Working with client rhythms in coaching

Doves No. 2 by Hilma af Klint, 1915

No matter how structured you want to be as a coach, no matter how accountable you want to hold your clients, no matter how motivated your clients are to move forward with their goals, there will always be ebbs and flows in the client's rhythm and in the rhythm of the coaching encounter.

As coaches, we must help the client put aside the mundane worries of the day. We must ask our clients to put them on the shelf or leave them at the door, so that we can get on with the work at hand. We must set up the energy of the coaching container to be calm, centered, and focused. Once we've done that, we need to assess the client's mood and energy level and ability to be mindfully present in the coaching space.

After that, as we work through the agenda for the session, we must constantly be adjusting, noticing the client's cadence and flow, noticing the client's resistance and pulling back too. As we take note, we go deeper as the client leans in and slower as the client leans out. The client is always signaling to us about what's working and what's not. There is a time and place for requesting the client to ask more of herself. And there is a time and a place for honoring the client's rhythms.

In the Authentic Wholeness Coach Training Certification Program, I teach coaches and facilitators how to get in rhythm with their clients so that the movement and pace of the work is in harmony with the client's internal sense of readiness. As coaches and facilitators, we can use the techniques and skills for moving clients swiftly to their next vantage point while at the same time honoring their rhythms and flow. To be exceptional coaches and helpers and guides, we must master the skills that allow for both going with the client's rhythm and facilitating readiness for the next climb.

Plunder: to a young friend by Linda Pastan

On a day of windy transition, one season to the next, you spoke of helping your mother close her house, of the choices you had to make—what to discard, what to keep—as if it were your childhood itself waiting to be plundered.  You kept a Persian rug, all reds and golds, to walk on every day, keeping the past alive under your feet; those nested Russian dolls you played with as a girl: grandmother, mother, daughter; four bentwood chairs wrenched from their table.

I listened, thinking I’d be next to try to crowd a lifetime of things into a shrinking universe of boxes. I’ve started dismantling my life already, throwing out letters from people I remember loving, choosing among books—this one to stay, that one to go– as if I were a judge sentencing some to death, the rest to the purgatory of the emptying shelf. Perhaps I should simply burn it all.

But don’t we live on in what we’ve left behind? In the fading twilight of Kodak? In our sterling knives and spoons tarnishing on a grandchild’s casual table? Don’t these become a kind of museum of the afterlife? The Pharaohs had it right. They took their whole world with them—vases and chests, gilded statues, jewels—plundered perhaps, but not for a thousand years. Nefertiti’s tomb has never been found.