A lot of the times you go through an experience where you
would talk to your clients, they will set goals,
but they will feel all over the place.
They would want to have some great experiences
in their relationship,
and they will want to make a ton more money,
and they would want to have a career growth,
and they would want this, and they would want that.
And while all of that can be potentially achieved
as a coach, you may go, well, it's not,
there's a lot of things to work on.
And because of that, it may feel
that as much as you want to help,
the client keeps going all over the place
with different kinds of goals that they put in front of you.
So today, what I'm gonna share with you are five techniques
that you can use with your clients to help them find
their goals or help them elicit their goals.
The first technique is probably the most well known
technique there is and that is called scaling questions.
Scaling questions show up in many different formats
in front of us as tools.
Scaling questions simply means
that you have a client pick different areas of their life
or you give them different areas of their life.
And then ask them to scale themselves on a scale
of 1 through 10, one through hundred, however you like
and help identify which other areas that they
rate themselves lower and hence they would want
to work on first.
You've seen this technique used in popular models
like Wheel of Life.
You may have seen this technique also being
represented in a very popular Mindvalley tool
called the Lifebook Assessment.
All of these tools simply are identifying some
key areas that are important to you,
that are important to the client.
And then you are saying, "Okay, in this area
how do you scale yourself?
Where do you see yourself on a scale of 1 to 10?"
And when they intuitively rate themselves on a scale
of 1 to 10 in a particular area, what happens is some
of the areas become more dominantly challenging.
These are the areas where they go, oh yeah, I definitely
need to work on my relationship.
Yes, I'm making money,
but I'm not really passionate about it.
And such things just give you a clear compass of where
is it that your clients will benefit most for when they work
with you as a coach.
If they rate themselves lower in relationship,
maybe that's a good place to start because it might be
some very easy wins that you can create for them,
giving them more confidence about their ability to transform
and giving you more success straight off the bat,
which will help your client also to trust you a lot more
and have more confidence in you for you to be able
to further that journey and help them get more
and more results.
The second tool some individuals love, and especially
if you're working with anybody that has a technical
background, they would absolutely love this model.
This technique is called mind mapping.
Mind mapping is simply you creating a flow chart
of how things are working out for you,
what connects in what way in your life.
When you mind map your life or an area of your life,
you see clear patterns that are occurring and recurring
for somebody.
And as you mind map with your client,
you may be able to help them identify some clear things
that are gaps, places where they end up stopping themselves,
places where they see there is no progress being made,
places where they have an idea,
but there is no action being taken.
Those will be the areas that probably would be
better to get started.
Mind mapping anything allows your client
to dump everything that's happening
in their mind into a physical form, on a physical paper,
in a clear visual way.
As they mind map the different areas of their life,
as they mind map their current challenges,
as they mind map what's happening
for them in their overall life, it becomes more
and more evident to them as to what's really happening,
where the goals need to go, what's important to them.
And also, as they're doing this exercise with you,
you are able to identify some of these gaps.
You are able to bring attention to some
of these gaps that helps them then to further
and really identify what the goals should be
and be able to work with you on that goal.
The third is one of those things that truly
changed my life when I first did it.
This is called values discovery.
See, for most of my life, I just operated
from thinking, well, this is who I am and this is what I do.
And it was very intuitive
and there's nothing wrong with being intuitive.
But when I discovered that I may be operating pretty much
every decision in my life, every goal in my life,
comes from certain values that are dear to me.
There's certain things that are very clearly
important to me.
And if I know those things, if I am aware of my values
it makes all of my decision making significantly easier.
You see a values discovery is us helping our
clients discover their values.
Most of us have never really sat down and said
what is it that are my clear toward values?
Values that really excite me, values that are really
important to me, values that I'm inspired by,
values I wanna live into every day.
And also, what are my away values?
Away values are values that really trigger me.
Things that I would not want in my life, what I would not
want in the world, and things that would really annoy me,
and things that I would not want to associate myself
with at all.
To know your towards values or values that you're excited
about and to know your away values really gives you
a good sense of where is it that you want more energy
of your life to go?
And where is it that if the energy is that like
your away values are there, you wanna move away from that.
So say for example, if somebody has a value of passion
and purpose and meaning and love and service like I have,
they may want to do more activities that are aligned
with creating social good in some way.
But let's say at the same point of time, they have
an away value that is around politics that they don't
like office politics.
They don't like when people are, you know, and nagging
on each other, or they are, you know, bad
about each other.
Well, if they are in an office that is like that,
even while they're doing purposeful work,
they need to find a way to go away from that right?
So, a goal may be to find a better organization
that still is aligned to these to get towards values
and are not really leaning into these away values.
So that way you can identify a goal
because of the discovery of what is important
to your client and also what really triggers your client,
what is really not in alignment with your client.
Because you'll be able to identify areas which
they're not aligned because of that.
And you'll be able to see how we can turn our coaching
in a way where they can move and live a lot more
towards the values that they're really inspired by,
excited about, and want to live on a day-to-day basis.
So that's what is a values discovery exercise may look like.
It'll help clearly identify what goals should
be prioritized, sometimes even discover new goals
because you finally identify the values of a client.
The fourth exercise is called the ideal self exercise.
An ideal self exercise is a simple exercise where
you ask your client to imagine their most ideal self.
See, we all have a version of us that we hope
to achieve one day.
We all have aspired and thought about what would be
our most ideal life.
We may be living the most beautiful life.
No doubt about that.
But still, we have a version
of ourselves that we would really aspire to.
It may be influenced by society, it may be influenced
by our own being, but there is a version of us,
like a version of me is funnier on camera.
A version of me is even more charismatic on camera.
A version of me has a million YouTube subscribers,
and that ideal version is that ideal version.
But if I tell you that ideal version, you can now go,
"Ajit wants to be more charismatic in front of the camera.
Maybe he should take a charismatic training.
Oh, he wants to be funnier.
Maybe he needs to do standup comedy.
Oh, he wants a million subscribers.
Maybe he needs to learn how the algorithm of YouTube works."
All of those ideal self narrative that a client shares
with you gives you a way to actually work
with the client to be able to identify,
oh that's the gap that they have
from their current self to their ideal self.
Now, if they could define their ideal self,
now you can clearly see where the gaps may be
where they don't see their current version
as their ideal version.
This would help you see their overall goals in life.
And it'll also help you be able to elicit some
goals that may be more important to them,
more urgent to them than the others.
So now you have a goal to chase,
you have an ideal self that they want to be fulfilled
and so you could work with them to actually fulfill
that ideal self.
The fifth technique is a magical one.
I call it the magical one
because your client needs to believe in miracles to be able
to answer this question, or use this technique.
And the technique is basically based on, a lot
of times we doubt ourselves and we feel we can't do things
or we can't have things and it's own our own story.
And when that happens, we limit what our potential is.
We may not be able to answer the question of our ideal self
because we may feel that it's never gonna happen.
We may have had failures in our life because
of which we doubt ourselves.
But if you give that responsibility to universe
or miracle, what would happen is suddenly everything
is possible, especially if your client believes in miracles.
And so the question becomes the miracle question, which is,
"if you were to wake up tomorrow,
and if a miracle was to happen,
what would your life look like?"
And this takes away the responsibility
of your client to be able to think
if they can do something and set a goal,
or if the goal's too big, if the goal's too impossible,
and they should lean into their past and all of that stuff.
It's all gone.
All they're focused on is, oh, if it was a miracle
if it was just to, you know, wave a wand,
and think would happen, what would that life look like?
Well, now you have the true answer
to what they want their life to look like,
not something that they doubt,
not something they wonder about,
not something that they would question almost immediately,
as they would say it.
And that will give you some precise goals
that your clients would want to achieve.
Which of these techniques have you already used
in your coaching sessions?
Which is these techniques you're excited to try out?
Share with me in the common section below.
Thank you so much for watching.
This is Coach Ajit.
I'll see you next week.