- Hello there.
In today's video
we are discussing life coaching questions for beginners
in a three-part model
that you can use when you are coaching people
in different areas of life.
You see, life coaching
is one of the most impactful industries
that is out there right now.
With the world changing so fast around us
more and more people are requesting
to work with a coach
as they go through challenges in life,
in their careers, in their relationships, as parents.
There's an increasing need in coaches
that can help clients through challenges
and can also help them redefine their ambitions
and purpose in life.
Hi, I'm Ajit Nawalkha and you're watching this on Evercoach.
I'm going to focus on a three part model
that I mostly use when I'm working with clients
across their entire life.
These three areas are the most prominent areas
that I tend to find my clients
struggling with or needing help with.
This is why I wanna focus on these areas
and then give you techniques
and questions across these areas
that you can use to be able to create an impact
in your clients' lives.
While I will be suggesting questions,
do remember,
the greatest way you can create an impact
in your client's life
is by being present to the situation at hand,
by being present to the conversation that you're having,
and then asking more contextual questions.
Let's get started on understanding
the three-part life coaching model
that you can use in your upcoming life coaching sessions.
The first part is what I call challenges.
Challenges are areas in our lives
that we clearly identify as challenges.
There might be clients that will come to you
that would say,
"Have a challenge in my relationship.
"I have a challenge being confident.
"I have a challenge making more money."
While there are many dimensions of challenges
that we can talk about,
I'd like to focus on one of the biggest challenges
that most clients experience
when they approaching a life coach.
It's a challenge with their emotions.
Challenge, with their emotional state.
How they feel confident, how they feel happy,
how they feel sad, how they are angry about something.
Most of the times,
when you are being approached as a life coach,
you will find that people come to you
with emotional challenges.
These challenges that are reflected mostly around emotions,
usually also lead to actions.
And these actions often lead to consequences
that are not healthy
for the clients that you will be working with.
For example, you may find a client that may come
to you because they feel
that they have been emotionally overeating,
which may have led them to eating lot more,
making them fairly unhealthy.
It all stems from certain emotions
that they may be experiencing
that may have been triggered
because of the thinking that was behind those emotions.
And that is the essence
of working with somebody that has challenges
or emotional challenges.
You see,
most of our emotional challenges
are because we have not resolved our thinking
around certain events in our lives.
Let's understand this with an example.
Say Katie is really angry.
And Katie is really angry at Mark
because Mark again, did not put his dishes in the sink.
And so they're sitting outside,
it's dirty, it smells
and Katie is really, really mad about it.
And because Katie is really mad about it,
now she's mad at Jonathan, who's her kid,
for no reason whatsoever.
She is just mad.
Now, Katie being mad has originated
not because the emotion just showed up for her,
it is because of the thinking
that is behind the action that Mark may have done.
Mark left the dishes that were dirty.
Katie probably has an inherent thought
that when he kept the dishes again outside
and left without it.
"I have to do these dishes.
"These dishes is not my job.
"I'm an equal partner in this house,
"why should I do the dishes?"
She's thinking that Mark and Jonathan
are not supporting her and keeping dirty dishes around.
While this is an extreme example,
you see how her thinking about Mark leaving the dishes
is only making her angrier.
If you could get her to question that thinking
and ask a different question,
Katie might operate differently.
Mark left his dishes again.
He didn't put them in the sink.
Why is Mark doing that?
Is there a sense of urgency that he always has?
Does he not have a good planning system?
Is it something that he could learn
that would help him put the dishes away?
Is there something that I could learn
that will help me help him organize himself slightly better?
You see, switching Katie's narrative
from being mad at Mark
to asking the question that are more empowering,
more responsible, and even more thoughtful
allows Katie to get into a state of calm instead of anger.
And when she's calmer,
she has a more solution-based approach.
Haven't we all found ourselves in situations
where we were really, really angry on something,
and then a few hours later,
as we calm down we realized how silly our anger was.
This is what we are trying to do for our clients.
We're trying to switch the thinking of our clients
so they don't go into emotional states that are negative,
that are not powerful for the client,
but they go towards more towards emotional states.
States that are actually more helpful.
We are trying to help our clients
think through any given situation
in a slightly different way,
and showing them that other options are available
to think about the same event
to cause a different action
or a different consequence in our lives.
Byron Katie has a method that she calls The Work,
which is a powerful way of ending suffering.
Of thinking through
what may be happening as events in life
and turning them around to something positive.
I'm not going to explain Byron Katie's work,
but the reason why I refer that
is because what I'm gonna show you
is very much influenced
by what The Work really suggests.
When we're working with a client
that is going through a challenge,
a situation in life,
that is causing a lot of pain and suffering
and emotional distress in their life,
this could be a questioning pattern
that you could use
to be able to help them look at life,
look at that situation,
look at that suffering in a more positive context.
So let's work through these questions and see
how you could help your clients
turn around what they are currently experiencing
to something that's positive and more empowering.
The first question that you wanna ask your client is,
what is the thinking that incites this emotion?
The question clearly inquires
your client to find out the thinking behind the emotion.
To not associate themselves to the emotion so much
that the emotion controls their mind.
We are asking them to switch
to a lens that helps them identify
that it is the thinking that is causing the emotion
not the emotion itself.
For that matter,
it's not even the event that is causing the emotion.
It is the thinking of the event that is causing the emotion.
When you contextualize that,
it allows your client to really open up
and take one step back to go,
what is my belief?
What am I thinking?
What have I believed to be true
that right now this emotion becomes more prominent?
And this promotion becomes the forefront of that event
that may not necessarily incite an emotion itself.
Once you have helped that client
identify the thinking behind the emotion,
let's see if we can help them
look at an alternative perspective.
The next question could be,
what is the alternative thinking
that could be possible for the same event?
You see, Mark leaving dirty plates
could have incited,
"Mark always leaves dirty plates,
"he's somebody who is not clean,
"I don't like the person."
But we could also switch it around,
"Mark always leaves dirty plates, maybe it's a habit.
"What can I do to support him
"to understand that he has this habit?
"And also, what can I do
"to support him actually change this habit
"because I really do love Mark."
This is how switching your thinking
can completely turn
the way you are addressing a particular situation.
So ask your client,
what is the possible alternative thinking
that we could consider in that same event?
Is there something else that can be thought about
or considered that would help us understand that situation
but in a different light?
Now that we have alternative thinking
or maybe many different alternative thinking,
we could ask this following question.
What thinking should I choose to accept
to end the suffering?
This is an important question.
This question puts responsibility
on the person to decide
that they could choose to think differently.
While you will have clients resist this idea
because they will truly believe
that the person that did them wrong, did them wrong.
And there is no alternative thinking,
and neither of the alternate thinking is the right thinking,
you have to persuade them
to at least consider the idea
that there could be an alternative thinking
that can end their suffering and their pain.
That it is not about the person that caused them the pain,
it's about them ending the pain.
And that switch hopefully,
would get them to start to consider the other options.
The other options of thinking,
the other options of having a different emotional state
from where they are right now.
Once we have had our clients consider this new thinking
and at least consider to try it on,
ask them to try it on.
What would happen if you choose this thinking?
How would you change?
What would change around you?
How would your behavior change?
How would your emotions change?
How do you feel as you try on this new thinking?
The reason why we want our clients
to try this new thinking on
is because it will help them realize
that just by switching the narrative,
just by switching the thinking,
they feel less pain.
They feel less of a challenge.
They feel less of a suffering.
And that already is bringing them to a state
that will help them long-term
to reduce that pain, reduce that challenge,
and be more creative in finding solutions for life.
Now that we have had them choose this new thinking
and tried it on and they know it feels good,
let's go to the next question.
What do you think would be the benefits
if we chose this thinking every day?
This is where your client may establish a strong reason why
they should choose them new thinking
that you've identified for them.
And when they have a strong reason why,
the final question and the final step becomes very easy.
What is it that we can do every single day
to choose these thoughts around these kinds of events?
The reason why we want them
to choose these thoughts consistently every single day,
is because choosing a different thought
is a learned behavior.
We are creating a circumstance for our clients,
so they choose the more positive, more progressive,
more forward-thinking thoughts, every single day.
And to be able to enable our clients to do that,
we want them to have a plan.
How is it that they can choose this better way of thinking
every single day?
As they choose a better way of thinking every single day,
slowly but surely you'll find that their challenge,
the challenge they were dealing
with when they came in to work with you,
disappears slowly.
And other challenges will show up,
and these challenges
now because they understand how to think
and how thinking impacts their world,
they are now able to regulate those challenges
a lot more easier
and you're able to have a much easier dialogue
to be able to help them regulate these challenges
lot more easier, creating a positive outcome for them.
So that's the first part
of how you could coach somebody through the areas of life.
Then there's the second part.
And the second part is a more interesting part.
This is the part that I call ambition.
You see, a lot of individuals
may come to you because they are suffering.
They don't have extreme trauma
but they do have some suffering that's happening in life.
But once they get past their suffering,
once they are able to see a better view of the world,
they move on to something that is ambition.
They are now lot more passionate individuals.
They're looking for something greater in life.
They're looking to create something big.
They have big goals and big ambitions.
They want to do more.
They want to get more out of life.
And this is a great place to coach your clients.
This is a fantastic and phenomenal place
where your clients can get to
where they are excited about the opportunities
that are in future for them.
While they would have a lot of ambitions,
a lot of goals around things they want,
cars or houses or particular kind of experience,
very often they would get stuck
in the way to pursue their ambition.
You see, all of us have ambitions of a beautiful life
but very few of us are able to clearly define
how our life really looks like
when that ambition is fulfilled.
Yes, you want the car, but what is your life at that time?
How is it that you're going to work?
Are you really stressed out and you have the car?
Probably not.
Which means we need to do a little bit more work
to understand what the ambition truly is.
I'm gonna give you three questions
that you can use for yourself,
and you can use for your clients
to be able to find their passion
and create profit from that passion.
The first question that you wanna ask your client is,
"What is it that you have been passionate
"about for an extended period of time in your life?"
The reason why this question is framed this way
is because very often
people are passionate about a lot of things.
We are passionate about cooking
and passionate about travel and passionate about coaching.
You could be passionate about all those three things
but some of them you're passionate about for a long time,
and some of them kind of had a season in life
and now it's onto the next thing or next season in life.
So you wanna be able to identify
what is the thing that they say,
or a few items that they say
that they have been passionate
about for an extended period of time in their lives.
It's not only about now,
it has been at least five years
that they have inquired about it,
stayed curious about it,
wanted to learn about it,
wanted to grow in it, and so on and so forth.
So you wanna find out firstly what is that thing
that they're really, really passionate about.
The second question that you wanna ask
is which one of these passions
you have actually taken action to words,
and while you were taking action
you were so set that this passion is amazing.
The reason why that question is important
is because a lot of people get passionate
about things that they watch online especially.
Like they are passionate about,
"Oh, I want travel".
But they have never really bought a ticket,
traveled and see if they actually enjoy traveling.
"Oh, I would love to cook",
but they've never really taken a cooking course
and tried cooking something.
And because they have not taken action
their passion may be ill informed.
Their passion may be informed
from a place of just watching stuff
and watching other people do something
instead of true passion from their own soul.
Which is why you wanna ask them,
"Which amongst these passions have you taken action towards
"and you've found yourself to actually like it?"
For a couple of times, not just once.
For an extended period of time,
like we asked in the first part of the question.
When they have identified that,
now is the time for the third question.
Is there a way that this passion
can be turned into a profit?
The reason for this third question
is because some passions
are a little hard to turn into a profit.
Like for example, if you love to cook,
to open a restaurant is a completely different thing
than just loving to cook.
So you wanna ask that nuance question or saying,
can this passion be turned into a profit?
For example, cooking can be turned into a profit
by maybe having a cooking show online
which is significantly simpler
than starting a restaurant and making it work.
So you want to ask that question
because you want your client not only to know
what they're truly passionate about,
but can that be turned into a profit?
The last part of this life coaching model is spirituality.
You see, lot of times we are in our heads,
we are in our minds.
We are thinking about our passions from our mind,
we're thinking about our challenges from our minds,
they're all thinking based.
We're thinking it,
parts are coming to us
and it's all being processed on the mind.
What I have found,
and I'm sure you have found in some way,
is that there is a lot more
that's going around in the world
than things that we can think about.
There's a lot that as a human species
we still need to discover.
I just tend to call it spirituality.
This is our higher calling.
This is where our purpose meets our passion.
This is where we want to do something
that is greater than us.
This is where our urge is to create something
that's powerful and influential
and is positive, is so well driven.
This is probably the reason why
you decided to become a life coach,
because you wanted to contribute
to somebody else's life,
contribute to somebody else's success
because it made you feel grateful and fulfilled.
And that is where spirituality comes in.
While spirituality is a whole different segment,
I wanna give you one simple question
that could help you identify your spirituality
and can help your clients identify their spirituality.
The question is,
how can my talent, my being,
help the greater good?
Your humanity, world maybe a cause.
This simple question
while being really open-ended
inquires us and suggests us
that we really tune into our heart
and ask ourselves,
what is it that I can do as a talented individual
like we all are,
to be able to create a positive impact in the world?
Because I truly believe as human beings
we want to create a positive impact in the world.
So last question, maybe a simple enough question,
but if we took the advice and asked that question,
and wrote in our journals on how we can use our talents,
our being, our capabilities,
to create something positive for the world,
I'm sure we'll find a powerful answer
that will align our spirituality to our ambition,
and it will help us also work on our challenges
really, really fast.
My wish for you is that you use this model
and create an impact out in the world.
What I also hope is that I was helpful today.
And if I was,
I would love for you to hit that like button,
subscribe to this channel,
and leave me a comment on what you think
about this three-part life coaching model.
Also let me know in the comments section below
if you found the questions that I suggested helpful.
Thank you so much for watching,
this is Ajit Nawalkha,
and you're watching this on Evercoach.
(light hearted music)