Coaching a client to see the progress they've made
This is for you when a good client, months in, says flatly, "I'm not sure anything is different." That flatness, not anything you did wrong, is when people quietly decide to stop. You want to show them the distance they can't feel.
A precondition: a real "before." A few months of work behind them, their first results in hand.
Pull those first results as a fixed baseline: the client's original Discovering Your Strengths and Uncovering Your Blind Spots from their Career Discovery report. Don't re-run anything. A "before" that stays fixed is how they finally see how far they've come.
One rule: a strengths-in-action log, not a retake or a scorecard.
Hold the shape as a spine, not a script.
Pick the two or three lines they set out to work on. Not the whole report, just the blind spots and the strength they chose to build on.
Read each original line back, word for word. Then ask for a recent moment: "Walk me through one time last month this went differently." Push for a scene, not a general sense.
If no real example comes up, that tells you something too: maybe the change is happening somewhere they can't see it yet, maybe that line hasn't moved. Either way, name it honestly rather than reaching for something that isn't there.
Write it down side by side, in their words. For each line: the original wording as the "before", one sentence in their own voice as the "after". That page is the log.
Close on what they didn't know they'd done. Have them read the page back, then ask: "Which of these did you not realize you'd done until just now?" That line lands hardest: progress they'd stopped noticing.
When you finish, the client holds a page: their old results next to a real thing they did last month. The movement they couldn't feel is now on the page.
Coaching questions
This is a bank to pull from, not a worksheet to run in order.
Sitting with what they can now see
- Reading your old line and your new one side by side, what do you notice?
- Which of these had you already stopped counting as a change?
- What is it like to see it written in your own words?
Widening it
- Where else has this shown up lately that we haven't written down?
- Who around you has noticed this before you did?
- If a version of you from the first month watched you last week, what would surprise them?
Moving it forward
- What is the next line you want to be able to add here?
- What is one small thing this week that would give you something real to write next time?
- How do you want to keep this page going between now and then?
