Ep #267: The Value of a Coaching Session

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it’s all about real clients, real problems and real coaching. And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Well hello, my friends. Today I am super excited to talk to you about the value of a coaching session. I know this seems like such a basic topic but I've actually been getting so many questions about what happens in a coaching session, should I sign up for a coaching session, who should I sign up with?

A lot of people who aren't in my immediate world when they find out what I do for a living want me to coach them, which of course I don't do one-on-one coaching anymore, but I have lots of coaches who work for me who do do sessions.

And so what I've decided to do as an offering on my site is to offer a one-off session. Now, this is specifically for those of you who aren't in Self-Coaching Scholars. What's wrong with you people? But if you aren't in Self-Coaching Scholars, I wanted to offer you a one-off session to give you an introduction to what we offer within Self-Coaching Scholars.

So if you're in Scholars, you already know you have access to coaches and you can get one-on-one coaching sessions within Scholars. But for those of you who aren't in there, you may just want to try out a coaching session. So I want to tell you what it's like to have a coaching session, how you can benefit, and how oftentimes, one coaching session is really all you need to get started.

So if you're interested after you listen to this in signing up for a coaching session, I really want to recommend that you go to thelifecoachschool.com and you just click on coach session and it'll take you to the one-on-one coaching session.

And you can sign up right there and you'll be scheduled. You'll be able to schedule right there upon purchasing it for your session right away. It's a 45-minute session that you can design any way you want. You can request to be coached on anything.

So you may just want to pick the biggest thing you're struggling with. You may be a long-time listener of the podcast and you may have an area or one of the podcasts that you don’t quite understand or maybe you're doing models, you're not quite getting them, you have some questions you'd like to ask, you'd like some help on just this one small topic, and you just want 45 minutes help with a certified, awesome coach that we have selected to work with you because we pre-screen all of our coaches.

Everybody has gone through the ringer in order for them to work for us as a life coach and so you will be connected up with one of the best, literally in the world. And you can ask them and get help with anything you want. Maybe it's a model, maybe it's a career change. Maybe it's weight loss. Maybe you need a push of motivation. Maybe you need some perspective in a relationship.

Whatever it is you want, you get to pick whatever that topic is. Our coaches are trained on every single podcast I've ever done, on every single topic we have ever covered. Our coaches have studied it in depth so they will be able to take you to the next level of understanding and also of application of whatever the area is that you most want to work on.

So a lot of people will ask me, "Well, what is it like to be coached? Is it just like having a conversation with someone? Is it like going to a therapist?" A lot of people have told me that they're intimidated, they're nervous to have a coaching session because they're not really sure what to say, they're not really sure what to do.

They don't know if they're together enough to get the help they need; they don't know if they can articulate it well enough for the person to be able to help them. And so I want to tell you that I have felt this way myself many times when it came to getting a coaching session or getting help with something.

And because I felt the way that you may be describing this, I created a coaching program and I helped train coaches to do what we call lead the session. So what this means is that any coach of mine that you will work with, you get to come to the session with nothing. You don't have to have prepared for the session, you don't have to bring a topic or bring the questions or be able to articulate anything.

You just get to come and be you. We will ask the questions. We will drive the session. We got you. We will manage the session for you. We are the ones that are the leaders, the professionals in that situation.

Now, this isn't always true for all coaching relationships. I can't speak for other life coaches, but one of the things that's important to me with all coaches who are certified through The Life Coach School is that we take responsibility to prepare and manage the session so that you as the client can bring whatever you want or nothing.

So I'm always telling my students, my coaches, I'm like, "Listen, when your client comes to you for a session, they may not know what they need. They may not know why they feel the way they feel. They may not know why they're not motivated, whatever. I don't want them to have to try and figure that out before they talk to you. That session that they have with you is for that purpose."

And so because I trained our coaches that way, they are able to really take you through the process to enlighten you to yourself. To show you your own mind without you having to be the one doing what we call the heavy lifting.

I used to go to therapy when I was much younger and I always felt like I had to have something to talk about. I had to like, prepare for my session because I had one of these Freudian therapists who literally just sat there the whole time. She literally nodded and went, "Mhmm," and then every once in a while, she would say, "Well, that sounds like..." and create some symbolic representation of what it might have meant.

And I remember I was super young at the time. I remember dreading my therapy sessions because of that, because I felt like almost like I had to entertain my therapist, which is insane. I couldn't have gone in there and just been quiet and not said a word.

Coaching is very different than that. Coaching is a very active, participatory situation and as coaches, we love to offer tools, we love to give exercises, we love to ask questions and take you through processes. So at the end of the session, it is our goal that you will have witnessed your brain in a way that you hadn't before.

I think as I grow into my position at The Life Coach School and I see how much our industry is influenced by the work that I'm doing, I see the value of our emotional health being recognized so much more, by everyone in our industry, especially of course, the clients that have had the experience of improved mental health, of improved emotional health, which of course are very - those terms can be used interchangeably because as you improve your mental health, of course your emotional health is improved.

So our purpose in doing these one sessions is to expose you to the process of what it is like to practice improving your mental and emotional health. And the first step for all of us is self-awareness. Now, I want to tell you a little story because I think it's important that you recognize that you don't have a lot of self-awareness if you haven't worked at it. Let me put it that way.

So I have some friends who love me and think that I'm great and we're going through some stuff, and I recommended that they join Self-Coaching Scholars, which they did. And they love it and they think it's great. And we were having a conversation about something and they were like, "I'm going to go take this to the Model. I'm going to go home and work on the Model on this."

And I said, "Okay, tell me what you're going to put into the Model." And their answer really showed me - what they said they were going to put in the C line was actually not a circumstance but a thought - that they didn't really understand that their interpretation of the world is not the world. That their observation of the world is not the same as the world.

So if I'm looking at the world and I think the world is beautiful, that doesn't mean the world is beautiful. It means that I think the world is beautiful. If I look outside and I say, "This is a gorgeous day," it doesn't mean it's a gorgeous day. It means I think it's a gorgeous day.

Now, in our own brains, we don't distinguish between our own interpretation, our observation, and reality. We think our observations are reality. But our observations of our life, of the world, of our relationships, of ourselves is totally biased. It's totally based on what our brain has been programmed to think.

Now, because we've always thought that way and interpreted the world that way, we think that is reality. We are like fish in water. We don't know we're in water. We don't know that our observations are different than what the world is. We think our observations are the world and that's where we get into trouble.

So when I was talking to these friends of mine and I said, "Hey, when you think about the world that way, how do you feel?" And they said, "But that's how the world is. We have to think about it that way." And I said, "Notice that you don't see the distinction between you and your observation of the world." And I said, "Now I want you to notice the difference. Here's what's true in the world and here's what you're thinking," and I pointed out those thoughts and it was like, mind-blown. Total mind-blown.

Then I was talking to another colleague of mine and he's really struggling with some business failures that he's had recently, and the way that he's thinking about himself and the way that he's thinking about his financial situation and the way he's thinking about his future is devastating. It's devastating.

And in his world, he thinks that he's just looking at his life and what has happened. He's just looking at what happened with his business. He's just looking at his bank account. He's just making observations. He's just seeing reality.

What I tried to show him was you're interpreting reality in a terrible way. You're interpreting what happened in a terrible way, in a way that's making you feel devastated and therefore perpetuating the idea that you're a failure. And this is a really intelligent, aware, exposed to a lot of self-development guy, and he couldn't even recognize it in himself.

And the last thing I want to tell you is so many times I call one of my best girlfriends who's also a coach and I think I'm just telling her what happened. I think I'm just expressing to her what the day was like. I'm not putting my opinion on it, I'm not putting my spin on it, I'm just conveying the facts.

And she often points out to me that I'm not doing that. She often points out to me that I'm having a lot of thoughts about what happened and a lot of thoughts about the world that aren't serving me, that are in fact causing me to experience a lot of pain.

And when she helps me see that difference, when she helps me recognize that I am a fish in water and that my thoughts don't really accurately convey to me what reality is, I have so much more freedom in my life to change my thinking, change my feelings, and change my actions and results.

And I think so many of us think that because we understand the concepts, because we understand and coach ourselves so much that we don't need a coach. We don't need a session, we don’t need someone to reflect back to us what we already know, and we're wrong about that.

We are totally wrong about that because as soon as I get on that phone and start talking out loud and hear my thoughts out loud, and she says to me, "Hey, did you notice this thought? Did you notice that thought?" or we do a model together, I feel like the expanse of what is possible for me opens up every single time because I am limited.

You are limited in the way that you think by what you've always thought. And someone who's not in your life can give you perspective on your brain that you may not be able to get on your own brain.

So one of the opportunities that I want to give to you is the ability to go to a coaching session and do a thought download with your coach to just instead of writing down your thought download, which is what you would do in self-coaching, you go to the session and you do a thought download with your coach.

And here's one of the recommendations that I always give to all of my coaches who are being coached because those of us who have been exposed to a lot of self-help, those of us who are coaches have huge challenges in being able to recognize our own misguided thinking because we think we already know what's happening, we're already on top of ourselves. And we feel like we already know this stuff, we already know what's going on, I don't need anyone to convey this back to me.

And the truth is we probably need it more than anyone because especially if we're smart, we can justify our own limited thinking very easily. We can push it away because we're like oh, I've already worked on this before, I already have this figured out. And a coach will be able to point out to you, you don't have it figured out.

So what I tell all my students and all my coaches, I say, “When you go to a coaching session, you need to take off your coaching hat. You need to not be trying to coach yourself while you're being coached. You just need to go and be a hot mess."

It's kind of like if you go to get a massage, you don't want to be like, telling the masseuse how to do it the whole time. You'll miss the point and it's not good for the coach and it's not good for you. You just want to go in there and be a body. And when you go into your coaching session, you just want to go in and be a brain.

And you'll look at your brain with your coach, but don't try and edit what you say, don't try and be evolved, don't try and be clean-minded. Your coaching session, if you're a coach or if you're someone that's done a lot of this work is your opportunity to just let it all go. Your coach will hold space without judgment and just help you see your own thinking.

So often I'll do a thought download with someone and I'll be like, wow, I did not even know that was in my brain. I had to say it out loud to you to even recognize that that was in my brain. And then usually in a coaching session, what we'll do is pull a couple of those thoughts and do some thought models on them and talk about what we're currently thinking and what we want to think.

And sometimes we'll evaluate situations in our life and talk about them in a way that we can make decisions with the perspective of someone who isn't in our life, who doesn't have any vested interest in what we do or don't do, and gives us the opportunity to really see all of our options based on what we choose to think.

The other thing that I think coaching sessions do beautifully that's much more challenging to do when we're coaching ourselves is gives us the space to feel with a witness, which is a very different experience than feeling by yourself.

So a lot of times I'll teach you to feel and witness your own emotion, but when you can be in a space where you are going to go deep into an emotion, feel an emotion, access an emotion, and be able to convey to another person what it feels like in your body, what it feels like as a vibration and have them be there and to listen to that explanation is a very different experience than doing it by yourself.

I think it's a much more powerful experience. And describing yourself to another person out loud lets you listen to your own description about it, which I think takes you to a deeper level of awareness. Mental health, emotional health is all about awareness.

I've taught you a lot of concepts on this podcast. I've taught you a lot of ways for you to approach your life, interpret your life, think about your life. But until you expose your own self to yourself, you can't utilize any of those tools. You can't apply any of those tools until you see what's actually happening now. And of course, you have to understand what's actually happening now in order to change that for the future.

One of the most beautiful things about the Model, the self-coaching model is that it applies to everything always. I have many tools that we have in our toolbox as coaches that we can help you use and apply to your life. But we always have the Model to apply to everything. There's only five things that exist on the world.

They are circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, or results. So no matter what's going on for you, it'll work in one model. I've had coaching sessions that have gone on for an hour and a half where we just thought about one model and it changed everything. And I've had coaching sessions where we get through 20 models and it changes everything.

The Model is the most elegant, perfect tool to coach ourselves and to be coached with than anything else in the world. So I want to invite you, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, if you think you understand the Model, if you've been doing models with yourself, I want to invite you to do a session with one of my coaches and bring one of your models to that session.

First and foremost, just make sure you're doing the Model properly. So many of you guys think you're doing the model properly and you're not. And it's not even that there's a wrong way to do it. It's just that we can look at your models and help you make them so they're more effective for awareness, they're more effective for change.

A lot of you will have some really common mistakes that you do in your models and getting that feedback will be super helpful. The other thing that I really want to invite you to do is to come with any questions that you have about anything that you've learned. Here's where I think some of the best learning comes from.

If there's stuff that I've taught you in this podcast that you don't really agree with, you don't quite get, you don't think applies to you, I think that's a very useful thing to bring up in your session. It's a really important thing to explore. And if you're not threatened by it, it's of course totally fine to disagree with me, but if it's bothering you, if you're like, "Why doesn't this jive with me? Why doesn't this work with what I'm trying to apply?" having a coaching session about it can either really illuminate your own perspective on it and make it even stronger, or it might give you an alternative perspective that will take you deeper into your work.

And I'm going to leave you with this; I want you to consider doing a coaching session as a gift to yourself, as a way of saying I need 45 minutes to work on my life instead of being in it. I need a witness; I need someone to help me talk this out. I need someone to help me change my perspective of myself or of this other person. I need someone who can be non-judgmental, hold space, and love me through this conflict that I'm having with this person in my life.

I'm super excited to offer this to you, to extend this to you as a really affordable, wonderful way for you to get access to the top level coaches in the world and to take your work deeper to make your awareness stronger, and to possibly help you with something you may be struggling with right now. Simply go to thelifecoachschool.com/coach session and try it out.
Let me know how it goes, my friends. Have a beautiful week everybody. Talk soon. Bye-bye.

Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out Self-Coaching Scholars. It's my monthly coaching program where we take all this material and we apply it. We take it to the next level and we study it. Join me over at the TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. Make sure you type in the TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in Self-Coaching Scholars. See you there.