How to Create an Effective Parent Coach Plan

Arrive

When you begin working with a new client, you are most likely witnessing their struggle, challenge, or pain. Your first step in the relationship is to welcome your client and everything they are bringing to you: frustration, anger, shame, and more. Inviting your client into your space of non-judgment and total acceptance can be an unfamiliar experience for them. This is exactly what they need to step into vulnerability for their own personal growth. 

New clients have already taken meaningful action by choosing to work with you. Now, you, as the coach, get to observe where your client is at the beginning of their journey and validate their worries, concerns, and fears. You both know the client is looking for a solution to their problems, and it’s your role to give permission for your client to go at their own pace. Allowing your client all the time and space they need for their process builds trust from the very beginning.

Affirm

One of the gifts you already have as a new coach is your outside perspective. You’ll utilize this gift in every session with every client, and it comes into play early on. While your client might want to rush into solutions and strategies, you get to slow down and help your client lay a foundation for their personal strengths.

You know that the journey ahead can be bumpy and uncomfortable, and that is exactly why you are committed to helping your client identify their strengths. This is an essential component of a growth mindset, which is what you’re cultivating with your client. Starting with strengths and revisiting them regularly will fuel your client to keep going through inevitable challenges.

Intend

A critical tenant of the coach’s role is to let the client own their experience. No coach can create change for another person. No coach can force a transformation. No coach can tell a parent what is right or wrong, good or bad. The client gets to step into responsibility from the very beginning and decide the outcome they desire.

Working with a client to set an intention for their work with you is a step you cannot overlook. An intention becomes the client’s north star, and it allows you, as the coach, to consistently check in on the progress they’re making. Parents coming to work with a coach understandably have a lot going on, and it’s nearly impossible for them to keep track of their own progress. You are the guide, and you get to gently redirect conversations and strategies back toward the path of their original intention.

Evolve

The entire premise of working with a coach is that every person has the capacity to change. Not simply changing habits, routines, or actions but changing neural pathways, personal relationships, and even subconscious patterns.

A personal evolution does not unfold along a linear path. You as the coach get to navigate ongoing cycles of learning, exploring, and reflecting with your client with the same fluidity of ocean tides. You’ll share new information and concepts that your client will integrate as it resonates with them. You’ll gently guide your client to explore resistance and skepticism that block achieving their parenting goals. You’ll invite them to reflect on their new perspectives and the outcomes of their personal growth. 

The process of an individual’s evolution happens organically, without pressure or expectation. Some parents have experience with personal development and are ready to make significant changes in a short time. Other parents will be entering the space of self-responsibility and self-reflection for the first time and may experience confusion, doubt, or discomfort with different aspects of the coaching process.

The key to any successful coach and client relationship is trust: your trust in the coaching process and unwavering trust in your client’s innate ability to gauge their pace, and your client’s trust in you as a leader and guide to hold them in their discomfort without pushing them beyond their threshold.

Celebrate

Just as you utilize your gift of an outside perspective in helping your client affirm their strengths, you will help them slow down and celebrate their incremental success. Most people instinctively look at what’s not working, not going well, or is still unfinished. They fall into the trap of comparing themselves to others or to their own expectations. 

You get to take on the role of cheerleader, highlighting any small win or tiny victory that your client shares. You get to bring optimism and hope into the spotlight as you guide your clients to recognize the progress they are making. Celebration happens throughout the entire coaching journey and serves as a catalyst for continued evolution in your client.

Renew

Each coach has the opportunity to design their practice however they want. Whether you commit to a fixed timeframe of working with a client, or you remain available for ongoing coaching, your client needs to have a space to wind down, take a break from learning, and let their journey integrate into their system. This seemingly dormant phase is what allows a parent to capture the growth that they experienced before moving forward into their next iteration of growth.

As you bring one portion of the coaching journey to a close, your client gets to look back at where they started. They will revisit their original intentions and determine the extent that those are now present in their everyday parenting. As their coach you guide them through this process free of judgment, supporting them to set new intentions for the next phase of their personal transformation.

What Makes a Successful Parent Coach Plan?

As you begin to work with clients, you may rely heavily on an outline you create for yourself. You can include all the components listed below, knowing that you have the flexibility to follow your client’s lead. Once you gain more experience, the flow will feel natural and personal, and you may find that you are instinctively adapting to each of your different clients and their unique personalities and needs with your parent coach plan.

Ground

Many parents come into coaching full of stress and worry, with the tasks and demands of daily life pulling their minds in a million directions. At the start of each session, you can serve your clients best by modeling how to slow down and commit to being fully present in the moment.

Mindfulness is a practice, both for you and your clients, and you may find that either of you will need to pause and reground during a session. Trust your intuition and gently take a moment to get back into the present time and space when  you sense yourself or your client getting distracted or going beyond a threshold of inner safety.

Intend

Even though your client will set intentions for their entire journey, each session is precious time and will be most effectively used with a clear intention or goal. In some sessions, clients will have crystal clear intentions for what they want to receive or accomplish. Many times, a client will vent, complain, or need a lot of support to set an intention. 

Setting an intention is not just so you, the coach, have a thread to follow in the session. The intention is for the client to feel the progress of their personal growth. This is a distinct difference between coaching and therapy; never underestimate the value of establishing a clear intention.

Celebrate

Again, parents who are struggling are often tempted to focus only on problems and difficulties. When you invite a client to celebrate something that occurred in the family or in their life, you are actually rewiring their brain to look for positive evidence. 

You will have experienced this already throughout your journey in becoming a parenting coach, and you’ll see your clients begin to notice more and more positive outcomes when you consistently invite them to celebrate the successes, no matter how small or fleeting.

Share

Parents are working with you because they want a change, so yes, they will be ready to share about their problems. The key to witnessing your clients share is how you listen ‘beneath’ their words. This is a major aspect of your parent coach communication. You will become proficient at finding hidden layers of judgment, blame, projection, unprocessed emotions, and subconscious beliefs that become your secret sauce later in the session.

Flow

The majority of a coaching session will be like an elaborate dance. You might start by reviewing new information and learning, checking your client’s understanding and clarifying any questions or misconceptions, or discussing how it applies to their family. 

Then, you get to employ your coaching superpower of asking powerful questions. Throughout your certification program, you will experience, practice, and develop a massive collection of gentle yet provocative questions that guide your client toward the inner layers of their struggles. This is indeed where the magic happens!

In some sessions, you may ask only a couple of questions and witness as your client guides themself through a deep exploration. On other occasions, you may try out many different pathways to find the one door that creaks open for your client to explore. Rest assured, you will have ample practice in this highly nuanced area, especially with Jai’s signature coaching tools, which you will learn in-depth during your training.

This portion of the session can unfold in any number of ways, often entirely different than either you or your client would have predicted. Again, this is why setting an intention is critical. Though it may feel like you are meandering through many different stories or thoughts, you as the coach will have the intention in mind so you can track your client’s experience to see how it aligns with that intention.

After questioning and witnessing, you get to tap into another superpower: reflection. Throughout the session you’ll reflect what you hear not only for understanding, but to develop coherency where the client may feel lost or confused. Your objective perspective allows you to see patterns that your client may not notice on their own. 

Connect

A coaching skill you will develop over time is the ability to be fully present with your client and pull together pieces of what they share into a bigger picture. As you conclude a session, you provide tremendous benefit to your client by gathering their observations, reflections, and awareness and connecting those back to their original intention. 

When you synthesize your clients' experiences, you provide a way for them to move forward. They are still the owner of their experience, and you offer them insight (not advice or answers) that helps them take the next right action toward their goals.

Create a Plan for Your Coaching Success

As you develop your coaching practice, you can support yourself with the same grace, compassion, non-judgment, and celebration that you would for a client.

Give yourself the gift of affirming your current strengths as a coach and as a person. Set an intention for this beginning phase of your practice. Commit to your evolution through learning, exploring, and reflecting at a pace that works for you. Celebrate yourself! (If you find that challenging, partner with a fellow coach who will happily celebrate with you.) 

Renew your commitment to your purpose of serving parents and families, reconnect with the values that motivate you, and remember that you are on your very own journey of personal transformation. The work is never done, but it is worthwhile every step of the way. 



If you're ready to start your journey towards supporting parents and building your very own parent coaching business, consider applying to become a Jai Certified Parenting Coach today!