Can you offer Counselling?

My client has previously come to me for tarot readings having been in a complicated love situation for many years, she set up her own business offering tarot readings a couple of years ago but is still struggling to get it off the ground. The purpose for her session today was to try and put some manageable goals in place.
She often finds that the emotional situation she is in drags her down and consequently takes her motivation away from building up her business. There is a fear of letting go to this particular connection but equally she can see that there are repeated patterns which stem from her mum being in a similar situation when my client was in her teens.My client is her own boss working from home so that can also have an impact on her motivation to work especially when her emotions take over.

My client is a single mum to 12yr old twins and is currently having issues as well with her daughter that include stealing from her and a huge amount of attitude! There are also issues surrounding the children’s dad and his lack of contact over the last few years.

I explained to her how life coaching can help her to realise her true and unlimited potential that she already has within her to help move her business forward.
On the emotional aspect I explain that we would initially talk about any emotions / pains that may still exist so that we can accept them, but then strive to focus more on them now and in the future.

I explain that my role as a life coach is to enable and empower my clients by using the clients commitment to succeed. As a life coach I will be facilitating my clients learning so that they can find new ways to think about and understand themselves. In turn this will help them to find a workable path to their goal / goals

My client explained that on the emotional situation (love triangle which had been going on for 7years ) that she had discussed with her partner actually making the decision to leave his wife and family in October 2015.
She explained that there is a certain amount of fear around this not happening as she has tried to instigate him into doing this for the last few years.
She explained that if this does not happen in October then she knows she needs to be the strong one to say enough is enough and walk away. Part of her is hoping that if she has to do this it will then make him sit up and realise that he could be losing her.

I asked the question how would she feel if she bought this all forward and said this to him now, her response was that this is where the fear of being alone kicks in, in her mind she has prepared herself and said October so she feels she needs to stick by that goal post.

My client then spoke in detail about what she feels she deserves within a relationship and how Darren should be treating her. She knows that the current situation is certainly not ideal – a lot of her day is sitting around waiting for contact which she agrees I not healthy particularly as it can block her from focusing on promoting her business.

My client did say that she has the deadline in her mind of Oct 1st to walk away if Darren does not walk away from his marriage

We then spoke a bit more about what she wishes to achieve.
It’s important to be very clear about where they are now and where she wants to go.

This time is also useful in building up rapport with my client, in order to gain trust and mutual respect for each other.
Rapport is one of the essential skills for a life coach.

It’s important as a life coach to understand that people have different learning and behavioural styles, along with different personality types.
This is where I can also dip into my knowledge and understanding of the different star signs. Knowing a person’s star sign on its own can give you so much vital information.

My client predominantly works visually, I know this because during our initial conversation my clients eye movements  were looking more upwards as opposed to any other direction. This tells me that my client has a tendency to store events as pictures and images.

As a life coach I need to be flexible with my own representational systems in order to engage with my client.

The other clues that were visible were the way my client was sitting on her chair – she was sitting forwards in her chair, she was also very neat in her appearance – hair / clothes / matching jewellery.

We then moved on and spoke about how my client,  would explore how to achieve the goals.

I asked her to just sit for a few moments and visualise what are long term goals would be?

The long term goals that came to the surface are to:
1)Get the business off the ground and gaining more direction
2)Emotional wellbeing for herself
3) Rebuild her relationship with her 12yr old daughter

My client came to the conclusion that by keeping busy and focusing her mind and energy on the practical and business side of things she is the one in control.
Within the emotional situation she finds herself in she is the one waiting for the other person to make the changes, her control with this comes in October if nothing changes.

Once we had established the areas to focus on now we could then start to explore the options and possibilities available to expand the business.
I explained that it is sometimes necessary to break our goals down into bite size manageable goals.

It’s important for me as a life coach to ask open questions to gain more information and closed questions when I’m wanting to gain commitment from my client.

We touched on how it’s important to use positive affirmations within our daily lives.

Prior to doing my life coaching cause I have done a lot of work with positive affirmations and the law of attraction. I strongly believe that what ever thoughts or beliefs we put out there will in time manifest for us.
Louise Hay is the Queen of Affirmations and in one of her books “Heal your Body” she talks about how emotional / mental issues can affect us in the physical.

We briefly spoke about a few ailments that seem to affect my client – migraines / sore throats / upper back ache.

By asking about these ailments I was able to look up each condition in my book by Louise Hay – Heal your Body. I was then able to give my client an affirmation for each of the conditions she told me about.

My client explained that the migraines in particular can be so frequent that they have a knock on effect with my client running her business.

I do feel it’s important to focus on the whole person and to give them the tools and techniques which they can apply to their own situations.

I am a trained holistic therapist in the following areas:
Crystal Healing
Reiki
Eft

The way in which I choose to work is to tailor make my sessions for each client. So perhaps bringing in some crystals to carry around with us to develop growth and expansion particularly around the business issues.
By applying these elements along side my life coaching skills is the holistic approach I want to achieve with all my clients.

With each client it’s important for me as a Life Coach to have these 3 essential components to conduct an effective life coaching session.

1) they know what they want or need to achieve
2) They want to achieve
3) They want to have Life Coaching

For now my client has decided the main focus is the business, she came to this conclusion by me breaking down each area and thinking about the importance and relevance of each issue.

I applied various techniques during this part of the session such as questioning / chunking / listening and summarising skills.

We then moved onto discussing an action plan.

The 1st tool used to do this was the Life Areas Assessment Tool

We had already talked a lot about the areas in my clients life which identify where change or improvement is needed.

1)Get the business off the ground and gaining more direction
Score – 4

2)Emotional wellbeing for herself
Score – 5

3) Rebuild her relationship with her 12yr old daughter
Score – 3

My client felt the most important area to address was the business.

This conclusion came about by looking at the 3 areas and my client scoring them on a score between 0-10
(0= very unhappy)
(10=very happy)

It was important for my client to go with their first thought.

The lower score generally dictates the areas that should take priority – in this instance the lower score was my clients relationship with her daughter however my client felt that she would like to focus more on building up the business and bringing pennies into the house especially as the summer holidays were approaching.

We then moved onto the “sun diagram”

The sun diagram includes things my client can do, people they could ask for help, people they could influence, any other resources / ideas

The Business!

1) creating a website

2) business cards and flyers to be created and printed

3) stop doing the free daily tarot readings on her Facebook page so to encourage purchasing readings

4) creating a database of existing clients

5) creating a newsletter or finding an app or someone to assist her in getting a template set up

It’s important during the whole life coaching session to ask open ended questions particularly in response to these goals such as:
Who, Where, Which, What, When, How

Questions that start with these words made my client think about the goal and the steps needed in order to achieve them.

Listening and then summarising back to my client is such an important skill, as it shows that you are listening and that you understand what my client is saying.

We then moved on to using the tool “well formed outcomes”

We did this by taking each goal in turn and exploring the possibilities and assessing that the goals listed were the right goals.

Some of the questions used during this part of the session were:

1) can you achieve this by yourself?
2) is the goal positive?
3) how will it benefit you?
4) why don’t you have this now?
5) how big is this goal? Do you need to break it down into smaller goals?
6) when will you take the first step?

By setting these goals gives you the starting point and helps your client move from A – B. This in turn makes them proactive and enables them to take control of their lives.

We then moved on to the tool that is
“Goal setting Charts”.

I felt that the simple goal setting document was the best one to use for my client.

There are other tools such as STEPPA and TGROW.

The goal setting charts include:
Target dates
Review daily
Well defined
Measuring progress
Reward or treat

1) creating a website
My client explained that previously a friend had agreed to do this but 2 years later this had not happened.
I put forward the option of my client creating one via a website builder

My client said yes this was her only option as she couldn’t afford to get someone else to build one for her.

The other issue explained by my client is that she had tried to do this but only having an iPad made this tricky.

I then asked the question are there any apps specific to creating a website?

Unsure of the answer my client agreed that the first step was to go home and do a search in the apple App Store.

2) business cards and flyers to be created and printed

My client told me that she has designed a flyer already that she uses on social media sites.

I asked the question does the flyer showcase all your skills and qualifications

My client told me that the original flyer just focuses on tarot readings.
She admitted that it does need to be updated as she has gained more qualifications such as teaching tarot and she has become a certified angel card reader.

Already it was apparent that just by making some simple updates to flyers through social media sites would help her business to grow.

The next part is how do we advertise the business in her  local area?

My client spoke about the newsagents and village shops would be ideal but would need to get these flyers printed

She also spoke about having a flyer in her car on the back window.

I asked how would she go about doing this?

The first response was via a printing website such as Vistaprint who specialise in promoting business and their merchandise.

My client said the next task would be to update the flyer tomorrow and also to look at prices to get flyers printed.

3) stop doing the free daily tarot readings on her Facebook page so to encourage purchasing readings

This one was simple – all my client had to do was stop all the freebies. My client felt slightly uncomfortable doing this completely as she has built up her page, I asked the question – do the free readings generate regular paid clients? The answer was no.

This made my client rethink and came up with the suggestion of weekly readings. This would free up more time and people may then be encouraged to buy a personalised reading.

I then asked would it be an idea to do this for a couple of months and then to reassess the free weekly readings against the paid readings to see if there had been an increase.

My client agreed by breaking this down into weekly from free daily readings would be the next step.

4)  creating a database of existing clients

My client spoke about how she has all of her existing clients email addresses so it wouldn’t be too hard to pull all that information together to create a database for future newsletters.

5) creating a newsletter or finding an app or someone to assist her in getting a template set up

My client spoke about how she could look to see if there were any apps that would be easy to set up, alternatively we spoke about designing a newsletter via Microsoft Word which she has on her IPad.

To summarise I then talked about how it’s important to give these goals a timeframe so my client has something to work towards.

1 month goal setting
1) create flyers and business cards and then order
2) do research for website apps
3) create database of existing clients
4) create a Facebook post asking if people would like to be added to the newsletter

2 month goal setting
1) have website up and running
2) have first newsletter sent out
3) reassess income from previous 2 months since stopping free daily readings.

6 month goal setting
1) Find alternative ways of promoting business – different search engines
2) reassess profits over the last 6 months

We decided to leave it there for today as we both felt we had covered lots particularly with the business side.
We have made our next appointment for a months time.
This appointment would give the opportunity to evaluate how the last month has gone and my client said that at that point it would be useful to look at the emotional situations.