What’s a good coaching request?
How to maximize your time with a coach
In my private coaching practice, I have clients fill out a coaching request form before our scheduled coaching conversation. Often, it takes 3-4 months for clients to start understanding how to make coaching powerful for them. This is a note I meant to write to some of my new clients to help them discover a powerful process, and I thought of sharing it publicly, hoping it would benefit anyone working with a coach.
Glossary: “Project” is a SMART plan the client defines for their goals at the start of our coaching engagement. Some examples: Creating a larger scope of work, Making X amount of money, Starting a company, Creating work/life balance, Losing weight, etc.
Coming up with a coaching request is the start of a journey to come out of the water we’re swimming in. We can still coach without a request, but our time would be most powerful if you could reflect on your life experience and project progress.
Most often, our social conditioning and ego defense mechanisms make us look for external guidance when faced with a problem. This often gets reflected in coaching requests, like:
"What should I do?"
"How do I make this decision?"
"What's the next step?"
On the other end of the spectrum, high-agency people try to solve everything independently without asking for support. That shows as not having any specific thing to work on and everything being fine.
These are perfectly valid and normal requests. There is absolutely nothing wrong in asking for intentional guidance. But there's more power to be extracted from transformational coaching. We don’t want to lose the opportunity to find our internal compass and co-create the life we want with others.
At a meta-level, coaching requests train the muscle to get clear, specific and empowered in your requests to others. Most problems don't remain problems when we train this muscle. When we get good at our coaching requests, we develop to a self-authored mind that has a strong inner-compass from a socialized mind (stage 3 of Kegan’s adult developmental model where 75% of the adult population is, with internalized external belief systems and rules.)
A good coaching request has a clear ask for the shift you want to make in an area you're struggling with. Before we get into that, here are some very valid coaching requests:
Not having any requests at all — this is an amazing place to be and can be a beautiful conversation into why you’re not able to bring a request for support. For many, this can be a case of
“I don’t know what’s the right thing to talk about,”
“I don’t have time to think about this,” or
“Everything is good and fine. I don’t need help,”
or anything else.
All of these could be survival mechanisms (ego defense mechanisms) and can be a pointer to other non-serving patterns.
Something you’re frustrated or annoyed with — such a request would be the most obvious one to look at, even if it’s not related to any of your projects. Our frustrations, disappointments, and irritations are windows to discover the breakthrough that’s available for the results you said you wanted to create. During the call, we may sometimes fully solve the “problem,” or create new practices. The idea is to support you to be “at cause of the creating what you want in life,” (empowered) vs. “at effect of life happening to you” (victimized, struggling, indecisive, etc.)
The ‘What should I do’ or ‘How should I do’ requests — Though I speak a lot about not looking at situations as problems and ‘how,’ ‘should,’ etc. are possibility killers, these are also perfectly valid requests. We might go into some consulting with mutual agreement. But if ‘what should I do’ is your only question, that’s also a golden window into a powerful breakthrough. So please bring that as well.
As you can see, any request is perfect. The only way to make coaching powerful and accountable to support you in reaching your goals is to have ‘A/any request’ each week. That being said, here’s a way to do some reflection ahead and maximize our time together:
What area are you struggling with or can’t make sense of? (The best place is to start with your projects)
What’s a shift you want to make in that area?
How are you relating to the area?
How do you want to feel empowered in this area?
How would we know you made that shift? What will change in your life?
What’s your sense of the thing that’s getting in the way?
You don’t have to have perfect answers for all or any of these questions. We start with whatever you have, then spend time digging into these questions and making your request more powerful.
Seems like a lot of work? It is.
It can be hugely uncomfortable to try to get clarity on these questions. And this is by design because, at a meta-level, we support you to get very clear and empowered to create your conversations. Our survival and ego mechanisms create a lot of fog when we try to get this clarity.
If we can practice this way of creating coaching conversations with specificity, you’ll develop the muscle to self-author other areas of your life as well, with clear, specific, empowered requests coming from your inner wisdom.
So, that’s my stand for you.
I stand for you to be a CREATOR of your conversations, roles, and life.
I stand for you to derive decisions from your own internal compass instead of waiting for someone else to guide you.
I stand for you to live a beautiful, extraordinary life that you create.
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