As a life success coach, you take your client through a series of steps on the way to reaching his goals. No matter what your particular process is, most likely you work with your client to develop a strategy and action steps. Then, of course, your client has to take those steps in order to have the success he wants in his life or work. So why is it that so often he doesn’t take the actions? What gets in his way?

Sabotage From The Outside

Every one of us faces all kinds of external saboteurs. It’s very easy to get thwarted by the normal time and energy consuming distractions of our modern age, and being a life success coach doesn’t exempt you from the sabotage. It probably does, however, mean you have developed the tools your clients also need. There’s a long list of external saboteurs–telephone calls, email, the net, the barking dog next door. Share your successful techniques with your client and work together to find the best strategies for him.

Internal Saboteurs Can’t Hide From a Life Success Coach

Your client’s internal saboteurs are his limiting beliefs. As your client’s coach, you are responsible for seeing his limiting beliefs when he can’t, and for helping him to see how they affect his behavior. By just identifying the limiting beliefs, you begin the process of changing them and taking away their power. Internal saboteurs are like an onion, though. Don’t make the mistake some life success coaches do, of thinking that all your client’s limiting beliefs have been handled and wondering why nothing in his behavior seems to have changed. There is always a deeper layer.

Intimate Saboteurs Can be The Toughest to Handle

Sabotage can also come from people who are closest to your client. For instance, someone with a weight loss goal may be sabotaged by her partner who wants pizza for dinner instead of baked chicken, or comes home with ice cream to share over a movie on TV. Consciously or unconsciously, that’s sabotage. As a life success coach working with that client, you will need to help her address this particularly tricky kind of saboteur.

Sabotage is an issue for all of us, coaches and clients alike. Stay aware of it. Handle it in yourself and coach your clients on how to handle it to achieve the goals they want.

Give this strategy a try and see for yourself that it works. If you liked this coaching tip, leave a comment or use the handy bookmark buttons below to share it with others on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. Thanks!

Dorine G. Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach