COPING WHEN YOU GET EMOTIONALLY CAUGHT UP WITH YOUR CLIENT

One of our Meta-Coaches recently wrote to talk about an experience when she was coaching a teenage who wanted to make a decision. She was in some internal conflict because his decision was contrary with her mother’s. What complicated things for the coach was that she is “close to both of them” and knew both of them very well as well a lot of the background issues on both sides. As a result, she described her own conflicted emotions which she said that she was not managing her own feelings very well. The question she then posed to me was based on the Responsibility to/for distinction. She wrote, “I remembered what you presented in Coaching Mastery that ‘You are not responsible for your client.’ So if not being ‘responsible’ for the emotions and choices and life of our clients is what allows a professional coach to be effective with his or her clients, then Would you kindly share how to manage a state when a coach has become emotionally involved with a client?”