When it comes to the introductory coaching session, most coaches who don't have a proven system to deliver them, end up falling into one of two extremes.
They either come across as a “People Pleaser Coach” or they become a “Domineering Coach”.
Let me explain.
During the introductory session, if you don't have a plan, if you don't have an agenda that is more than just openly coached a person on whatever happens to arise in the moment… Then you will get extremely varied results.
Coaches who are traditionally trained often fall into this problem.
Trying to conduct a sample coaching session and then hoping that it magically turns into a sale, is a very bad plan.
The reason is that from the clients perspective, it’s very hard to connect the dots between the open questions and the results they want. Remember, at this stage the client probably doesn't know anything about coaching and certainly hasn't been educated about it… And it would definitely be a waste of time to try to educate them in the very first session.
From the clients perspective, if you ask open questions that aren't based on an overall plan that lets them know that you know what you're doing and that you're taking them through a specific process, then the client may well end up feeling as though you're just saying and asking anything that they want to hear and you're trying to simply please them.
This is the equivalent of the People Pleasing Nice Guy who buys lots of ladies dinner, but never finds love or gets married (in this context, lands the long-term client). You come across as the person who stands for nothing and falls for anything… and people generally don't buy from you just because you're nice and trying to please them.
The other extreme is the Domineering Coach. This is somebody who may well have a system that they take people through during the introductory session, but as soon as the coaching starts, they immediately jump in and start telling the client what to do. They are a consultant more than a coach.
During the introductory session, this may show up as trying to tell the client why they should sign up for coaching (which never works) or trying to convince them of how good coaching is, (which also never works). Or telling them what they should do in their life (which, you guessed it… never works).
In its worst form, this domineering behaviour shows up in the coaching relationship as the coach being a consultant and giving directives and commands to the client, instead of asking intelligent, open questions, designed to inspire and evoke insight.
If you want to avoid being seen as a people pleasing, needy, desperate coach and also want to avoid the extreme domineering salesy approach, I recommend you check out my system that has been tweaked, mastered, and dare I say it, “perfected” over 1000s of introductory coaching sessions. It's part of the Never Ending Stream of Clients programme.
And if you're concerned that you don't have enough introductory sessions to practice on, join this week and I'll add in the extremely popular “Session Getting Secrets” seminar that I recently delivered.
Here's where you can get all the good stuff: