Chapter 5: How to Defeat Your Client’s Self-Limiting Behavior

Even with the best of intentions and self control, we all struggle with a side of ourselves that seems bent on sabotaging our most promising efforts at personal growth and change. In the book Co-Active Coaching,  coaching masters Laura Whitworth and Henry Kimsey-House personify the source of this self-limiting behavior as the Saboteur.

Popular culture sometimes depicts this role the devil on the shoulder, while psychologists refer to under the archetype of the scarecrow. In any case, coaches often need to ask a series of probing questions in order for clients to recognize this tendency to:

• Resist change
• Obsess over obstacles
• Maintain the status quo at all costs

Self-limiting behavior often reveals itself when clients are answering questions about the obstacles that stand in their way and the options that they have for moving forward. When you are coaching a client who is struggling with this problem, you will find that they have difficulty identifying individual obstacles and simply view all barriers as a muddled, overwhelming mass. By asking the right probing questions, you can help your client discover that many of these obstacles are a result of their own behavior.

As a professional coach, it is not your role to provide counseling to your clients in order to help them overcome their own self-limiting behavior. Instead, you can lead a client to addressing such behavior on their own by listening carefully to their questions and asking the right types of questions.

When it is clear that the perceived obstacles that a client is facing is the result of a self-limiting behavior rather than real world barriers, using some of the questions provided below may help your client recognize the underlying problem for himself:

• When you have more success in the past, what was different?
• What can you control in this situation that you haven’t in the past?
• What’s missing?
• Where have you been stopping short?