The psychology of coaching is what we life coaches use to help our clients. To be more specific, the psychology of coaching is all about the mental states and processes at work in the human mind. In our profession, we often talk about mastering our psychology, and teaching our clients to master theirs. That is perhaps the biggest distinction between the psychology of coaches and that of other helping professionals, and that is the first distinction we’ll discuss.

Why The Fuss About Mastering Your Psychology?

If you haven’t yet learned how to master your own psychology, now is the time. Do it by controlling your emotional triad of focus, beliefs and physiology, and a world of achievement opens to you. When you master your psychology, you can quickly put yourself into a peak state for coaching effectively. You can set aside your personal concerns and emotions and give total focus to your client or to whatever task you wish. And you can teach your client how to do it so he can minimize the effect his emotional state has on his own effectiveness.

What The Psychology Of Coaching Says About Your Clients

There is an important distinction between the psychology of coaching clients and the psychology of therapy clients. Coaches assume that their clients are psychologically intact. We work from the premise that whatever their behaviors are, they are rooted in the need to satisfy one or more of the basic human needs of certainty, love and connection, significance and variety. We are more interested in present motivations and beliefs than in stories of past history.

The Distinction Of Asking The Right Questions

Great coaches ask great questions and train their clients to ask great questions of themselves. The right questions open up interpretations and possibilities that would never occur to your client. For instance, if your client is upset about something, you could ask why he’s upset and stop there. But a better question to ask might be “What’s great about what happened?”. That one could change his psychological state and allow him to access interpretations that could shake him out of some limiting beliefs or behaviors.

Knowledge of the psychology of coaching is what will allow you to help your clients. Develop the skill to recognize your client’s mental states, manipulate them with his consent, and help him get the results he wants.

Hope you took some great value out of this post today! I’d love to hear your feedback, so make sure you leave a comment with your thoughts or questions. And also, you can click on the Twitter button below to retweet this article… Thank you!

Dorine G. Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach