“How can I help my coaching clients get unstuck?” This is a question many life coaches ask themselves.

Often, clients come with similar issues, feeling confused and unsure of what to do next.

They get stuck, drained, and end up procrastinating on what truly matters due to decision fatigue and analysis paralysis.

As a coach, your role is to help them untangle their thoughts and guide them towards the right direction, bringing them closer to their goals and maximum fulfillment.

The problem

The main thing to remember is that most people get confused because they don’t know what they want. When consulting with clients, if they ramble or tell a story without a clear question, it’s a sign of confusion. Clear questions indicate they know where you need to intervene and how to integrate your concise answer into their workflow.

When someone is in the zone with a clear objective, there’s no room for confusion. As a coach, you need to facilitate this by asking exploratory questions that help them discover their priorities and achieve a flow state.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow, people perform at their best when doing tasks slightly above their comfort level—challenging but not overwhelming.

Often, challenges arise because clients don’t know their values or what they want in life. This lack of self-awareness leads to uncertainty about their actions.

When your clients lack self-awareness, you need to ask deep exploratory questions to help them gain insights and get unstuck.

There are three steps to this.

Step #1: Help them identify what they want

You need to ask them certain exploratory questions that uncover what they are actually trying to accomplish.

Have a mini questionnaire to help them discover this and ask them to write it down. Contrary to what many people think, most problem-solving involves defining the problem on paper.

Often, what they perceive as a problem is simply a lack of clarity.

You can make them ask themselves questions like:

• What am I trying to accomplish?
• What is it that I want?
• Do I know what I want and why?
• What’s the deeper reason why I’m doing what I’m doing?

If they struggle to answer these questions, it means they lack self-awareness.

You need to step back a bit

You may need to guide them in determining their life’s values. That’s where John DeMartini’s life value determination comes in handy.

Essentially, these are a set of questions that help anyone discover their life’s values: what they love to do, talk about, and think about.

You will be guiding them to determine the major things in life they value and devote most of their time and energy towards.

Once they determine their values, they can dive deep into the reasons why they value these things and what they are trying to accomplish.

Once they get clear on their life’s values, then you need to again work forward to identify their objectives by asking the set of questions that are included above.

Once they determine their objectives, the next steps become easier.

Step #2: Help them find the best possible action

Identify their objections is the first part of the puzzle. The reason why they have consulted you is to help them move.

You need to help them figure out the next best possible action that they need to take in the direction of their objective. When it comes to achieving any objective, there are countless different ways.

You need to help them identify the most optimal path.

💡 The most optimal path can be determined by people who have been through the same road. You can find out people who have been down the same road by scouring different YouTube, books, blog posts, and just leverage the search engine and discoverability that the modern age provides.

You don’t need to lay down the entire plan for execution. All you need is a rough outline and then the immediate two to three actions laid down for clarity.

The two big questions that they need to ask themselves are:

• What is stopping me from getting the outcome?
• How am I going to achieve it?

So, the first question is about attacking all the roadblocks to take action and the next question is about the means by which they will be accomplishing the objective.

Step #3 – Accountability

The next step is accountability. People don’t take action and stay on the right path if there is no accountability mechanism in place.

If you are serving multiple clients or in a cohort setup, consider creating a community and forming groups or triads. Group them up, assign a leader, and give them weekly or monthly challenges to work on. This way, even if a client gets distracted, it won’t drag them off course.

An accountability system helps them take action and fosters a bias towards action rather than staying stuck in analysis paralysis.

If you’re serving many clients, consider conducting online challenges where they follow a pre-designated path to accomplish a specific objective that they value the most.