Power of Acknowledgement in Coaching

How to Know if You are Connected to Your Client

Ask yourself:

• How many times have your clients connected back voluntarily?

• How many times did somebody tell you that “I want these sessions to never end because I feel good in these sessions”?

• How many times have your client called you just like that to share or take suggestions?

• Apart from the coaching sessions, how many times have your client made a phone call to you when they faced a down turn?

• How many times have you guided your client over phone without charging them for that conversation just because that conversation was crucial for him and money is not everything for you?

What are the perspectives generated through these questions? Can you resonate with any of them? If not, maybe get coached to find some answers as they can be very crucial from long term relationship perspective.

Benefits of Connection and Acceptance

Forming an emotional connection and truly accepting your client is extremely difficult; but that takes you to places. The client is not only the client; he is your ambassador, and the way you will make him feel will decide how much he would recommend you to others. Coaching as an industry works best with the word of mouth and hence it is very important to have your heart with the client. If you are with them in their journey, they would be with you in your journey. Stay with your clients so that they can stay with you. Hope you don’t take this as a strategy because it is not,  if you are not genuinely connected and interested in the coaching relationship, it would show up and there would be nothing worse than that. It needs a huge amount of emotional connection, acceptance, kindness, feeling of deep care and concern coming from within. You need to be genuinely caring towards your clients and o be involved in their goals.

Role of Acceptance

I am sure we all agree that the whole reason why we have coaching as a “hot profession” is because of the speed of lifestyle which is making people vulnerable. Everybody today has the need to be heard and accepted. while the acceptance could be from family, relatives, or career or professional peers, seniors, profession or , friends, or spouses or may be even ourselves. The acceptor could be anybody, but the urge for acceptance exists in everybody who breathes. When we work towards our goals, we strive towards our acceptance to ourselves in that goal. If you see from this perspective, Self-awareness itself is a form of acceptance of ourselves. When you start the journey of self-awareness, you start with acknowledging good things residing in you, then you move deeper to find more goodness and potential within you, then you recognize them and finally accept them to stay happy. The same works with the client, if you have accepted your client whole heartily without judgment and with lot of care, you have made a place in their heart to move forward and to help them achieve what they are set for.

Ask yourself:

• How many times has it happened with you that after one or few session, you didn’t feel like talking to a client and continued the sessions just because only the client was interested?

• Were you present with your mind and heart in that conversation?

• How many clients just had one or just few sessions with you and ended the coaching sessions with you by giving some excuse of time and schedules and then never came back?

The reason could be that they couldn’t connect with you in some of the initial conversations. And let me submit that it has happened with me also. I am sure that it happens with everybody during some point in time in our coaching career. If you reflect on this, then you can start devoting your efforts to build connection in first few sessions. Start being with the client and start making the relationship with genuine care and genuine concern. It is a very deep level of acceptance, which makes the client feel acknowledged for what they are and that acceptance makes the relationship strong.