As a coach, your best coaching practices require you to look deeply at the issues your clients bring you. While watching television recently, my husband’s quirky sense of humor produced a question which led me to think about how TV music is a sort of metaphor for beliefs. It was a scene in a perfectly ordinary supermarket, and suddenly there was an orchestra playing. His question–“what’s that invisible orchestra doing in a supermarket?”

What does TV Music have to do with beliefs?

Have you ever noticed how music suddenly appears during dramatic moments on television? Someone survives a risky surgery and suddenly violins are playing in the operating room. Or there is a car chase and a full orchestra suddenly roars into existence to accompany the racing vehicles on the freeway. So what does this mystery music have to do with your best coaching practices? It’s about looking at motivation. In the real world, it makes no sense that the music is there, but it is used to heighten emotion and draw you in. Similarly, your client’s beliefs hide somewhere until something triggers them, and suddenly they are driving the action, providing the passion and emotion. And while the beliefs go unrecognized, their effect is to cause your client to behave in inexplicable, extreme or undesirable ways.

As a coach using your best coaching practices, you are a super sleuth. You figure out what’s going on in the background. What beliefs are driving the behaviors? How do they limit your client? Until you really start looking, no one even knows those beliefs are there–not the client, not you. When you are using your best coaching practices, you use probing questions to find the beliefs that are constraining your client and stopping her from getting what she wants.

Your best coaching practices include transforming limiting beliefs

Once you and your client have identified the hidden beliefs that are limiting her, it’s your job as coach to transform them into beliefs that empower her. Unlike the TV music, you can’t just make the limiting beliefs disappear. But using your best coaching practices, you can work with your client to:
— Find out how those limiting beliefs are serving her–what needs they are meeting;
–Transform the limiting beliefs into empowering beliefs that meet the same needs at a higher level;
— Help her find ways to reinforce the new beliefs so the old ones don’t regain their power.

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Dorine G Kramer

JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach