I found an interesting post over at drakepulse.com that talks about successfully coaching employees. I think a lot of what they talk about in their article can be applied to life coaching and business coaching in general. The main point they are making is that you need to be prepared when interacting with an employee. Rather than a casual meeting that will meander and end up taking more time, put in some thought up front and your meetings will be more productive.

Here are some of the tips they give on what to think about before your meeting and how to conduct your meeting. I think many of them can be useful for the life coach.

Determine if the poor performance is caused by a lack of skills or simply a poor attitude.

This can be a great use to the life coach, your client may need additional skills to meet their goals. Or they may need some motivation.

Focus on the behavior of the individual.
Get agreement on the standard and the actual performance.Good points. Your client is responsible for their own behavior. Also find a metric to measure success.

Discuss the alternatives and consequences and actually have the employee, suggest some solutions.Get clients to help themselves. Its a win-win. They will feel more empowered.

Establish action plans and dates so that the employee can be held to accountability standards.
Constantly review and monitor the process.Planning is essential. And how do you measure success? Establish a metric to show the client progress. It will create a feedback loop of achievement.

Write down everything and keep accurate notes.This is vital for a coach and the client. Action plans lead to success. Also, basic meeting notes are useful to track client progress and help the coach stay organized.

You can apply many useful pieces of advice to your coaching interaction and keep your clients happy and moving forward. You sometimes find gems of good advice in unexpected places. Improve yourself, improve your coaching business.