Robbins-Madanes Training | RMTCenter
Client Startup Kit (First Three Sessions)
Session 1: Understanding your client
In this section, you'll understand what questions will help you get a full understanding of your client. You'll also get some great tips on navigating the different areas of a client's life.
Outlines and ideas for how to plan your first sessions with a client are useful and practical, but when you are actually speaking with someone, you never know what will be thrown your way. This is where your intention and focus come into play.
The client wants to feel connected with, understood, and cared for, no matter what information they give you. You should always make a point of being open to the client, ask them for more details, more information. Never come across as arrogant or a know it all. A common pitfall for a coach is to believe that, "If this client would just do what I tell them, they wouldn't be in their situation or have this challenge." The truth is your client is the expert on their life. You are a consultant. With this is in mind, your motto should always be "Do no harm."
Be ready and open to learn from your clients, acquaintances, and friends. They will teach you more than any training or class. So, embark on this adventure with open arms, ready to meet with as many potential clients as possible, just like a student in college who spends their first year taking a variety of classes before picking a major. As a beginner coach, be ready and open for a coaching-type conversation at any time. You may be in a cafe, at a friend’s house, in line at the store, and you are presented with an opportunity to listen and care. You are training in these moments as a coach, flexing your conversational muscles, practicing active listening, inviting sharing with your body language, tone of voice, and heart. With this attitude, you will be amazed by the opportunities you have to talk with others. People are everywhere. People who want to connect and listen are not. You get to be this force of kindness in the world, allowing others to naturally feel better because someone heard them and cared.
In all activities, be it learning an instrument, driving a car, or becoming a life coach, the number of hours you practice gives you your expertise. Start practicing now. Stop worrying about your website, or whether you know the exact definition of metaphor. Get out there and start talking, listening, and caring. Give yourself the present of being free from judging yourself. You need to have at least 30 coaching-type conversations before you tell yourself you need to improve on anything or change yourself in any way. Enjoy this time you are getting to know a new side of yourself. Organically your style, who you most enjoy working with, and your favorite coaching strategies and tools, will emerge. Then everything, all the checklists you might be telling yourself you must complete, will fall into place. You will know, “This is what I am best at, these are the people I help the most easily, this is where I like to do my work,” and so on.
If you have a friend, family member or acquaintance who enjoys learning and growing or who likes acting, ask for their help. Tell them to present to you as different people with different lives and practice with them. You will have a lot of fun together. Many adults miss the way we all used to play as children, those days when one day you could be a professional dancer, the next day a police officer.
Identify in your life the person who is your greatest supporter, and let them support you. This person is a natural coach to you. Give them the opportunity to encourage you and let them know how important their support is.
Start with these simple questions:
1. I am so happy to meet with you. Tell me a little about yourself.
2. It is great to be here together. Do you have a specific goal or outcome for our coaching time? (what is a challenge they want to overcome, relationship they want to improve, pattern of life they want to begin? There are endless possibilities for goals.) Stay with this subject as long as necessary for your client to feel understood. Repeat back to them what they have told you so that you have clarity.
3. Would you like my help defining and understanding your goals fully?
You can explain to the client:
"The way I work is to first really understand you. My goal for the next hour is to really understand your situation, your way of thinking, feeling, and of experiencing life and situations. I would like to understand your relationships, now and in the past. This way I can help you the most effectively and quickly to reach your goals. Sometimes my clients realize brand new goals during our first meeting, as they explain themselves to me. This is always ok. What I have noticed is that sometimes understanding oneself better leads to understanding our goals better." (Note: when talking with women, they often prefer an emphasis on the word “feeling,” whereas men tend to prefer an emphasis on “thinking.”)
Remember: some personality types are very-outcome driven and do not necessarily want to share with you about the rest of their life. In this case, it’s important to ask for their permission to ask them about all areas of their life. Explaining to them why this is important for you to understand them. You will listen and look for clues to how they feel when you are talking with them. A very outcome-driven client may send you an email before your first session with their goals and patterns already written out. You should give this person significance by going over anything they present you with in detail. Often, we learn a lot before our first meeting with a client.
Keep in mind for yourself, as the coach:
You can and should take notes and give feedback to the client. Have a notebook handy. Your client will be giving you key information that will be more and more useful to you in the future. For instance, you want to write down names of key people in the person’s life, key moments and decisions. When the client talks about something that they want, aspire to, or like, write down the exact phrases they use. For instance, one person may emphasize “fun” as in “that’s no fun” or “I thought to myself, that would be fun.” In this case, write down “fun” as a key word in the person’s life. These terms and phrases are charged with meaning for the person.
I like to ask questions until I really understand. If a client is speaking about a wife, I might ask, "Is she very creative?" in response to the husband’s explaining how his wife changes her mind often. Take risks in a polite, humble way. If you are wrong, they will tell you and explain the person better to you. The risks to take should always be aimed at elevating the intention of the client and the people they are in relationship with. Never ask, "Is your wife a very selfish person?" This would lead to the client having more negative feeling towards their wife. The coach should understand the clients relationships and sources of love and connection.
Most importantly, in your first session you are getting to know your client. Here is a checklist to have for what you should know about them. Allow yourself time to naturally learn instead of making this a questionnaire. You may focus on one set of questions in each session. Or you may want to keep going in the first session and understand every area of questions.
Questions around Connection and Love
In order to know how to influence your client, you need to know who is already influencing them. Who is in the client's inner circle of relationships? Keep asking until you feel you have a picture of the people in your client’s life. Learning about your client’s relationships allows you to discover their different sides. You also understand what their emotional resources are very quickly.
1. Are they married? Where they married to someone else before? Are they divorced or separated? Ask about their spouse.
2. Do they have children? What are their ages? Invite them to share with you about each child and their relationship with that child.
3. What is their job like? Do they like their job? Why and why not? Who are their colleagues?
4. Who are their friends?
5. Extended family that is important in their lives both in a positive and challenging way?
6. Are there any drug or alcohol problems in the family?
7. Has there ever been physical or emotional abuse?
8. If client is worried about client or family member, you may ask whether anyone is suicidal or dangerous?
9. "In your life, who do feel is most aligned with you?"
10. "Who do you admire most?"
11. "What is it about this person that you admire?"
12. "Who are you challenged by?"
Questions around the client's State
1. How do you like to feel? Some people enjoy being creative, some thoughtful, intense, cheerful, helpful, sharp, strategic, selfless, understanding, sensual, teacherly, melancholic, dreamy (you can add to this list and invite your client to share a new state with you).
2. Is there a state of being you want to experience more often?
3. When you are most you? What state are you in? You know you are in this state because time flies by.
4. What kind of people are you usually around? If you could increase a certain emotion or state in others, what would it be? Do you help people feel encouraged, creative, connected, inspired?
Questions around Spheres of Life
Everybody has spheres of life that are important to them in some way. When we move from one sphere to another, we experience a transition - for instance when we go home from work, we shift our expectations, our state, our focus, and which needs we prioritize. So it’s great to ask your client what spheres of life are important to them.
1. What are the spheres of your life? (Make a list together. For many people it’s Work, Relationships, Self. For others it could be: Family, Volunteer Work, School, Friends, Pets, Working Out. It could include five areas or two.
2. Tell me a little about each sphere.
3. Is there one sphere that takes most of your time and focus?
4. Is there a sphere of life you would like to spend more time building? What would be added to it? People, emotions, activities, successes?
5. If life felt really fantastic, what sphere of life would you be able to spend more time in?
Questions around contribution
1. Who do you give the most to? To whom do you give emotionally, or through worrying about them, or financially?
2. Who gives the most to you? This could be someone from your past. This could be a family member, friend, philosopher, blogger, teacher, co-worker, etc.
3. If you had the time and resources, who would you like to give to more?
4. How do you give to yourself? This could mean activities you do alone like reading or watching something. This could mean sexually. This could mean through a fun relationship. Giving to yourself includes anything which allows a person to feel love and connection.
Fifteen minutes before ending your session, you should review the key points. Repeat your understanding about their relationships, goals they have, challenges they would like to overcome. Often at this point they may introduce something new. Ask them now, “Is there anything else you want to share with me, that we haven't talked about?"
Take-away action at end of session:
Always give a take-away action for your client. Explain that in the session you understand and strategize together. Outside the session, your client transforms their life and relationships. For this reason, you always give a take-away action for your client. When a person does something concrete in their normal day, they benefit much more than when they do it only in the context of a coaching session. Ask your client to keep a journal or to write a letter. By writing, your client will be able to observe their patterns in a deeper way. You will gain insight together about times of day and relationships which trigger the client's "challenge" or which create blocks to achieving goals. Journalling about times of day that the client feels good is also very helpful. With today’s technology, it is very easy to ask the client to quickly enter a note in their phone when they notice they are experiencing great energy, joy, feelings of motivation, happiness. You can reflect back to the client the words they use about themselves, and what they hope to have more of during your session. Then ask them to note when these emotions surface. They can also track when a pattern they wish to change occurs in their day.
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