We are pleased to share an article entitled “Clearing Limited Beliefs” by Lion Goodman.
Your clients come to you to get support and help with their problems. Like most human beings, they have a lot of them. You’ve been trained to do that, but you may have noticed that most of the methods you use produce temporary results rather than permanent change. This was my greatest frustration in my early coaching career 25 years ago. Clients came back week after week with the same set of issues. They were happy and hopeful at the end of our session, and the next week they returned just as frustrated and irritated as they had been before.
Have you noticed this pattern in your own work as a coach? I’ve talked to thousands of coaches, and the vast majority have experienced this pattern. If this is true for you, it’s not your fault.
It’s the processes you’ve been taught.
Our clients want transformation, but they often get information. Transformation is profound and permanent. Information is like advice – readily available on the Internet and through A.I. bots. Informational coaching is an outside-in solution to an inside-out problem.)
If you want to survive and thrive as a coach, learn to transform your clients from the inside out.
There is one major difficulty with this recommendation. Coaching schools and the International Coaching Federation have declared that coaching is not therapy, not consulting, not counseling, and not teaching. They have set a clear boundary: coaches work only with the present and the future. Coaches leave the past to professionally credentialed psychologists and therapists.
This is a double bind because what stops our clients (and ourselves) from moving forward in life is stuff from the past: self-esteem issues, limiting beliefs formed in childhood, bad programming, and traumas.
If you took all your clients who have old limiting beliefs and referred them to a psychotherapist to solve the issue, you would rapidly deplete your client base to zero. We all have stuff from the past that holds us back from creating the life we want.
So what is a coach to do?
Learn how to clear your clients’ limiting beliefs with a coaching methodology that isn’t therapy. It will be therapeutic, because therapeutic as an adjective means “… it helps you to relax or to feel better about things, especially about a situation that made you unhappy (Collins Dictionary).”
The ways we have to help our clients can be divided into three major levels of change:
Outcomes Level Change: Most coaching methods focus on what’s showing up on the surface of awareness, and the client’s desired outcomes. These are outside-in interventions: “I’m going to help you clarify what you want and what you need to do to get it. Then we’ll increase your motivation, change your habits, and hold you accountable for your actions.”
This kind of coaching really works for some people, especially those who have a strong will and a high level of motivation. For example, in sports coaching, athletes are already highly motivated to improve their performance, so this kind of intervention is exactly what they need – pointers to make incremental shifts that result in improvement.
Processes Level Change: This type of intervention goes below the surface and is based on the coach’s favorite processes: “I’m going to teach you to be more mindful, and give you recordings to listen to every night.” Or, “Say this affirmation ten times every day.” Or “Tap in these places while loving and forgiving yourself.”
There are dozens of processes that can be used in coaching, and they can be very helpful. They are usually more effective than outcomes-based coaching because they involve self-reflection and they take the client deeper into their own experience. The promise is: “Do this process repeatedly, and change will eventually become permanent.” This is the problem with most processes – you have use them again and again to keep getting the results. There is incremental or temporary improvement, but a week later the client is back to their old habits and reactions. And if the client doesn’t get the promised results, they think either there’s something wrong with you, the coach, or with the method you used, or there’s something wrong with them, so they quit or switch to a different coach or therapist.
Identity Level Change: Change at this level shifts what the client believes about themselves. For example, when a client replaces the belief, “I’m worthless“ with “I’m priceless,” they feel like a different person – because they ARE a different person. They can see possibilities that weren’t visible before. When change occurs at this level, it’s a permanent shift. It doesn’t need to be repeated. It’s once and done. Our self-beliefs shape and color our perceptions, abilities, motivation, choices, and actions. They are the lenses we see the world through. When you facilitate change at this level, you empower your client at the depth of their personality. They walk out of a session changed, and the change sticks. They can now function in the world at a higher level.
If you can transform people this deep and permanent level, clients will flock to you, because that’s what most people are looking for in their life. They want their lives to change for the better. Outside-in methods are like putting a Band-Aid on a deep wound. It may feel better for a while, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
Here’s a prescription for virtually guaranteed career and financial success as a coach: here are two recommendations:
- Learn to facilitate deep and profound transformation in your clients.
- Establish one or more processes to find and enroll clients and do it every day.
Many coaches find marketing distasteful – and very few of those coaches make a decent living. We live in an attention marketplace, and we have to market ourselves and our services to survive and thrive. Hold your nose and find a way to do it. Find a way to market yourself that matches your own style and integrity.
When you combine these two recommendsations, you’ll get more referrals, higher fees, more consistent revenues – and a stellar reputation that draws people to you.
And when you produce outstanding results for your clients, you’ll feel the profound satisfaction that comes from impacting others’ lives – in almost every session.
This is why I created the Clear Beliefs Method of Trauma-Informed Therapeutic Coaching – to give coaches a way to get rapid and permanent results rather than temporary or partial results.
The Clear Beliefs Coach Training is a coaching methodology that intentionally creates shifts at the core of the psyche, in the belief system. It is not therapy – and it is highly therapeutic. More than 600 practitioners in 45 countries around the world have graduated from the training, and we get rave reviews from 97% of graduates.
We have conducted psychometric research and shown significant results in improving personality characteristics and reducing negative self-beliefs and responses to past traumas. It is accredited for 40 hours of CCEs by the International Coaching Federation and the Association for Coaching.
For more information, visit www.ClearBeliefs.com.
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