If you’ve ever felt stuck with a client and thought, “I don’t even know what direction to go here,” you’re not alone. That uncertainty doesn’t mean you’re a bad coach. It usually means there’s more of the coaching process that needs to be worked out. That’s exactly why we’re digging into real coaching questions from actual client scenarios today.
In this episode, Sarah Tierney and I are doing something we’ve never done before on the podcast. We’re pulling real questions from coaches inside the Health Mindset Coaching Certification about their actual client scenarios, and we’re talking through how we’d approach each one. These are the kinds of conversations we have behind the scenes every single week, and chances are, if our students are asking these questions, you may have them too.
In this blog, I’ll share a few of the questions we discussed, but head on over to the full podcast episode to hear the rest of the questions and solutions we provided!
Why We’re Sharing Real Coaching Questions and Client Scenarios
One thing that is missing for a lot of us when we start coaching is that we are not given an opportunity to then talk with our colleagues or peers about how to handle client situations. HMCC solves that issue. You come in and obviously you learn behavior change principles, how to be a coach, how to coach clients through behavior change. But then also, who can you round table with on certain client situations?
Doing coaching alone is really hard and you don’t have eyes on your work. Doing this coach work solo is something I do not recommend. You want to have peer review in the coaching space. So today we’re bringing those real coaching questions and client scenarios to the podcast so you can learn from them too.
“I Can’t Tell If It’s a Knowledge Gap or a Self-Efficacy Issue”
The question: This coach says, “I feel directionless with my client. I can’t discern if my client has a nutrition knowledge gap or if they have low self-efficacy and their abilities to make decisions in the moment.” The client says, “I think I just need to be told what to do.” The coach says, “I don’t know what she needs though to help her do better. I’m kind of stuck. So how do I find out?”
This coach needs to ask more questions. If you have a client and you’re trying to tease apart whether it’s a genuine knowledge gap or a self-efficacy issue, you need more back and forth, more information. Sometimes coaches feel a little insecure doing that because they feel like they need to be the most wise person in the room. They need to know all of the information first. But one of the best skills you can have as a coach is not being afraid to come to your client and ask those questions.
It’s not a clear cut answer of, “Oh yeah, this is definitely a self-efficacy issue.” Let’s say this coach goes to the client and starts asking some more questions about what is feeling most difficult for them. And this client comes back and says, “I feel like I know what I’m supposed to do, but then when obstacles or challenges arise, that’s where I really just feel like I don’t know what to do in those situations.” Then self-efficacy could be something that we need to touch on because it’s clear that when things get difficult, that’s where the client is struggling the most.
Use scaling questions. If you’re trying to tease apart what’s really going on, use a scale of one to five or one to ten. Build up a plan with them through those clarifying questions, then ask: on a scale of one to ten, how confident do you feel going into this? If they’re at below an eight or at a three or below on a one to five, you want to talk more with them about it. What’s keeping them from being higher?
So often the questions you’re unsure about, or the direction you’re unsure of with a client, the answer is to get more information. To ask more questions. Rather than making it seem like, “I just don’t know how to help this client,” it might just simply be: what else do we need to extract from this situation in order to answer the question?
This is going to feel ambiguous and you’re going to feel uncertain with navigating clients. We want to normalize that. Nothing has gone wrong here just because you’re feeling a little bit directionless. It just means there’s more of the coaching process that needs to be worked out.
“My Client Struggles With Open-Ended Questions”
The question: This coach says, “I have a client struggling with open-ended questions. I gave her the emotional eating worksheet and she needed her husband to help her fill it out. She also struggles with setting a weekly goal. Her ultimate goal is to lose weight and eat more fresh foods, but she just doesn’t know how to. She doesn’t know what to say or what to do each week.” The coach is asking: what am I missing?
At HMCC we suggest best practices are using open-ended questions because if you just use yes or no questions, you could miss a lot of details that are really needed. But then we have clients who really struggle with it. It could be an awareness piece, or it could be that they’re new to this work. A lot of the questions we ask clients have not come up before in their life, probably ever.
Try offering multiple choice answers. You don’t want to just tell your clients what to do all the time, but you also don’t want to be in a stalemate where nobody wants to tell anyone what to do and nobody actually has solutions. A good in-between is to say, “I’m hearing that this is a goal of yours. I have a few different options of how that could look. Do any of these feel the best to you? If not, is there a combination of them or a totally different option that I’m missing here?” Now you’re getting their gears turning based on options, but you’re still allowing them to be the decision maker.
Give examples from other clients. You can share how previous clients have answered those questions as a jumping off point. Some people just need to see how someone else responded to get their own mind going. But be careful about using yourself as the example. A client may not identify with you. They may feel that you are so much farther ahead and think, “Well, it’s easy for you to say.” Rather than using yourself, you can say, “My other client, when they were in this sticky situation, this is what they were going through. I don’t know if that’s what’s happening here with you, but let me know if you identify with anything that I just shared.”
Consider that they may not know how to access it themselves. If you have clients where you feel like you’re just getting a couple words or they’re not even responding at all, it’s like, have you ever thought that maybe they don’t know how to access it themselves? So how are they supposed to give it to you? Their level of ability for introspection just isn’t even there. Instead of thinking “this client just doesn’t give me information, so how am I supposed to coach them,” ask yourself: is there a way that I can coach them to help uncover this stuff? Maybe that’s the core issue. This is one of those real coaching questions from client scenarios that comes up again and again.
The Bottom Line
Feeling uncertain with your clients doesn’t mean you’re a bad coach. It means there’s more of the coaching process that needs to happen. Ask more questions. Get more information. Use scaling questions to gauge confidence. Offer multiple choice options when open-ended questions aren’t landing. Set up guardrails for yourself so mindset conversations stay productive. And don’t be afraid to sit with something for a week rather than forcing a next step that doesn’t exist yet.
These are the kinds of real coaching questions and client scenarios that come up every single week inside HMCC. Doing this work alone is hard. Having peers and mentors who can round table with you on client situations is what makes you a better coach. That’s exactly what we do inside The Health Mindset Coaching Certification.
If you have a client who’s ghosting check-ins, I have a full episode on that. Check out my episode on what to do when your client is ghosting you for both the prospective client and the current client side of things.
Find me on Instagram: @coachkaseyjo
