- No such thing as failure; only feedback – A coach often sees behaviours that their client wants to change and the client might feel like a failure. What would be the point in life if there weren’t ways to grow? Sometimes we decide how we are going to grow, but then we fall off the bandwagon. It is easy to see this as a failure, but realistically this provides us with information about something that didn’t work. It’s an opportunity to change a variable and keep going but making life less hard for ourselves. For example, if we want to diet and we end up eating all the biscuits in the house then we try to make an allowance for having biscuits in moderation.
- Positive Intention – Most people have good intentions. Every action they take is to serve a purpose. We might think we make mistakes, but they are often motivated by good intentions, sometimes good intentions that don’t outweigh the bad we do. Sometimes when looking at an action that seems wrong coaches should consider how the action serves the client.
- Respect the mind-body connection – The way you act affects your mind and your mind affects your body language. Sometimes you need to fake it to make it. Act confident to feel confident. Open body language can make you more open. If you’re struggling to set boundaries, deliberately adopting closed body language can make you feel more firm about the boundary. The coach can help you use this by having you rehearse situations you find difficult.
- There’s no such thing as a bad person, only unhelpful attitudes. – Attitudes can change. Sometimes people are rigid thinkers and this makes them seem inflexible, but attitudes can change.
- Coaching should aid the maturity, decisiveness or strength of character for the client.
- People see reality through the gauge of their own experience. No-one experiences reality directly, but only by comparison to their prior experience of reality.