the more aware that we can be the better. We ll still be going more in to this later on in the program, but as much as you can I want you to be aware how you re feeling in any given moment. But, since we had this homework I wanted you to just notice it, because as you notice it you can start seeing some other things. You start noticing where it is coming from and eventually I ll be showing you guys ways to handle where this stuff is coming from because a lot of what holds us back from getting results that we want is internal stuff. There s a lot of success programs out there that teach you step-by-step how to get from point A to point B, or from point A to point Z but knowing how to do it is not enough. If you re able to help clients work through the fears, the doubts, their self judgments, all those things then you are going to be a super, super valuable asset to people. That s what I want to make sure happens to everybody so probably through all the homework I give I ll have to still keep noticing how it feels and how it feels when you re doing it. We re going to jump in here on creating a safe space where people will open up with you more than with anyone anywhere. I want to

7 just also tell you that you re almost set up as a coach in a lot of ways because there is a willingness for people to open up with you as a coach just because they don t know you super well. Anonymity brings some level of safety to the client so the fact that when you re talking to this coach it s not somebody that you hang out with, it s not somebody you re afraid is going to judge you as much. There will be some of that and especially actually sometimes it pops up later in the relationship as the clients get to know you better. Then, they start feeling like they want you to like them so they may fully show up. We don t want that to happen. But, we kind of get a good start because they don t know you very well. Then also another layer of safety is created by just being on the phone. You can certainly coach people in person and there is nothing wrong with that at all but a lot of coaching takes place on the phone. Most of the work I do with clients is over the phone and being on the phone creates another layer of safety. You may have noticed what people will say to you face-to-face might be different than what they will say over the phone and then could also be different versus what they ll write with in an . It s amazing how scathing and sinister some people will be via when they don t really see the person or hear the person on the other end. They feel more safe for better or worse being crude or being rude sometimes via . In that situation, not necessarily a good thing but when it comes to being coached just being on the other end of a phone line creates another layer of safety for people so, we already have a little bit of a head start. Another thing I want you to keep in mind is that one of the biggest things that you bring to the table as a coach is your presence. The more present that you can be, the more in this moment that you can be when you re working with someone the more powerful you ll be. In fact, the biggest mistake that coaches make often times is just going in to auto pilot in terms of jumping in to solve problems, jumping in too fast to give advice. As coaches we want to avoid that big mistake, we want to give clients lots of space to speak, we want to give clients lots of space to be who they are and to feel what they are going through. So, the number one thing or at least one of the biggest things that we bring to the table as a coach is just our presence. Just being there, being fully present, giving them the space to just show up however they really are, too not jump in too fast to give advice, not to go in to auto pilot to try and solve a problem, just giving them space to talk and to show up with what they ve got going on.

8 Participant: Christian, I have a question about that. Yeah? Participant: It is about me personally because I am not someone who speaks up quickly or I m not particularly pushy at all. It s a personal strength for me but also when it comes to coaching or marketing myself as a coach perhaps a weakness because I want to be who I am genuinely with the person that I m coaching. I want to accept them as they are but my quandary is whether I m not reticent but whether who I am is in line with coaching? People like to talk to me, they tell me they appreciate the way I listen and so on but my concern is everybody else speaks up easily in the phone conversations and I sit back and listen because I like to listen and hear what other people have to say. I already know what I think. I m wondering if that s going to be too much of a detriment to me in coaching? I m going to use this as a little bit of a teachable moment here. What I m hearing is somewhere in here there is a limiting belief that something about giving people space, something about your style is going to hold you back. I don t know what the belief is yet but I just want to kind of see if everybody can notice that there s something in here. Obviously, there s a fear that you have that somehow you may not attract clients because of who you really are or how you really are or whatever. Somewhere there is a belief that is creating that fear that if I m not super in your face or shouting from rooftops people aren t going to find out about me. I don t know if that s your limiting belief but it sounds like it could be something similar to that. Participant: Well, you ve spoken of your confidence and you re obviously outgoing. I have confidence one-on-one with a person in talking with them but I don t come across particularly I don t think as a confident person or outgoing particularly either. Okay. Well, two things here is later on in the program we ll be talking about identity and how you see yourself because how you see yourself will determine how you show up from day-to-day in any given situation. So, if you don t see yourself as confident, or probably you see yourself as something other than confident so not necessarily that you see yourself as not confident but you may see yourself as I don t know what the words are and I don t know what it really is we would spend more time figuring it out but, how you see yourself will determine how you show up.

9 Part of this is like an identity like, I m this kind of person versus that kind of person. In terms of generating confidence, I ll actually show you how you can generate confidence on this call. We ll be talking about that and then actually doing it. So, we can definitely make some shifts in terms of your ability to have confidence, maybe even to be more outgoing potentially. But, I will tell you one important way that you may decide to market yourself could be through writing. Writing doesn t require you to be some super confident public speaking hilarious person. I just saw someone today who was a fantastic public speaker and I was like, Wow, he s so good. I d really like to be that good. I look forward to becoming that good and I ll definitely put that as something I aspire to but I m not super funny. Some of our calls we laugh a bit here and there and we re fun and we re playful but I don t consider myself, and maybe this is part of my identity here that I see, to be super outgoing, super life of the party kind of guy and all of those things. So, you can definitely be successful regardless. I just want to assuage that fear that you may have, just letting you know that this won t be something that stands in your way. If you find yourself continually thinking that it probably will and then we might need to dig in there and find out what are some of these beliefs that could be slowing you down or standing in your way that make you feel that way. In terms of building confidence, I ll show you how to do that right on this call. Does that sound good? Participant: All right. Okay. Participant: May I comment Christian? Yeah, absolutely. Participant: What is your name? Participant: My name is Gayle. Participant: Gayle, I think probably the most critical skill a coach has is the ability to listen and it sounds as if you have that ability to a great degree because people value when you are listening to them. So, I just want to say that the foundation there is really solid having those listening skills. Participant: So, should I market myself as the quiet coach then?

10 Participant: There you go. Participant: Absolutely. Participant: There s your title. Participant: One coach does not fit all and one personality type does not fit all. So, I don t think you really have to worry about it so much because you ll attract the people that need your skill and expertise and how you deliver it. Participant: Not everybody can be Tony Robbins. Yeah, that s for sure. Participant: And, thank God for that. Yeah. Participant: Well, we re not here to be Tony Robbins he s got that job. Our job is to be who we are. Participant: Yes. Participant: Right. Yeah. Participant: The best we can. That s the challenge of course. You had one more thought there? I know I was cutting you off there so go ahead. Participant: I just said our job is for each of us, in my mind, to be the best that we can and of course that s our challenge individually. I want to thank everybody for jumping in and sharing your thoughts with Gayle. Everybody thank you for that. In terms of marketing and getting clients and stuff like that, as much as I want to support you in getting clients, that is not the focus of our program so I don t want to spend a whole ton of time on that but, you can get clients no matter who you are. In fact, who you are will help you get clients. The more you can embrace who you are, how you are, your values and things like that definitely can attract a lot of clients.

11 One last thing in terms of marketing is that marketing is all about them and not about you. So, as long as you can keep being a great listener, finding out what your potential clients are wanting, needing, struggling with, etc. and you can show them how you understand them and how you can help them then people are going to hire you regardless of how you are or how outwardly confident you may seem. Sometimes, you might be surprised, you might find that people perceive you differently than you perceive yourself. A lot of people might think you re really confident. Going back to the list of creating a safe space here is again, one of the biggest things that we bring to the table is just our presence, showing up. Just being there for them, being there with them in any given moment is very, very powerful, very powerful. In fact, one other thing to keep in mind is that the value of coaching starts the minute someone says, Yes, and hires you. Because, what happens is they take themselves and they take their goals much more seriously so just by them hiring you and saying, Yes, just know that instantly you re creating value for them. Again, just by being there on the call and letting them talk is very, very powerful. How many people in this world can you or any of us go to where we can just totally, openly, in a place just feel totally free to say what we want and the conversation is all about us. It doesn t have to be able the other person at all, it doesn t have to be a two way sort of thing, give or take where, Okay, I ve talked for 20 minutes and now it s your turn to talk about you, or any of those kinds of things. It s all about the client. Just being there and just them paying you, as silly as it may sound, them paying you creates value for them. So, the minute they hire you, the minute they re paying you, the minute you re showing up on the other end of the call and being present for them, that s the instant that you start creating value for them and the instant that you start making a difference for them. Another thing that is really important to be aware of, this is probably the second biggest mistake that coaches make. The first one is jumping in too soon to try and give advice or solve problems, the second biggest mistake that coaches make is to make it about themselves. Like somebody has an issue and then you tell them all about your issue and how you grew up with that kind of childhood, telling them your story and all about your stuff. That s the big mistake number two but kind of I don t know if it is the opposite but a great way to help create safe space for people is to share a little bit about you and to be vulnerable and share your own weaknesses, or struggles, or how you went through something similar.

12 For example, if I had a client that was telling me about how they re just in tons of debt and they feel like they can t get out of it I would say, Wow, the truth is I m not completely out of debt myself. I had a ton of debt and it s been something that I ve struggled with. Money has been something I ve struggled with my whole life. Just by sharing a little bit about yourself, and that s I think one of the big differences between therapy and coaching, therapy is the therapist is the expert who doesn t say anything about themselves. It s not an even playing field is what I m trying to get at here. Where with coaching it s, Hey, I m not better than you because I m your coach. I am vulnerable too. I have weaknesses, I have struggles, I have things that I m going through. We want to pepper our coaching with that a little bit. I would use the 90 second rule. If anything that you tell about yourself on a given coaching call lasts more than 90 seconds you re probably going too far and making it about you. We don t want to make it about you but on the flipside, to help people feel more safe, more trusting is letting them know that you have challenges, that you have struggles, that you re human, that you have weaknesses. The more you can do that the more safe that people will feel. Not the more you do that but just being able to do that every now and again. I ll give you another example is sometimes clients will come to me and they ll tell me about this whole thing and they ll almost expect me to have my patented solution, or answer, or start questioning them to help them find the solution for themselves or whatever my process might be in any given moment to help them have a break through. Sometimes, I might just be totally honest with them and say, Wow. I ve never worked on this before. Or, I have no idea how we re going to do this. Just being open with yourself and with your process, that you don t need to have the answer right now, trusting that you and your client are going to find the answer together is all you need. The answer is there for you guys to find together and you don t need to know the answer. So, sometimes by just saying, Hmm, I m not really sure let s talk about it some more, or, Let s look in to it a little bit more. That s another way to be honest, be vulnerable, share what s really there for you. One other thing that will make clients feel safe is letting them know that what they are feeling is common. Even if it is something that you ve not necessarily worked through before, if it s something that you know happens a lot, This is really common, I see this all the time. I ve worked with a lot of people on the same challenge.

13 Obviously, you want to say what is true but those comments is a process that I call normalizing it. It takes somebody who feels like whatever they are going through that there is something wrong with them, there s something weird about them, that they re the only ones going through it. When you let them know that it is common it makes them feel normal, it makes them feel like there s not something wrong with them, that this does happen a lot and that there is a way to resolve it. Finally, to create a safe space and just being a great coach is just listen, listen and just listen. Give people a lot of space to talk and be comfortable with silence. Also, sometimes silence makes other people uncomfortable so in a way it can make your client a little bit uncomfortable so they may then keep talking to fill in the gap but eventually they ll start noticing that you leave a lot of space and they ll start feeling comfortable with it. Also, obviously as you re listening and you create a lot of space and they do keep talking more that can be good because they may discover some things that they hadn t thought of yet. Finally, about listening, listening and listening is that sometimes clients just need to hear themselves think especially entrepreneurs tend to have that kind of need to talk things through make up in their mind that somehow just hearing themselves talk is very, very powerful. That s great coaching on top of helping to create a safe space where you re just giving them the space to talk. Coaching is way, way more than just that but just this, right here what you ve gotten right now is a powerful foundation that you can show up and start coaching clients and adding value just by letting them talk, being present and creating a safe space. You do those things and you re already a great coach. This right here is the foundation for being a powerful, powerful coach. If you can do this, I don t know if this is 80% of being a great coach but this is a big, big part of it and everything else is just tools or processes to use with clients. This is the foundation right here. Any questions about what we ve covered so far? Participant: I just had a comment that when I was going through my master s program one of the basic skills we had to learn was silence and that meant waiting 30 seconds, and somebody timed us, our observer timed and waiting 30 seconds between the last time the client spoke before we actually started talking. Wow.

14 Participant: It is a discipline, it is very difficult but even if you didn t allow for 30 seconds there is just so much like you said, when they are thinking about things and for me I remind myself so that I don t cut them off and they lose their train of thought. I was just talking with a client today and we were talking about that very thing, about silence and being comfortable being in that and needing that period of time so they can finish their thought even though they have not said it out loud. Yeah. I just want to also mention that the coaching process is very organic and I want you to really follow your intuition and your instincts because sometimes it s best to create space and to listen and sometimes you don t have to wait for them to finish what they re saying. Sometimes, you can jump in with what s going on you don t need to keep waiting, then they talk, then you talk, then they talk and then you talk because you can have a more natural conversation where they are saying something and you may already get what they re saying or be two or three steps ahead of them and you can kind of go back and re-explain what you were saying or re-ask a question if you see that they misunderstood what you were saying. It s not that you have to wait and wait, wait, wait the whole time and it might get pretty insane if I were a client and every time I spoke it went 30 seconds before my coach spoke. Participant: That was just one exercise. Absolutely. Participant: It was for me to remind myself not to cut them off more so than anything because I hardly wait 30 seconds. Yeah, it s a great way to build the muscle of patience and of feeling comfortable in the silence so absolutely a great idea, a great exercise, probably a great thing to start doing with friends every now and again, give them 15 seconds before you might say anything. Experiment with that. In fact, that will be homework assignment number one, just in conversations with people practice all these things listen, listen, listen, leave gaps of silence for them to keep talking or finish their thoughts. Great, yeah, that s homework assignment number one. I m going to put someone in charge of writing down all the homework assignments to repeat back later. Who wants to be in charge of that?

15 Participant: I ll do it. Who is this? Participant: Scott. Okay, great thanks Scott. Any other questions about creating a safe space for clients? Participant: Yes. Yeah? Participant: With what she said you could also have the other opposite, a person talks and talks, and talks, and talks. What do you do in that extreme? Yes, yes. Good. Sometimes people get caught up in what we would call their story and so you might interrupt them and just say, If you could put this in a nutshell, what the crux of this situation is that s upsetting to you, what would you say that it is? Or, something like that. If you can get people to bottom line it so to speak, that s a great thing to do. Sometimes people get caught in the story and they want to share the whole story. Now, sometimes it s really good to give people the space to share their story. I just heard about a study that was done, I wish I could cite it, I don t have it here. Maybe, I ll be able to share it with you later, I wasn t thinking about sharing that on this call. But, there was a study done just recently with doctors. The study was they had doctors actually hear their patients out, what their patients talk about, how they injured themselves, or what happened and just let them talk about what was going on. Normally, the doctor is trying to access as quickly as possible, Where is the pain, what s really happening, dada-dada-dada-da. So, they had a control group that worked with patients the normal way and then they had another group that had a second file. In the first file it was just the normal file and the second file where they doctor wrote down what they heard the patient saying. They found that the group that kept the second file that their patients healed dramatically faster, better and had much better results. So, certainly just hearing people out has a lot of power. We can t know exactly what made the results better, maybe the patients did better treating, maybe it was just being heard or feeling like the doctor

16 cares about them. I don t know what the conclusion can be from that but the fact is all that we really need for the point of this story that just listening to people has a lot of power. Any other questions about creating a safe space? Okay. So, I wanted to remind everybody that we re going to get through all of the material that is in this program one way, shape or form and that we may have more than 12 calls. Well again, we ll officially have 13, we ll have the first call plus 12 but we may end up having extra calls because I have planned out the content for the program but again sometimes we ll be talking more, have a lot more participation and I just want to reassure everybody that if we don t get through everything that was on my agenda tonight we are going to get it through it all. That is just the way that the program is going to work that we re going to get through everything that you need to learn whether that takes 14 sessions or 16. I m committed to you guys getting the material and not trying to squeeze it all in. I wanted to move on to getting and maintaining rapport. There s actually five things that you can do to help immediately gain rapport with people. Generally, I m talking about over the phone. There are some things that you can do even more to gain rapport in person but since for the sake of coaching it is mostly going to be over the phone here are the five things. Number one is matching speaking rate and speed. So, when you hear someone talking if they re talking really, really fast you may want to start talking a little bit faster so you can match their speed. If you hear that they re talking a little bit slowly, you might slow down and match them. There s an unconscious factor where we are looking for similarities. The more someone is like us the more we like them. So, if they are like us we like them so we want to be like them so that they like us and how we be like them is by matching the way that people speak. You might match the speed that they talk, you might match the tonality, so if someone is really, really intense in how they talk and they emphasis words a lot you might start emphasizing words more, if they are pretty relaxed you might be more relaxed. Another way that you can match people is that you can match keywords that people use. For example, I remember I was working with a potential client he hadn t hired me yet but I kept asking him questions about how it would feel if he had what he wanted and he kept saying the word fantastic. I just wrote the word fantastic down. When someone else says fantastic to me I hear awesome. So, we tend to paraphrase things, we take things from someone else s model of the world, or someone else s experience and we

17 transpose our model of the world so when someone says, Fantastic, we think awesome or when they think awesome we hear great, when we hear great we think amazing. We all have different adjectives we tend to use a lot. When you hear someone using a specific word especially a word that kind of stands out you might just jot it down and see if you can rework that back in. So, I ll use the word fantastic back for him and he ended up hiring me because we had really good rapport. Obviously, he hired me for other reasons too but part of great coaching is getting rapport. Those are the first three and those all have to do with the way people talk and just talking in a little bit of similar way. You don t want to totally mimic people but just work some of that stuff in. Any questions about those three? Participant: So the speech rate and the speech speed are two separate items, is that correct? No, rate and speed are the same, tonality Participant: Tonality is what I missed, I m sorry. Is the second one and keywords is the third of those first three. Participant: Thank you. You re welcome. This is actually based on a science called neuro linguistic programming otherwise known as NLP. Neuro linguistic programming talks about how we communicate with each other, how we communicate with ourselves. This is just a little piece of NLP, NLP is actually a bigger, broader topic and this program will take some of what I consider to be some of the better or maybe even the best stuff from NLP and we ll have some of that worked in to this program. The next way to get and maintain rapport with clients is something that I call sounds of reassurance. Sounds of reassurance is something a lot of us do naturally, I know it is something that I kind of do naturally but I do my best to make sure that I do it. I notice that I do it, I notice its impact on people so I started just consciously being aware of it and letting people know and teaching others to do the same thing. Sounds of reassurance are simply just little things like, Mm-hmm, oh, wow, really. Just those kind of like almost throw away things that people say where I know it s not my turn to

18 Participant: Mmm. Participant: Hm-mmm. Participant: Oh. speak yet I m still listening, I m still hearing you but it is kind of like letting you know that I m still on the other end of the phone. I have a friend who likes to talk a lot and if I m quiet for a while he might wonder if I m still here or if I m even paying attention so it is a really good idea to just use those sounds of reassurance, Mmhmm, Mmm, ah, oh, wow, great, cool. Then, at a certain point it might be time to throw in a question or whatever. But, just those little sounds of reassurance what it does is if you were in person with somebody you could tell if they were paying attention by if they were looking you in the eye and nodding their head and seemed really intrigued by what you were saying by their body. You could tell that. But, when you re with someone over the phone you don t have that so you ve got to kind of do those same kind of head nods and eye contact, these are the verbal version of it and it s what I call sounds of reassurance. Any questions on sounds of reassurance? That s a pretty easy one, right? Good. You guys might even do that as I m teaching the next couple of things. You can even practice it while I m teaching the rest of the call. Here we go, the next one is never make the client wrong for what he or she may want, for what they may need, for what he or she may say or do or feel. Never make the client wrong. Maybe there s a better way that they could have done something, maybe you have a better idea, maybe they were suppose to do something different, it doesn t matter never make them wrong. The minute you start thinking that they re wrong or you start saying that they re wrong or alluding to that they are wrong or doing something wrong, you start losing rapport. Any questions about that one? Participant: Can you give us an example of that one? Yeah, okay. An example would be let s say you re a relationship coach and you re working with a woman who hasn t been on a date for a while or whatever and she meets a guy that she really likes and she tells you how excited she is that she s going to be going out with somebody next week. Then, you have your next coaching session and she tells you how good the sex was. Now,

19 Participant: Mmmm. Participant: Ah-ha. here s a place where a lot of people could impose their own values and start saying, Well, you know don t you think maybe you should wait until you re married. Or, Did you know that if you re a woman and you have sex with a man too soon that he s not going to respect you and you really screwed it up. Not that anybody would go that far. Well, I m sure there probably are coaches that go that far that say, You really screwed that up. I guess that would be an example where you want to be like, Oh really? Good, so the sex was really good, good for you. You want to be in the client s corner. You don t want to ever alienate yourself because as soon as you start imposing your judgments on your client then you lose your power to really help them. I see a lot of coaches do this kind of thing where they think they know the right way to do something. Another big mistake that coaches make is just trying to give advice about things. Advice in and of itself is not coaching. You can give advice in the process of coaching but I know sometimes somebody wants to learn to manage their time better so a coach will often times say, Okay, you want to manage your time better do this, this and this, as if that was the end all be all way to manage your time. Different strokes for different folks, you can suggest ideas and stuff like that but what s right for you is not necessarily what s right for your clients and what s right for your clients isn t necessarily what s right for you so we want to be able to be the kind of people that will let other people be themselves. The more that you can create the space that your client can be totally completely themselves, the better. As soon as you start judging and making someone wrong for what they do you start losing rapport. Actually, I ll just tell you even with my coach right now, my coach lost rapport with me and maybe I lost rapport with him maybe a month ago when I started telling him about a goal that I have for my business. I have a goal to put my business completely on auto pilot so that I don t even have to be there at all so that s go out and people purchase things and dada-dada-dada-da. He doesn t like that idea. I couldn t get any exact thing from him but just the idea that if there s not a person behind it that somehow the heart and soul of the business isn t there and etc. So, I felt a little judged by him to be honest with you and we talked about it quite a bit just earlier this week.

20 Participant: Really. Thank you. I ll tell you that made me feel like you were hearing me, that made me feel listened too. That made me feel like you were getting what I was saying. So those were some examples for you, did that help? Participant: It did, it did. Thank you very much. You re welcome. Participant: I just have a quick question along those lines, you don t want to make somebody wrong but what if their behavior is really detrimental to themselves? Okay, give me an example. Participant: Well, let s say you re relationship coaching and somebody is allowing somebody to be either physically or verbally abusive to them and they keep allowing it? Well, my guess is that a problem for the client? Mostly, if that s a problem for the client I would check in with them on that. First of all, if a client brought that up to you, Boy, my husband keeps saying these mean things. Or, My husband hits me. Or, whatever my guess is that s an indicator that they have a problem with it anyway. But, you would want to find out if this is a problem for them. If it s a problem for them then you want to help them solve their problem. When it comes to abuse and things like that, I don t know how many of you, if any of you, are going to come across any physical abuse. I really hope that never happens. I don t know what percentage of people who have the wherewithal, desire and financial aptitude to hire a coach that are people who might be being abused. I don t know the demographics for people who are coached that may not be the same people who are abused. Although, there could be some overlap, there s no doubt. I guess that s not them harming themselves, I think that s more them letting other people harm them. But, if they bring up, Boy, my boss keeps abusing me. I would talk to them, Wow, that sounds like that must be pretty stressful. Is that something you d like to change? Absolutely. Good. Then, we re going to do that. Let s see what we can do to turn that around. Then, it becomes you guys working together to solve their problem.

21 Now, let me show you a different approach to the same thing, Wow, my boss keeps taking credit for all my work and any time I ever turn anything in late he starts yelling and screaming. Here s bad coaching, Wow you sure are a pushover. Maybe it s time to get a spine. These are some things that I can see that no one on this group would go in that direction but most of what would happen would be really subtle, sometimes we judge in subtle ways. I want to just remind everybody to be aware of it and if whatever is going on you want to be behind the client even sometimes in them running off a cliff that you know is going to lead to no good. You might want to help them run faster towards the edge of that cliff sometimes as the coach. Now, as a coach you ll want to talk to them about the edge of the cliff that they re about to jump off and what could happen when they hit the ground but, if that s the cliff that they want to jump off of, who are we to say what s right for them. Maybe splatting on the other end is just what they need in their life. Who knows, if they hit the splat on the other end of the cliff and they get up from the other side and they re like, Oh my gosh, I want to make sure I never do that again, or, I want to go really fast but in this other direction, they may need that splat in order to learn. Now again, if you see that there s an impending splat coming you could talk to them about it, you could have a discussion about it but you want to do it in a very non-judgmental way, you want to do it in a way that makes them feel really comfortable with whatever they choose. Whether they choose to keep running and running towards the edge of the cliff and jumping off or whether they choose to go in a different direction, our job as the coach is to really support the client in what they want for themselves. That s my major underlying philosophy. Participant: Christian, help them run faster? Yeah, help them run faster. Again, I would want them to see, Hey, you know what if we keep running in this direction you re probably going to go off the cliff and when you land at the bottom of the cliff here s what could happen. But, if that s what they want to do then, Okay, you want to run faster, you want to jump farther off the cliff this time. What s right for them is what s right for them and that s what I want to support them in. Participant: Alrighty.

22 I heard a big sigh, is there some challenge there or fear? Participant: First of all I think what may be bothering us is let me just make up something, let s say that a client is being harassed at work as you said, they re doing their work and the boss is taking credit for it. Sure. Participant: And, they are really resenting this, do I tell them just continue to let him do that until you are in enough pain where you re going to want to have a change? Well, if they re bringing it up again, they probably already want to change it because it s an issue for them. I think if I could come up with a different example here, let s say if they feel like they re being verbally abused by their boss and that s something that they want to put a stop to then you want to coach them on putting a stop to it. It can t be your agenda for them to put a stop to it. If it s not that important to them right now it might not be that important to them right now. They may have some things they feel are more important. Think about this too, if at any given moment any one of us could change probably a thousand different things about who we are as a person, how we interact with other people, how we behave so who am I to tell you Nina what you should change? Do you hear what I am saying? Participant: For me to pick, Oh you should change this, you should that, you should change this, you should change that. Who am I to tell you? I m your coach but that doesn t give me the right to be telling you what you should be changing about yourself. If you know what you want to change about yourself then that s for me to help you make those changes. Maybe you got that boss stealing your credit and verbally teasing you, borderline abusing you at work, okay maybe so but maybe you re not ready to tackle that one yet. Maybe there s something else that is more important. Also, I want to keep in mind this whole verbally abused thing, this stuff again could come up for you so I m not saying these things won t come up for you but what I really want to say here is that the purpose of our coaching with clients is to help them achieve goals, even non-result goals or non-material goals like feeling happy or more fulfilled, or more peaceful or whatever. But, there are things that people want to have happen and that s our job to help them make those things happen, whatever those things are. So, the