Sensing Your Client’s Core Being — Coaching

The landscape of many industries has changed due to the global pandemic in 2020 and is set for further shifts in theories, paradigms, and methods by which they operate in the years to come. However, one of the industries that have already been challenged by emerging techniques is the realm of professional life and leadership coaching.

A life coach is not just a coach or a to-go-person for shaping and changing behaviors and ways of thinking so that the coachee or the clients can adopt a different perspective and gain only insights, but also refine their approach to life and work and achieve their dreams.

But how a coach can meet the client for the very first time, and still fully comprehend their thoughts, background, past behaviors, and the key events in their lives that shaped them to be who they are now?. Doing this and being able to fully read the client’s inner world, within a short observation or conversation is difficult even for the most experienced of life coaches — especially in a brief period.

Life coaching is a transformative process for a client’s personal and professional awareness. In our modern world, it is more important than ever to be efficient with one’s time — and this is true more so with coaching than it is with other professions.

Understanding the core and essence of a client enables the coach to properly evaluate the true needs and goals of that person within a limited period so that time is saved during the coaching process. This method can be called as ‘time compression’ and is crucial in achieving growth and goal achievement for the client in the shortest amount of time possible.

Coaches could achieve this ability by way of continuous ‘sensing’. There are many methods, tools, processes, and techniques available out there which coaches can use to access this information to drive long-lasting, positive changes that can lead to ‘excellence installation.’ These tools include: Somatic coaching, Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), Autogenic Training, Yoga Nidra and others. While this is not an exhaustive list, each of these tools equips the coach in achieving profound and sustainable way of understanding the client’s inner self.

Somatic coaching raises a much higher level of self-awareness than traditional practices because it incorporates the entire body along with sensations into the process rather than focusing only on the thoughts and emotions of the client.

As humans, we wear the story of our lives on our skin and in our bones. The posture we have, the way we hold still, or even the micro cues such as pursing of the lips, raising eye brows and the changing lines on the forehead can reveal unresolved emotions from our past experiences and can often be perceived as pain or tightness in muscles or limbs — but, ultimately, it is a disconnection of our bodies and spirit.

Coaches that utilize somatic coaching — alongside NLP and other coaching techniques — to pick up on these secret macro and micro cues that our physical bodies reveal, enables them to cut down the time needed to understand exactly what needs to be changed for the benefit of the client. Sensing is one of the emerging key practices of life coaches around the world and is becoming an area of expansion and understanding for coaches and researchers alike.

Sensing is about using all available information to assist the client. This is a drastic shift in methodology as several traditional concepts and practices are one-dimensional. Sensing is multi-dimensional as the coach can use all of their bodily senses as tools to gather data bout the person they are helping.

Somatic data, as mentioned above, is just a single type of data that coaches can utilize. But there are many more, including:

· Conversational data

· Observational data

· Experiential data

· Intuitive data

Conversational data includes the information revealed by the client during the discussion. Coaches will analyze the language used by the client, even down to the level of specific word choices, stress and pauses they have when talking. How a client chooses to express themselves — either consciously or subconsciously — can reveal a great deal of information to the discerning coach.

Observational data is made up of all of the micro-expressions and context that a client creates when communicating with the coach. This can include their facial expressions, their tone of voice, their body language, and the way they hold themselves in a conversation, as well as their breathing patterns, rhythm, and their level of eye contact.

Experiential data is often obtained during conversation and in getting to know the client better. The past experiences of a client will be revealed by their body in a matter of moments to the trained eye, but the sharing of past experiences through conversation permits the coach to apply context to the way the client thinks and feels about their history.

Finally, intuitive data is information gained by the coach because of their inner world. Essentially, what occurs at that particular ‘moment by moment’ experiences shared in the co-created coaching space by the coach and the client give the coach a high degree of intuition and insight into the true needs of the client.

This shift from ‘gross to subtle’ means of information gathering and understanding gives a life coach the methods by which the coach can truly understand the person they are working with. Time compression is incredibly important in the coaching industry as a coach needs to be able to assess and gain this level of comprehension of their client within the first few minutes of meeting them.

Life coaches empower their clients through what is called excellence installation — bringing about fundamental changes needed in a person’s core self within a shorter period. This is also called a disruptive transformation. It is named so because of the immediacy at which the behavior change occurs, but naturally due to the sensing performed by the coach.

Traditionally and more often, it may take multiple sessions for a coach to strike that chord in getting to know the client, — as well as a significant investment in terms of time and resources. Now, through sensing and the many methods available to life coaches, these profound changes in understanding the being of the client may happen within a vastly compressed timeframe.