Coaches are leaders and problem-solvers — whether you have the title of "coach" or or not, if you make money by enabling someone's performance, you're a coach.
As such, your job is to communicate effectively, introduce and model empowered behavior, inspire your clients, and paint a picture of what high performance looks like for them.
When you do this well, your clients function and perform at the highest levels. Doing it poorly can result in low morale, low performance, and boatloads of frustration.
Really good coaches help their clients show up as the best versions of themselves through framing.
For example, when coaches communicate that they believe their client can accomplish great things, they believe it and deliver.
OMG! Could it really be that simple?
That's not the complete picture, but it does set your interaction up for success.
It's called the Pygmalion effect, a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance. It originated with the work of psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, who found that teachers’ expectations of their students affect the students’ performance.
On the other hand, when expectations are low, the client's performance lags, known as the golem effect.
In her book "Captivate," Vanessa Van Edwards talks about the highlighting frame. She defines it as “truly expecting the best from people and helping everyone in your life perform, act, and show up as the best, most honest version of themselves.”
As coaches highlight their clients while framing the engagement, it encourages the best out of each client.
When coaches set disempowering frames, or don’t set frames at all, it can lead to challenges and requires course correction… Let’s explore these two further:
First, disempowering frames. These result from too little conversation and direction on the front end. A good way to avoid this is to start setting the foundation during a call to evaluate fit. Then, if the client decides to enroll in your program and start hitting results earlier than expected, they are pleasantly surprised.
Second, a frameless engagement happens when the coach fails to define the context and bounds of the engagement. This can be disastrous because the client isn't equipped to make sense of what's happening during the engagement.
But of course, you'd never do any of that, right? After all, you're a kick-ass leader... otherwise you wouldn't be subscribed to dailyNLP... right?
So it's clear to you how important framing is to your clients' success. If you know how to frame engagements powerfully, you enable them to perform up to the standards you’ve set out right from the get-go.
