Becoming a successful life coach isn’t just a matter of setting up meetings with clients and talking them through their struggles. It’s also about providing actionable techniques that your clients can use to improve their lives on a personal or professional level (or both). Fortunately, there are lots of different life coaching techniques available; let’s take a look at some of the best now.

Goal Setting Techniques

Many of your life coaching clients will have difficulties with goal setting. They might not know how to achieve a long-term goal, or they may not know how to develop a goal in the first place. In either of these cases, you can leverage several different techniques to provide value to your clients, including:

• SMART goal setting. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This is a great technique to teach to life coaching clients who have difficulty setting goals they can actually achieve in the short to medium-term
• Teaching clients the difference between outcome goals vs. process goals. Many clients don’t know how to set up process goals, which help them achieve outcome goals or long-term goals
• Vision boards and goal mapping. For many clients, big and ambitious goals and long-term outcomes can feel immaterial or intangible. As a life coach, you can employ vision boards to help your clients visualize their overall objectives or desires, or help those clients map their goals step-by-step to make them more achievable

Cognitive-Behavioral Techniques

Cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT is a psycho-therapeutical technique that involves teaching your patients how to recognize harmful thought patterns or negative thinking. Then it involves teaching your clients how to change those thinking patterns by starting positive habits or repeating positive mantras each day.

Cognitive behavioral techniques are perfect for clients who struggle with negative thinking, depression, or anxiety. For instance, if you have a client who has low self-worth and has difficulty pursuing a promotion at work, you might teach them to:

• Identify that negative belief and say it out loud
• Figure out where the negative belief comes from. Then, you as the life coach can challenge the negative belief and highlight the positive elements of your client
• Develop new, positive thought patterns and behaviors to help them overcome their challenge

Motivational Techniques

Some of your clients might struggle with motivation. In that case, you can employ motivational techniques to help those clients from start to finish.

For example, you might teach some of your clients how to identify the deep values they hold as people, like conscientiousness, success, professional respect, etc. Then, you’ll help your clients figure out what motivates them: money, admiration, acceptance, and more.

Depending on the client, you might also focus more on encouraging accountability through progress tracking. Progress tracking is a coaching technique where you put together a spreadsheet or progress checklist with your client.

Then, each time your client meets with you, you’ll both update the spreadsheet together. Your client gets the motivation to do a positive action or have it so as not to disappoint you and themselves, and they get to see just how far they’ve come in the interims between each life coaching session.

Communication Techniques

Communication techniques are very potent skill sets you can provide to your clients, particularly those struggling with relationship or personal issues.

Say that you have a new life coach client who struggles with work and familial relationships. They constantly feel stressed, anxious, and like nobody likes them. Such a client doesn’t need you to work with them in terms of motivation or goal-setting. They need a different type of assistance.

For this kind of client, you might use life coaching techniques that focus on strong communication, such as:

• Active listening. With active listening, you demonstrably listen to your client and make them feel seen and heard, with increases their trust in your service
• Powerful questioning, which helps you learn more about the client and may help them reflect on their inner difficulties or toxic behaviors
• Assertiveness training, through which you’ll demonstrate to your client how they can be more assertive. That can be highly beneficial if, for instance, your client has difficulty setting boundaries with people they are close to (like friends or family members who take advantage of them)
• Conflict resolution skills, which you can teach yourself and then provide to your client. That can be great if your client is struggling with managing a team of people who clash, for example

These communication techniques can be perfect for clients who have more personal challenges.

Mindfulness and Stress Reduction Techniques

Last but not least are mindfulness and stress reduction life coaching techniques. A lot of your clients will come to you struggling with anxiety, depression, and too much daily stress from the workplace or their family members. It’s up to you to teach them actionable ways to reduce their stress and be more aware of their daily emotions.

Lots of life coaches incorporate creative and/or expressive exercises into their sessions with clients like these. For instance, you might have your clients practice calming painting, music, or writing to express themselves in creative, healthy ways to reduce stress and improve self-confidence. Journaling in particular is a great life coaching technique since anyone can do it without having to learn a new skill set.

Other effective life coaching techniques for clients in need of mindfulness training and stress reduction include:

• Guided meditation, which you can incorporate as a group life coaching process
• Visualization, which involves teaching your clients to visualize their problems and actionable solutions to those issues
• Breathing exercises
• Progressive muscle relaxation

Conclusion

With so many effective life coaching techniques to use, it’s up to you to determine which technique you should use for each client. Indeed, for maximum results, you should tailor your techniques to each individual client’s needs, preferences, and goals.