COACHING UP AND DOWN THE HIERARCHY

Your clients come to you—if they are truly coaching clients—for mastery. They come because they are ready for a challenge. They come to be stretched to step up to their potentials and to develop those potentials for excellence or mastery. Yet many of them cannot actually devote themselves to mastery. And why not? Because they are not yet effectively coping with their basic needs.

The fact is that before they can truly be challenged and enter into the self-actualizing life, they have to address how they are coping with their basic needs. In terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we have to coach them for the foundation of their basic needs before we can coach them for the higher levels of the hierarchy.