After a busy weekend of coach training and coaching my own clients I wanted to share my thoughts on helping people look at their lives in more positive ways.

A large part of coaching is to ascertain from the client that we are working with what they would like to achieve as an end goal or outcome, which of course will be based on the future.

When people are not moving forward in their lives in the way they want to there can be a great deal of resistance based on the way that they view their past.

This can cover a multitude of areas that can include, limiting beliefs that have been adopted from parenting, culture, religion, experience, media and much more.

It can also include rules for living or scripts that have also been created early in childhood by parenting and other areas and also that get added to within our proceeding developmental stages of growing up.

Within various areas of personal development and certainly within some therapeutic settings there is a great deal of looking at the past and examining parental relationships that have impacted us, and the way we might live today.

This can be a lengthy process and can also feel at times that things are not changing but going round in circles without a clear end in sight.

I am not saying that this is not useful for some people but how do we also look at the past in a more positive light that can help us move forward to what we desire with more confidence and resilience?

Also and importantly how can we help our clients make sense of things and see themselves in a more positive light when according to them they cant move forward?

In my experience the following has been very useful to allow for this to happen.

• Go into a session with a strong understanding that the client is not broken
• Be aware that the client will come with their “version” of reality that may not be based on fact or reality
• Don’t buy into their story but simply listen to their version of events
• Keep an eye out for changes in physiology that can give an indication on their filters and map of the world
• Listen intently to the clients language and words that can hold important clues to how they are seeing things with their own internal representations of events that could have been filtered by deleting information, distorting what has happened and generalising where they could be seeing things as negative and with a tinge of doom and gloom
• Hold space that allows for them to speak without judgement from you
• Know that you are not there to fix the client but rather allow for honest and open conversations
• When the time is right do start to loosen up their maps with curiosity and use a simple and person centred approach in doing so
• Ask purposeful questions that have meaning for the client and what they bring to you to work on and improve
• Do not feel that you have to rush to an end result
• Be clear, confident and concise and if needs be get out of your own way and allow the session to unfold
• Keep things on track by checking in where you are within the session in relation to why they are there with you in the first place

The past can be a great place for when people have accomplished success however small it may seem for the client.

A good question to ask yourself is

Do I need to be more focused and task orientated or more exploratory with this client?

Above all do not be afraid for the past to surface when it needs to and keep it simple.