WHEN THEY FINISH BEFORE YOU

Sometimes in your facilitation, a client completes whatever he or she was working on before you finish gathering your initial information via the 18-questions. It happens. Not often, but it happens, I would guess maybe 5 to 10% of the time. Whatever was going on with the person, she has an insight; he has made a decision; she connects with a resource; he makes a change. At that point, it is game over.

Now because it can happen in a mere second or two— really fast— you have to be calibrating or you will not even recognize it. For that matter, your client could also miss it. The client may be so involved in his or her own inner thoughts, that it doesn’t dawn on the person that something significant just happened. The client is caught up in the content and doesn’t have meta-awareness about it. Or perhaps your client is compliant and doesn’t want to tell you what just happened because he doesn’t want you to feel bad because he just completed a process, especially if he senses that it’s important for you to succeed with him. So many tanglements of thoughts!