Life coaching is not a seasonal job, but during the holidays, you may have clients who make New Year’s resolutions and are striving to keep those promises made to themselves. How do you help your clients keep those important resolutions?

According to Kathy Kolbe, an author, theorist, speaker, consultant, and organizational strategist, there are four personality types, or universal human instinct behaviors, when it comes to tackling a task. Or making and keeping a New Year’s resolution. She is considered one of the leading authorities on conation, which is the faculty of the brain which motivates and drives individuals to take action on a task or purpose according to their instincts. These four types of instinct-driven behaviors are:

1. Quick starters
2. Implementers
3. Fact finders
4. Follow through individuals.

In your life coaching business, you can utilize these behaviors to categorize clients and then create strategies and techniques that will motivate them to keep their New Year’s resolutions.

Life Coaching The 4 Behavioral Types

Quick starters jump right into their resolutions. They discover what works through trial and error and then modify their actions based on results. Your task as a life coach is to not try to change their quick-starting behavior, but to focus on the modification that will naturally occur; help clients find the right ways to modify and adapt. For example, if a client wants to lose weight for the new year, they might jump right into a severe diet and a unsustainable workout program. You can help modify their quick action to a more realistic and reachable level.

Implementers focus on space, objects, and environments. They would imagine a world in which their New Year’s resolutions are being followed and then create models to help them reach their goals. Your life coaching practice would help them find their own answers at each stage – help them imagine, help them build a model, and then work with them to implement the models they have created. For example, an implementer who has a resolution to have a more efficient office space would create a model that might be unrealistic – your job would be to help this client create a realistic model that is workable and attainable.

Fact finders do as much research as possible when starting a new task or behavior. Good life coaching will help them use this research to specify the most important facts and then implement them in the best way possible to achieve a specific goal. For example, if a client wants to get in shape for New Years, they would probably buy books and peruse the Internet for every possible type of workout or exercise. You can help them narrow down the research and put their focus on a few specific areas or workouts at a time.

Follow through individuals may be the best at keeping New Year’s resolutions because their behavior is focused on maintaining. However, these people may stick with something even though they detest it because their desire to follow through is stronger than their desire to succeed. If your life coaching client wants to lose weight for the new year, they may start a specific diet that may eventually become hard to maintain – they may learn to hate it. But, they keep with it for as long as possible because that is what follow through people do. Coaching these clients mans that you help them find a diet that is less severe and also discover other ways to shed pounds and keep it off.

Life coaching can be a complex job as you deal with may different types of personalities with many different goals. However, most people can be categorized into one of these four behavior types. Once they are categorized, you can use your life coach skills to develop techniques and exercises that works for each type.

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!