Don't impose your criteria, listen to your customers.

Being the coach of our clients places us in a position of superiority, biased under the criteria of authority conferred by the task we perform. This leads many coaches to impose their criteria on their clients.

When we impose our criteria, we do not provide the space to listen to our client's interests, which causes us to be unable to respond in a coherent way to satisfy the client's needs.

To present our criteria with humility is essential when it comes to transmitting knowledge. The coach-client relationship must be established with respect and understanding. During the development of this guide we will address the basic aspects related to this topic, so that they can be useful to you when relating and conducting your coaching sessions.

Discover your client's interests

When we coach and work with our clients, we often bring a preconceived idea of what we want to achieve and how we want to develop our sessions. While much of the planning and development of a coaching session is done by the coach, he or she must ensure that the session responds to the client's real interests.

To discover the interests of your client it is important that you do not impose your criteria from the beginning, learn to listen and let them express themselves freely. Be interested in getting to know him better and find out which aspects he wants to work on and improve. In this way you will not only be guaranteeing that you are respecting their criteria, but you will also be respecting your own work, since your main objective is to solve the problem that is troubling them.

Give your client space

When planning your coaching sessions, make sure they have enough space for your client to express themselves freely. A coaching session is not a monologue in which we expose our ideas, but a dialogue focused on the progressive discovery of the characteristics, qualities, development and particularities that our client possesses and that has led him to walk the path of entrepreneurship. If you are not able to understand what your client is looking for in your services, it is impossible for you to offer him an adequate solution for his needs.

Giving your clients enough space allows you to gather a series of information that will be very valuable when planning your strategies and objectives for each session. The more information you have about their tastes, aspirations and interests, the more effective will be the instructions and guidance you can offer them.

Be flexible with your criteria

The fact that you are the coach and that the client requests your services, should not bias you into a fallacy of authority that does not allow you to mold your criteria and opinions. If once you have listened to your client and understood what points he wants to work on in a prioritized way, your opinion regarding how his process should be developed has changed, you must be humble enough to recognize it.

Let go of preconceived ideas, have the courage required to recognize your mistakes and make the changes you need in time. Coaching is not an exact science, so it requires us to be flexible with our criteria and not assume that the same solution can be applied to all types of problems. It is precisely the particularities that characterize the current state of our client, which determine the form and methods that we must apply to make our work as productive as possible for their personal and professional development.