Repeat anything 3 times in my coaching or supervision sessions, and you can be sure that I’ll appear to acknowledge it and get curious!
Something I hear a lot of coaches in training or supervision be concerned about is that they’re going to miss something important if they’re not 100% attentive to every word their clients say and every subtle movement in their body.
While I’m a sucker for spotting patterns (bit of a strength of mine), you don’t have to be a genius detective to notice when someone mentions something several times. Usually you don’t even have to have a particularly good memory.
If something’s important, you can be pretty sure it’ll come back, even if you miss it the first time around.
I might not, the first two times around, feed it back to the client, get curious, or intervene, but whenever something emerges for the 3rd time (could be a word, a gesture, a flinch in their facial expression, a wobble in their voice, or a thought or feeling I’m having in response), I’ll definitely say something, at the very least to acknowledge it and check into potential significance. Usually I don’t have do anything more than note that it happened. The client will take it from there.
In a recent supervision group we’ve had a good laugh imagining Yannick appearing out of thick smoke, Beetlejuice-style, everytime that happens!
Stay present, but also: don’t worry about it too much! That worry will distract you even more.
With Love
Yannick
New content: Can I coach grief and loss, or is that therapy? TaC #72
The question of how far coaches can go is an increasingly pertinent one. The limits and boundaries around what coaching is and can be quite blurry. In today’s episode of talking about coaching our resident coaches Yannick, Siawash and Nicki discuss whether coaching is the right approach to support someone who’s lost a loved one, or grieving some other significant loss or ending, or whether that sort of work is best left to a therapist.
The episode with grief coaching expert Julia Menaul that Yannick referenced can be found at https://youtu.be/GDweULQZqEg?si=y9lDIJx8ddax7WSO
As always, you can listen to this episode or watch it on YouTube.
And if you’re hungry for more podcasts, click here!
