It’s the KEY to Raising Your Rates, Increasing Your Referrals & Attracting the Clients You Are Most Called to Work With. Did you know that 3 out of 4 clients you serve in your life-time will likely be women? Do you sense the women you work with have a bigger potential inside them?

You’re absolutely right!

Dr. Claire Zammit’s decades of research reveal that it’s not your fault you haven’t been able to do the deeper work you sense is possible with your clients. According to Dr. Claire Zammit, a leading authority in the world today in Coaching Women, most coaches and practitioners are making 4 big mistakes in their work with female clients that limit their results.

When you make the one key SHIFT you’ll discover in this article, you’ll gain the power to get exponential results that will also boost your own confidence, ability to raise your rates and become a sought-after expert recognized for your life-changing contribution to your field.

In this article, you’ll discover the one KEY shift to make that will save you from making the 4 big mistakes that are holding you—and your female clients—back from experiencing true transformation, including:

• The “Fatal Flaw” in how you’re likely setting up your client relationship, which sabotages results with women
• The one question EVERY coach/practitioner is asking their clients is limiting their possibilities by 50% or MORE
• The well-meaning way you are misplacing empathy that’s actually disempowering to your client
• One question that will INSTANTLY shift your clients out of self-doubt and insecurity
• Why coaching your clients to take action prematurely can be counterproductive and can keep them STUCK and unable to get traction

Claire is seriously a rockstar when it comes to working with women.

And once she discovered that a different approach is needed for coaching women, her income doubled, then tripled… and now she’s gone on to generate close to 100 million dollars in her business.

It’s urgent to learn how to apply these paradigm-shifting techniques to YOUR practice so you can start generating phenomenal results for your female clients in a fraction of the time. The One Key Shift shows you how.

The One Key Shift shows you how.

So check out this article to learn how to unlock your female clients’ full potential and skyrocket their success (and your own!) by making THE ONE KEY SHIFT.

Content Summary

Introduction
The ONE Shift
From Good to Extraordinary Results
Mistake #1 Setting Goals Prematurely Vs. Expanding Possibilities for Your Female Client
Mistake #2 Empathizing with Your Client’s Weaknesses vs. Calling Forth Her Strengths
Mistake #3 Focusing on Taking Action vs. Identifying and Releasing the Inner Barriers that Hold Your Female Clients Back
Mistake #4 Guiding the Client to Her Own Solutions vs. Providing the Blueprint That Can Rapidly Accelerate Her Progress
Conclusion
About the author

Introduction

If you’re here reading this article, I know that you’re a coach, practitioner, therapist, healing or helping professional, group facilitator, course creator, leader or change-maker who wants to make life better for those you serve.

Nothing is more painful than seeing untapped potentials within your clients and community members, and feeling powerless to unlock them.

I know you’ve been on a path of personal and professional development for a long time and have invested deeply in the tools and resources that will enable you to make a difference.

This was my own story exactly.

I had graduate degrees and prestigious coaching certifications, yet I would frequently feel something was going on in my work with clients that wasn’t enabling me to get to the deeper level of impact I wanted to have in my work.

This sense of stuckness impacted my own confidence, ability to charge for my work, and ultimately get traction.

I would frequently overgive of my time and energy to my clients in the hopes that it would help, which it didn’t—although it made me feel better about giving it my all.

I decided to search for answers, and about 20 years ago I made a remarkable discovery.

Women make up a staggering 70% of clients in the 20-billion-dollar coaching and life-long learning industry.

Yes—3 out of 4 of your clients in your lifetime will likely be women!

But entire fields—coaching, therapy, medicine and so many more—are not informed by the specific challenges and opportunities that hold women back.

I sensed this was the key that I had been missing.

What I didn’t anticipate was how it would unlock everything for me personally as well as my power to contribute and serve.

As I led groups and discovered what every woman there was missing, I quickly realized that my coaching training had radically underprepared me to serve my female clients—and this was such a huge relief.

It was my training that had fallen short – not my own ability to change lives.

I made it my mission to find out how to unleash women’s power and potentials, and within a short period of time the results I was getting with my clients skyrocketed.

Within a year, I went from coaching small groups of 6 women to teaching thousands online.

I went from struggling to get clients to having to give up one-on-one coaching because the demand for sessions with me was so high.

I have had the honor of serving incredible, gifted women including New York Times best-selling authors, NASA space engineers, Supreme Court justices, thought leaders, Grammy and Oscar award-winning artists, renowned Ph.D.s, MDs, tech giants, attorneys and other professionals, coaches, therapists, artists, change-makers, and educators plus a diverse network of women in over 168 counties.

I went from making a basic living doing my work to founding one of the leading transformational education companies in the world today.

Fast forward years later, and I’ve had the privilege of changing millions of lives and generating close to 100 million dollars in revenue that has enabled me to have access to the resources I need to bring forward my greatest work.

This was a possibility I could never have imagined.

And the best part is, I’ve discovered how to break down what I was doing into a blueprint and teach this method to thousands of other women that I’ve trained as coaches.

They’re able to get the same breakthrough results in their work with women in diverse niches including money, confidence, visibility, love and relationships, health and wellbeing, business, leadership and more.

It’s now my mission to pass on what I’ve discovered to everyone who wants to change lives at the deepest level.

I can’t wait to see what world-changing potentials get ignited within you by what I’m going to share in this article!

The ONE Shift

You’ve probably already heard that the coaching and life-long learning industry is booming. It’s currently valued at 20 billion dollars globally and is estimated to continue to surge forward in our new world of constant disruption and change.

What you might not know is that as demand increases for coaching, therapy, healing and health consultations, transformational courses, and more, so do consumers’ expectations about the results that these services can provide.

The client base for the coaching and life-long learning industry is no longer elite CEOs and celebrities like Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey who have heralded the value of coaching. “Average” people, like teachers, nurses, mothers, artists, and students, in addition to highly paid professionals, are seeking out help to navigate the challenges and opportunities in their lives.

And here’s the thing, the average person cannot afford to make a bad investment — getting so-so or even just “good” results, simply isn’t enough.

Your client needs to feel confident she can get extraordinary results through taking the risk of investing in herself.

The additional challenge you face is that the women who make up the client base for the coaching, personal and professional growth programs, retreats, books, and more, will not respond to conventional coaching approaches because…

• They have different motivations and aspirations for the outcomes they want to create.
• The barriers at this new stage are primarily internal in the form of old, limiting beliefs and patterns, an inability to source power outside of logical and linear ways of creating, and an inability to identify needs and access resources.

The sea change all of this signifies intersects with a huge and unprecedented revolution that is happening right now: the RISE of women.

Over the past 50 years, women in the West have truly become the most autonomous, free, independent, educated, and powerful generations of women in recorded history….

We’re being heralded as saviors of the global economy, having become decision makers with over a trillion dollars of annual spending power

• We’re now the primary breadwinners in many American households.
• We’re even graduating in higher numbers from college than men.
• We also have the freedom to create any kind of relationship we want to have in our lives… from marriage, to living together, to having multiple partners.
• We’ve been launching businesses at a higher rate than men for years now… 3x higher.
• Women in leadership positions in corporations create success at higher levels by every measure.
• We also comprise the majority of participants in self-development programs and spiritual communities.
• The Dalai Lama even prophesied that “Western women are going to save the world.”

And yet at the same time, women are experiencing an agonizing and painful gap between their higher possibilities and their daily lives that I call “The Power Paradox”.

Although we’re the most educated, powerful generations of women in history… studies are showing that we’re less happy, and more lonely and depressed than we’ve ever been:

• Over 20% of women are on antidepressants (not counting those of us who feel unhappy and unfulfilled and are not on antidepressants).
• 90+ percent of us have an unhealthy relationship with food or our bodies.
• As many as 50% of us are living alone, and those who do have partners, surprisingly, are having less sex than our grandmothers did!
• 6 out of 10 women experience overwhelming financial stress — many to the point where we can’t sleep at night — and not sleeping is the #1 cause of chronic illness!
• And even though we are starting businesses at higher rates, a staggering 95% of us never break through the six-figure barrier or go on to have the larger impact we want to have, or make the contributions we desire to make.

This “Power Paradox” certainly named my own experience. As I began to identify it in my work with women, I asked the question:

Why is it that so many women feel so powerful and yet powerless to create the things we’re now most yearning for?

In my research I found the answer: Something BIG is happening for women.

As a result of women’s rise to power, women’s values, priorities, unique challenges and opportunities have shifted dramatically.

Women no longer simply want to achieve success, nor do they want to return to traditional roles or combine the two in some kind of elusive “work/life balance”

Millions of women are yearning for something more.

They are making the shift from what psychologist Abraham Maslow identified in his “hierarchy of needs” as going from the “achievement” stage to the “self-actualization” stage.

Millions are making a SHIFT from Achievement to Self-Actualization, changing their values, needs, priorities, and most importantly, the support they need to succeed at this new stage

Women are feeling the “Self-Actualization” impulse to become everything they can be, and to use their gifts to lift up everyone around them.

Women are hungry to realize their higher potentials – to step into visibility and confidence, create growth oriented relationships, values-aligned prosperity, experience optimal health and wellbeing, unlock their creativity and spiritual connection, discover their higher purpose and make a differnece.

Paired with the economic and social liberation they have achieved, it’s no wonder that women have become THE MAJORITY OF CLIENTS for coaching, healing, life-long learning, books, workshops and self improvement.

3 out of 4 clients you’ll work with in your career will be women.

Now, this creates a new set of problems and challenges for coaches and practitioners who now have a mandate to deliver extraordinary results while serving this clientele.

In addition to new aspirations, Women now have a new set of challenges and obstacles in the way of their success and impact.

The majority of coaches, therapists, consultants, course-creators, healers and more have not been trained to identify or address these barriers — nor to they understand how to work with women to unlock their untapped potentials.

The primary barriers for women are No longer external, but rather are hidden blocks to their higher potentials…

Worse still, chances are you’re making mistakes in your approach that are keeping your female clients stuck because your training hasn’t been informed by women’s unique challenges, blocks or opportunities.

When you know what these are, it changes everything from your understanding of your role as a coach/practitioner, to the questions you ask, to what you’re listening for, to the process you facilitate to get results.

THE ONE KEY SHIFT you need to make is to become what I call…
“WOMAN-CENTERED” in your approach to working with clients.

The good news is that you can make the “Woman-Centered” shift in your work and harness all your existing expertise to unlock the extraordinary results today’s clients now demand.

Creating extraordinary results is the key to increasing your rates and referrals, and to attracting the clients you most want to work with, not to mention doing the deeper work to truly serve your clients.

Becoming “Woman-Centered” will give you the power to solve deeper, more urgent, and bigger problems, and create exponential value to what you offer.

While traditional training along with your superpowers of empathy and care might be getting good results — becoming “Woman-Centered” is the shift that unlocks everything.

From Good to Extraordinary Results

Let’s explore some examples of extraordinary results:

If you’re one of the many coaches and practitioners who struggle to get clients and referrals, or to have confidence to raise your rates, you’ve likely been thinking up until now that your challenge is in marketing yourself or “putting yourself out there.”

The truth is, if you struggle to have the kind of impact that matches your expertise, the power of your empathy, and the potential of your genius gifts to serve, what you have is a RESULTS PROBLEM.

Even if you’re already getting good results and making a good living, chances are you sense there’s another level you can get to, of income and recognition in your field.

The key that will unlock that for you is also to ELEVATE YOUR RESULTS.

Coaches and practitioners who can create extraordinary results have a line of clients waiting to work with them.

They get a massive number of renewals and referrals.

They have the ability to solve much bigger, more urgent, complex and expensive problems for their clients.

They receive recognition and opportunities to share their expertise on larger stages.

And as a result, they have the confidence to charge a premium and only work with clients they feel most called to serve.

Can you imagine how you’d feel if you were able to create those kinds of extraordinary results in your work?

Would your confidence go through the roof in your work with clients?

Would you be able to charge more if your clients met their life partners, created lasting health changes, stepped into game-changing leadership, tripled their income, and more?

Imagine how many of those clients would tell their friends and colleagues that you’re the go-to person to work with… as well as renewing for your next offerings themselves.

And imagine how much more satisfied and fulfilled you’d feel being able to leverage your own genius gifts and life-experience to change your clients’ lives at the deepest level.

Good results are just not enough anymore.

You don’t just want to be known as a coach or practitioner who is empathic and caring, and who is generous with her time…

You want to be known as someone who partners with clients to deliver extraordinary results.

You want to be the coach/practitioner who is playing your biggest game while helping your clients step into theirs.

Becoming “Woman-Centered” is the one key shift that unlocks it all.

In the meantime, I encourage you to read on to gain more awareness about the 4 biggest mistakes you are likely making that are limiting results for your female clients!

Mistake #1 Setting Goals Prematurely Vs. Expanding Possibilities for Your Female Client

This mistake is the “Fatal Flaw” in how you’re likely setting up your client relationship, which sabotages results with women.

What does every coaching or therapeutic conversation begin with?

Chances are, it’s with the coach/practitioner asking the question
“What is your goal?” or, “What do you want?”

Coaches and practitioners are trained to assume that their clients know what they want to achieve and are able to identify and articulate it as the foundation for their engagement.

What’s problematic with this approach when it comes to female clients?

The research shows that a female client will aim way lower than her actual possibilities.

Women are held back by invisible barriers that severely limit them from being in touch with their true potentials — and unless you know how to disrupt this disconnect at the start of your coaching/therapeutic relationship, you’ll never be able to get extraordinary results.

The research also shows both men and women will expect less from women and underestimate their potentials as well.

What causes women to aim lower?

Firstly, women’s potentials are limited by what I call the “Expectations Gap”.

The research shows that women’s expectations for themselves and their lives are 50% lower than those of men with the same abilities and qualifications, and it’s even lower still for women of color.

Women are also held back by what I call the “Power Penalty”.

The research also shows that women who are ambitious and reach higher are judged as being less likable. Women underestimate their own competence, downplay their achievements and are hesitant to be seen as being overly ambitious. They have a tremendous fear of being judged for reaching higher, as well as a fear of failure, which results in them disconnecting further still from their natural aspirations and impulses.

And finally, women are now feeling the “Self-Actualization Impulse” that has their values, priorities and aspirations radically shift beyond the realm of achievement alone.

Women don’t just want to achieve success—they want to cultivate their higher potentials, which they have difficulty naming, such as the yearning to:

• Become visible, seen and known
• Create growth-oriented relationships
• Create a thriving livelihood aligned with their values
• Discover their higher purpose
• Deepen their spiritual connection
• Unlock their creativity
• Cultivate body-confidence and radiant wellbeing
• Make a difference in the world with their gifts

These higher potentials are so often outside of their existing self-concepts and reference points. Not only is it difficult to name these deeper potentials, they are often in conflict with the priorities that they currently identify, making it challenging to articulate or identify their deepest desires.

Not engaging these deeper yearnings results in setting outcomes solely from the conscious mind, which results in massive incongruencies and resistance in the coaching process.

The process of coaching clients to create these outcomes is also different from traditional strategic coaching and needs to start with cultivating a much deeper connection to the client’s own inner yearnings.

In summary: Unless women are guided to aim higher from the outset, and you also expect more from them, you can’t partner together to create extraordinary results.

What You Need to Do Differently: The Woman-Centered Shift

When you’re informed by the things that hold women back from aiming higher, you will:

• Shift what you’re listening for and the questions that you ask.
• Understand your role differently—including how you set up the client relationship from the very beginning, where you know the questions to ask that don’t just facilitate clarity but open up possibility.
• Raise your expectations for what’s possible for your client, and gain comfort in letting her know what those are.
• Cultivate additional skills that are critical to empowering female clients, such as the skill of “Amplification,” where you are able to accurately reflect back to her even bigger possibilities than she can see for herself.
• Authorize her to reach higher for herself by sharing stories of success and possibility from other women you’ve worked with.
• Ask questions that connect her with her deeper yearnings and desires, not just the pre-existing ideas she has in her mind about what is important.

Mistake #2 Empathizing with Your Client’s Weaknesses vs. Calling Forth Her Strengths

In this mistake you are actually misplacing your empathy and it’s likely resulting in disempowering your client.

Your female clients come to work with you not to improve themselves but rather because they have reached a point where the energy, risk and pain required to change is less than the discomfort of staying where they are.

As such, you’ll encounter your female clients reaching out to you at a point where their struggle has become fairly extreme in the area that they are seeking your help with.

The research shows that when women and girls are challenged, they make “shame-based” meaning about themselves 80% more than men and boys do.

Shame-based meaning mis-attributes the struggle a person is having to their character or identity – they unconsciously interpret challenges as character failure.

For example, “I struggle with money” is not seen as a lack of financial management skills but instead is interpreted as being because “who I am is not good enough”.

“I struggle with love” is seen as “who I am is not loveable”, and I struggle with weight as “who I am is unworthy”.

Why is this problematic in the Coach/Practitioner-Client Relationship?

When shame-based meanings are made, women get anchored into “fixed mindsets” that disconnect them from the other parts of themselves that are powerful, creative and resourceful.

Your female client will often show up as way more hopeless, helpless, powerless and radically less competent than she actually is in other areas of her life.

This is the deeper root cause of the struggle that your client is having rather than the problem she’s describing – she’s unable to locate her creativity, power, and resources in the area that she struggles in.

Women also lack self-awareness of the extent of their own competence, brilliance and gifts and generally will under represent their achievements due to the Power Penalty that I mentioned in Mistake #1.

Additionally, women will also tend towards de-authorizing their own authority in relationships with others who have higher status (including with you since you are “the expert” who they’ve hired to help them).

Women give away their own inner authority in the face of experts way more than men do – they are trained to be deferential to authority.

This dynamic may boost the confidence of the coach/practitioner as being seen by the client as an authority or expert and can be a place we lean on to boost our own confidence.

The net result of all of this is that coaches/practitioners far too often will empathize with their client’s story of powerlessness and enjoy being authorized as the “powerful expert with the solutions”.

It’s way more important that your client leaves a session feeling that she’s brilliant than you’re brilliant.

Unless coach/practitioners shift this dynamic consciously, they will be working with their clients from the places of their greatest weakness instead of eliciting their power and possibilities from the outset, which makes progress infinitely more challenging.

In summary: The root of your female client’s problem is likely not what she is reporting to you—it’s that she’s unable to access her power in the arena that she struggles in.

Empathizing with your female client’s narrative of powerlessness is a trap that the majority of well-meaning coach/practitioners are lured into.

You can’t get extraordinary results with your client unless you are able to reconnect her with her brilliance, her inner resources, and the powerful person that she is in other arenas of her life—and coach her from there.

What You Need to Do Differently: The Woman-Centered Shift

When you’re informed by the things that disconnect female clients from their power, you’ll:

• Establish the client/practitioner relationship differently from the outset and create a dynamic that calls forth your female client’s strengths, brilliance and competence.
• Assume that your client is extraordinary and capable in many areas of her life, and seek to discover what those areas are.
• Listen for, mirror and amplify her strengths, her power and her brilliance at every opportunity.
• Actively “resource” your client by asking her the specific questions that elicit her most competent self.
• Become even more self-validating about your own competence and authority so that you’re able to feed power and authority to your female client.

Mistake #3 Focusing on Taking Action vs. Identifying and Releasing the Inner Barriers that Hold Your Female Clients Back

This mistake causes coach/practitioners to work with clients in ways that are COUNTERPRODUCTIVE and keep your female clients STUCK and lacking traction.

The majority of coaches and practitioners coach inside of a process where goals are clearly identified, and then clients are coached to take actions and held accountable for moving forward towards their goals.

What holds women back from their extraordinary possibilities isn’t primarily a lack of action and accountability.

My decade-long doctoral research into the barriers holding women back from their highest possibilities has revealed that the primary barriers to women’s success at higher levels are now primarily internal.

So what’s problematic about the action-oriented approach?

This traditional approach is effective at creating outcomes that are consistent with your client’s current self-concept – which is made of a set of unconscious assumptions that shape her identity. She can only describe what she wants to achieve based on what she is comfortable receiving.

The problem is, women’s true potentials — and the realm of extraordinary results — are outside of their current self-concept. They cannot even imagine having, creating or receiving them.

These hidden barriers act as an “inner glass ceiling” that makes it impossible for your female client to succeed in creating an outcome that doesn’t line up with her own current internal “set-point”.

80% of what shapes your female client’s expectations comes from these internal and invisible beliefs about herself, others, and the possibilities for her life, rather than from her external circumstances.

This set-point is an unconscious core set of beliefs at the level of self-concept or “old stories” about who she is, who others are, and the possibilities for her life in the area of her coaching/healing outcome. These shape her expectations, choices, decisions, behaviors and development of skills and capacities (or lack thereof) and structures in her life.

Unless you work with a client to directly address and raise this “set-point” no amount of action-taking will yield extraordinary results.

Your client can’t increase her earning power if she is carrying an old story that she’s not good enough.

She can’t transform her health and become radiant, vital and alive on top of a belief that other people’s needs have a higher priority than her own.

She can’t attract a great love on top of a belief that she’s not lovable.

And the reason is simple:

Inside these “old stories” your client will be making choices and taking actions that create evidence for their truth without even realizing it.

She will also not have the missing skills that are critical to cultivate to succeed. (See mistake #4!).

Take my client Pamela for example.

She was a gifted psychotherapist in her 50s, and in the process of launching herself as a life coach.

She had done years of personal growth therapy and had a pretty great life overall.

Yet there was one area she struggled with:

Making real money from her business.

She was incredibly stuck getting to the next level of her impact and success.

She felt a deep calling to make a bigger contribution, but she lived in a small town where the people she was targeting as clients couldn’t really afford to pay her fees.

Pamela has a big heart and she knew she could help people change their lives, so she would often charge clients on a sliding scale, and sometimes even see them for free.

She was stuck in a chronic pattern of under-earning and over-giving…

And because she knew she was genuinely talented, with a huge amount to offer, she was understandably frustrated and confused.

She had literally tried everything she could think of!

She’d spent tens of thousands of dollars on business trainings and was still not able to consistently attract coaching clients who paid her full fee.

In her desperation, she spent yet another $10,000 on a slick website because the latest business coach she’d hired had convinced her that the problem was her lack of visibility.

Then she hired a branding company that did a big photoshoot and set up an online launch for her new program.

In the entire launch, she only got one new client!

And the worst part was… the client asked if Pamela could possibly work on a sliding scale!

In our work together she was able to identify that underneath the pattern of overgiving and underearning was the core self-concept “I’m not valuable”.

She saw her belief about others was “others don’t want what I have to offer”.

Her belief about being successful in her business was that she had to turn herself into someone she’s not in order to get clients.

Inside of these assumptions, she copied offerings, messaging and positioning that she saw others being successful with, which weren’t connected to her core expertise, personality or passions—and that was the deeper reason they fell flat.

She doubted her ability to create real value for her clients, which was the root cause of her undercharging.

She also believed that if they weren’t succeeding or taking action it was her fault—and she had to give even more to them.

As a result of this belief matrix, she had never developed an awareness of what she uniquely had to offer that would create real value for her clients.

In seeing all this clearly, she felt like she woke up out of a deep trance.

• She stepped into a new story with the core belief that her gifts, talents, presence and expertise were invaluable to others.
• She began to feel a surge of power and clarity about what she could offer, which was a deep and urgent unmet need in the marketplace.
• She took the risk to fully be herself in her marketing.
• Her expectations of her clients changed and she gained confidence to challenge them to take action.
• And she positioned herself and her offerings on her website to match these shifts.

By breaking through this “inner glass ceiling,” Pamela had the power to create her new story and within six months she had a thriving practice serving women whose lives were rapidly changing thanks to her coaching.

Within 12 months, she’d broken through the six-figure barrier!

No amount of strategic planning, business training, or structure of action-taking and accountability would have worked for Pamela on top of her old “I’m not valuable” self-concept and patterns.

In contrast, she was able to get rapid and extraordinary results by gaining the help to pinpoint the hidden barriers and corresponding expectations, choices, decisions and behaviors that had been at the root cause of her current reality.

The good news is, as a coach, practitioner, consultant and/or change-maker, you can learn how to identify these patterns and guide clients to break free from them quickly.

In my research I’ve found there are 21 core patterns that hold women back, and each one has a very specific corresponding series of habits, patterns, expectations and behaviors that are the root cause of women’s blocks.

In summary: Your client’s #1 hidden barrier to creating extraordinary results is that her own underlying “self-concept” doesn’t line up with her vision and aspirations.

Coaching her to take action prior to identifying and transforming this at a deeper level will not yield extraordinary results.

Becoming Woman-Centered in your approach enables you to get breakthrough results because you know the process that works for women.

What You Need to Do Differently: The Woman-Centered Shift

When you’re informed by the hidden barriers holding women back you’ll:

• Start by facilitating a deeper awareness of the specific patterns, choices, expectations (or lack thereof), decisions and behaviors that are shaping your client’s experience in her current reality.
• Pinpoint which of the 21 core underlying “self-concept” and belief matrix are at the center of her struggles.
• Guide her to step into a “new story” about herself, others and the possibilities of her life in her area of focus.
• Ground her breakthrough by identifying new ways she can begin to show up in her life and the new choices, expectations, decisions, behaviors and structures that she can create to support her success.

Mistake #4 Guiding the Client to Her Own Solutions vs. Providing the Blueprint That Can Rapidly Accelerate Her Progress

This mistake causes coaches and practitioners to get stuck in cycles of slow and steady progress rather than creating breakthrough results.

One of the core assumptions in the field of coaching is that it’s the role of the coach to guide the client to discover their own solutions.

This is a powerful assumption and often works extremely well.

Coaches are rightly trained not to “give advice,” but to put the client in the driver’s seat of their own progress and engage their creative, resourceful thinking to solve problems and identify and design solutions.

So, what’s problematic about this approach with women?

As I shared in Mistake #3, the primary barriers to women’s success (and having extraordinary results in their work with you) are the hidden, invisible blocks that are largely outside of their awareness.

As a result, women have a massive blindspot when it comes to identifying the root cause of both underlying patterns that hold them back, as well as the shifts that will expedite their progress…

And they suffer from a “fixed mindset” about what’s been in their way. Your client’s unconscious narrative is that it’s because she’s not good enough, is too much, not worthy, not valuable, etc., that “X” has been a struggle in her life.

She doesn’t see how her own self-concept has been shaping her choices and decisions, nor is she able to identify the critical missing skills and capacities to cultivate to succeed.

For example, let’s take my client Jolene.

She was a brilliant healing practitioner in her late 40s who came to work with me because she wanted to increase the amount of money she was making in her healing practice.

She had taken multiple business trainings that left her in debt without leading to any forward momentum in her practice.

Through our coaching together I was able to help her identify an underlying self-concept of “not being good enough” that was underneath her lack of confidence in charging more.

I was also able to help her see that the relationship between the scarcity and lack she felt at the root of this old “not-good-enough” story was driving her interpretations and actions, which outpictured in her bank balance and the mediocre results in her business.

She saw how the feelings of “not being good enough” caused her to massively overgive things that weren’t even valuable to her clients. In spite of her giving so much, her clients weren’t satisfied and didn’t end up renewing their engagements with her.

This had been reinforcing her story, and she would even say out loud with exasperation when she was exhausted and depleted: “No matter what I do, no matter what I give, it’s never good enough!”

The solution in our work together was to cultivate a new self-concept of being a “powerful value creator.”

In addition to generating the new story about herself, others, and the limitless possibilities in her work to create incredible value and deep satisfaction, we were able to identify the skills and capacities that were critical gaps for her success.

I introduced her to the skill of self-validation and showed her how to practice this to be with her own feelings of lack and shift them quickly.

I introduced her to the skill of value creation and how specifically to ask for direct input and feedback from her clients related to their most immediate, urgent and expensive problems.

As a result of cultivating these skills, she gained laser-like clarity about how to redesign her suite of offerings.

In a short time her income tripled from her existing client base, and her clients were over the moon at what they were able to receive from her—her new offerings were an answered prayer for them.

In coaching 60,000 women over the past two decades, not one woman I’ve coached was able to identify her own limiting self-concept or the steps she needed to take to break free without assistance.

Nor was she able to identify the missing skills that were critical for her success or to cultivate them quickly.

In the Woman-Centered approach, coaches and practitioners are radically growth-oriented and recognize that their clients need to evolve their inner capacities and skills to match their new “self-concepts” and create extraordinary results.

They are trained in the questions to ask in order to assist their clients to identify the top 21 patterns that hold women back—and, most importantly, the missing skills and capacities that are the key to fast-track their rapid breakthroughs.

What I’ve seen firsthand is that when coach/practitioners have this training they’re able to harness the best of what coaching has to offer—and provide the resources that dramatically accelerate client results.

With this clarity about the patterns and clear developmental pathways to break free from them, coach/practitioners can facilitate a year’s worth of forward progress in a single session.

The client’s new self-concept, choices, decisions, ways of showing up and development of new skills create a framework for designing powerful actions and an accountability structure for your work together.

In summary: To get extraordinary results with your female clients, you need to become part “consultant” – and identify patterns, shift self-concepts, and create structured growth pathways that will rapidly move clients beyond the barriers holding them back so they can step into their highest possibility.

Your clients don’t have time for slow and steady progress. And you can’t afford not to get extraordinary results fast.

What You Need to Do Differently: The Woman-Centered Shift

When you’re informed by the developmental gaps that are critical to support your client to bridge you’ll:

• Establish a growth-paradigm and mindset as the key to success at the beginning of your work together.
• Identify and name the missing skills and capacities that she never developed inside of her “old story”.
• Coach your client to cultivate the specific skills that are most critical for her to fast-track her success and get results in addition to her self-concept shift.
• Create action plans and structures for accountability that are focused on her application of these new skills in her life.
• Coach your client to show up in the specific new ways aligned with her new story and vision.

Conclusion

Lets recap from our time together in this article!

Can you see how getting good results isn’t enough any more?

Everything that you’re wanting to create for your client as well as for yourself as a coach/practitioner is unlocked when you’re able to get extraordinary results.

Can you see how the training you’ve had most likely hasn’t prepared you to create extraordinary results with your female clients?

Can you see how becoming Woman-Centered is the ONE SHIFT that changes everything?

When you become WOMAN-CENTERED in your approach, EVERYTHING SHIFTS including:

• Your understanding of your role as a coach/practitioner
• How you set up the relationship with your client and set goals
• How you listen and what you listen for
• The questions you ask
• The processes that you facilitate your clients through to create breakthrough results.

And this unlocks deeper, faster results, increases your confidence, referrals, satisfaction and enables you to become a highly sought after coach who attracts the clients you’re called to work with.

If you really want to have a big impact with your gifts…there is NO more important arena to specialize in than the empowerment of women in our time.

About the author

There are few women alive today who have done more to empower conscious women to actualize their potential than Dr. Claire Zammit, founder of the Institute for Woman Centered Coaching, Training and Leadership.

She is the leading expert in the world today on coaching women.

Her groundbreaking doctoral research on the underlying obstacles blocking intelligent, conscious women from stepping into their greatness has been praised as a seminal contribution to the advancement of women in this century.

Her organization was ranked #83 on the Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies, and since its inception it has generated nearly $100 Million in revenue and reached millions of people from more than 180 countries.

This brand-new eBook details the paradigm-shifting approach developed by Dr. Claire Zammit in her extensive research and work with over 60,000 women.

Sign up for FREE upcoming workshop series, The Woman-Centered Coaching Blueprint.

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