5 Ways to Create Positive Experiences for Your Life Coaching Clients

Becoming a successful life coach requires you to have a few important traits and skills. You need to genuinely want to help people grow and succeed, you need to be honest and filled with authenticity and you need to be able to help people see the real picture of their lives while encouraging them to be positive.

If you are not naturally a positive person, it can be hard to work as a life coach, but it certainly is not impossible. Just like earning your coach certification is part of the journey and involves education, growing your positivity skills can also be part of this path of learning. Consider it an aspect of your life coach training. With that positivity, your clients are bound to benefit because you can bring that feeling and approach into your interactions. Here are five ways to bring positivity to your clients:

1. Explore the Positivity Ratio

The Positivity Ratio is the consideration that the best balance between being positive and negative is 3 parts positive for 1 part negative. So, for every negative thought, it will require 3 positive thoughts to create the ideal balance. The great part of this tool is that it acknowledges there are negatives in life, but puts the emphasis on looking at things positively more often.

2. Consider what you would prefer

Often, life coaching clients are able to talk at great length about the things they do not want. They hate their job, their business is not growing the way they want it to, they are tired of feeling stuck and so on. These responses are great for getting people to voice what they do not want, then, as a life coach, you can help them talk about what they do want. If the thing they do not want is eliminated, what would be the result? What would they prefer to have in its place? Asking the client to consider and voice what they would prefer helps them stay focused on the positive outcomes they want to see take shape in their life.

3. What is the Best Possible Future?

The Best Possible Future exercise allows you to help a client visualize, then write or verbalize their future at its best. This can build on the “what would I prefer” exercise in that it takes the current problem or problems out of the equation and looks to the future for what the client truly wants. Ideally, this will include aspects of who they are, what they are doing, who they are doing things with, what their strengths are, how they have succeeded, what they have accomplished and more. Once the visualization is firmly understood, it is important to consider what is needed to get to this future and the steps that can be taken.

4. Embrace the parts that are not liked

Pretty much everyone seeks to be whole and that is definitely one of the aspects that comes up in life coaching. But when a client has a part of them they do not like, they often seek to disown or detach that part of themselves. To be more positive about their whole being, a life coach can work with them to find ways to bring those parts in to be nurtured and loved, even though they may initially be perceived as flawed.

5. Present the value of being positive

Positive thinking has long been part of the general vocabulary, but there are actually studies that prove how positive thinking has a beneficial impact on health. There are a number of theories on the “hows and whys” of what positive thinking does for the body. To bring this forward to clients, find a study or two that you can share to show them what positive thinking can do beyond simply creating new ways of thinking. Having data may be helpful in making a case for bringing more positivity into their life.

Serving clients as a life coach requires a lot of thought, emotional intelligence and understanding. Your coaching relationship will also deeply benefit from sharing ways to be more positive.