New Rules of Engagement

I am of the firm belief that one of my responsibilities as a coach is to provide my clients with an experience of an adult-to-adult relationship.  As adult children, many of the people I work with feel either parental and responsible or childlike and choiceless (or veer between the two) in their relationships.  Being allowed – in fact encouraged – to be a calm, rational, unapologetic adult, and to experience a calm, rational and unapologetic adult is an integral part of the coaching and healing experience I offer.

I never tell my clients what to do as I believe that all adults are able to assess what is best for them and therefore should be making their own decisions about how to spend their time and lead their life.

For this very reason I have, for some years now, avoided asking clients to commit to and pay for a certain number of sessions in advance.  I don’t want them to feel as though they need to look after me, or as though they have to keep coming to coaching even though they may not want to anymore.

I have wanted them to feel that they have choice in the relationship and their role in it.

Mostly this has worked for me and, I think and hope, my clients.

Every now and then a client would cancel at the last minute or just not schedule another appointment and I would never hear from them again, and very occasionally someone would just not arrive for their session.  It was mildly irritating but I understand that the work that I do can be scary and sore and I totally get it when the client’s inner child acts out and doesn’t want to come back.

What I have recently come to realize, though (thanks in no small part to the excellent invention of Supervision and my wonderful supervisor), is that when clients cancel at the last minute/disappear/fail to appear then I am not being given the opportunity to be an adult in the relationship.  I end up dealing with my own parent/child issues; I become a rescuing parent when I don’t charge them a cancellation fee, and/or a victimized child when I don’t get paid for a session that I turned someone else away from. 

I have devoted much of my life’s work to feeling and behaving like an adult, and helping others to do the same.  This means taking responsibility for my own decisions and actions – and expecting those with whom I have relationships to do the same.

From now on I will be demonstrating and encouraging adult responsibility-taking by instituting new rules of engagement in my coaching practice:

• All clients will pay in advance.  I will be offering a session-by-session rate as well as a reduced rate for batches of four sessions.
• I will only schedule sessions once I have received payment confirmation.
• I will strictly enforce my 24 hour cancellation policy.

I have resisted these rules for so long because they weren’t right for me before.  But they are now.

It feels liberating, right and adult.

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