Understanding Your Client

By Pete Liska https://www.linkedin.com/in/peteliska/

When coaching, you are asking many questions to keep your client moving forward, moving towards something.  If you don’t understand your client, how can you help him or her move forward?  As a coach, listening deeply to your client directly supports understanding your client. It also provides clues to who the client is, how they think, and how they make decisions.

The Center for Coaching Certification’s Certified Professional Coach (CPC) coach training includes a class on personality types.   Here you are introduced to both how to be present in the moment to identify personality type and how to work with the different personality types.  Having the ability to identify and adjust to different personalities will go a long way in better understanding your client.

A quick overview of the CPC class includes the following considerations: Emotion or Logic and Passive or Aggressive.   These are paired into Pleaser (Emotion and Passive), Celebrator (Emotion and Aggressive), Investigator (Logic and Passive) and Achiever (Logic and Aggressive).  When you complete the coaching certification you will know how to recognize these types in the moment plus have a good understanding of the Do’s and Don’ts when communicating with them.  This understanding and then flexing to the client in turn leads directly to being present to who they are and also effectively developing rapport.

Everyone has different personality styles and most people are more than one personality type, usually a primary and a secondary style.  In this blog series, I’ll give some examples of these personality types and how to interact with them to gain a better understanding and increase clarity during conversations.