Bright, hand cut letters, blue-tacked to the window, that read “teach me how to do it for myself.”
I can see the image in my mind now, even more than 15 years later.
The window belonged to a room in a childcare centre. The room was just like any other kindergarten room, with books lining shelves, toys everywhere, and colours, numbers and letters on every possible surface. But this room was different. This room had 8 children ranging in age from 2 to 5, and at least 8 adults at any one time. This was a room that housed an early intervention centre, for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and each of these children received over 5 hours a day of therapy disguised as engaging, fun learning.
This was my first job out of university. I’d just moved from my small home town in New Zealand to Melbourne, Australia, and I was out of my mind excited to begin a job and finally start exercising my psychology degree. I’d swung the job as one of five successful applicants at a group interview of over 20.
We were behaviour therapists, responsible for hiding 2.5 hour long therapy sessions in what looked like play. Each child had their own specialised curriculum, teaching language, age appropriate social-emotional, learning to learn and daily living skills. Our job was not to fix deficits — we never observed our clients through this lens. Our job was to teach the skills that would open up more opportunities for these kids, so that ultimately, they could live full lives, independent of support.
We learned very fast to see each moment as a learning opportunity, leveraging their natural motivation to encourage the target skill. For these young children, many of whom were non-verbal or slow to develop speech, or simply less motivated to engage with others, structured play and daily living experiences were the perfect grounds to develop the motivation to learn to communicate. Snack times became opportunities for requests like “open”. Games became grounds to learn requests like “my turn!” Tricky situations like a closed door meant a chance to ask for help. In behavioural psychology, these requests are called ‘mands’ (like a demand) and they’re the perfect breeding ground for learning the skill — because the motivation is naturally high.
There are countless stories I could tell, of parents who had been told by doctors and psychologists “your child will never speak, never live independently, never make friends, never never never never….” We had the immensely fulfilling pleasure of proving them so wrong. I can’t count the number of children who eventually went on to mainstream schools unaided, built friendships, learned independently. It was the most gratifying work that often brought us and the parents to tears.
With the high highs also came the low lows, and I eventually burned out and left that work — ironically, burnout became my Masters thesis — and after several years in my own business as an organisational wellbeing consultant, I’ve spent the last 6 years coaching business owners to build businesses that balance financial reward, personal fulfillment and time freedom — really, the business model and personal resilience that creates a ‘burnout proof business,’ if you will.
I am so incredibly grateful for the depth of expertise I developed in that first decade of my career, and the philosophies that still inform how I coach to this day. Since 2022, I’ve also been training coaches through The Midas Coach, which I’m proud to say is one of the only entirely psychology backed coach training programs in the world. This series is built on these lessons I’ve learned over the years that I think, make me a better coach. Specifically, this first essay is about the dominance of ‘transactional coaching’ in our industry, and how we can evolve into a ‘transformational coaching’ approach.
If you’re a coach, or aspiring coach who wants to be truly exceptional, with high integrity and the ability to facilitate complex transformations with your clients, this series is for you.
Throughout the years, I’ve been known to remark “A coach is not a magic genie — you don’t just hire one and then expect your wishes to be fulfilled.”
But everywhere you look online, there are coaches marketing and selling to ‘get’ more stuff. Money, sales, more clients, a better waistline, the relationship of your dreams, the perfect parenting style. This has always seemed interesting to me, because when you get inside a great coaching relationship, it really is less about the external gains, and more about the internal changes we experience through the coaching process.
I’m not here to debate how marketing and sales is largely taught, or late-stage capitalism (that might be a discussion for another time), but my concern is when this mentality bleeds into our coaching, where we forget that our job is actually to transform the human so they they feel whole and complete on their pathway to experiencing the external outcome.
We don’t ignore the external desires, rather, our job is to find where motivation is naturally high for our clients, and use this as the opportunity to build the skills necessary to experience that outcome, just like I once harnessed natural motivation to teach children important life skills. We utilise their desire for achievement as motivation to develop the human so they live with less struggle, meet their own potential, and realise how capable they are. It’s about rewriting old learned limitations and stories so they can look in the mirror and appreciate the human staring back.
Put more simply, the desire is the doorway to the life changing transformation.
The transformation is the entire point. The desired outcome is the bonus.
I call this Transactional Coaching vs. Transformational Coaching. Most coaches start as Transactional Coaches — this is typically about planning, clarifying steps and accountability to create the outcome. This is often likened to mentoring.
But often, this isn’t enough to create long term change, and some coaches will naturally start desiring an evolution into Transformational Coaching.
Let’s clarify what each of these terms mean…
Similar to the concept referred to in leadership circles, transactional coaching is really just about getting the client to the outcome. That is how success is defined. I can see several issues with this approach.
Issue #1:
When the coaching space becomes singularly focused on getting to the outcome, with little regard for the client’s own desires, values or strengths.
I’m sure you’ve felt it. Business masterminds that are all about counting your sales so the coach can share it in their stories. Weight loss coaching so that the coach can share your before and afters on their website. Pressure to be overly focused on the outcome, which often leads to the client forcing themselves through natural energy patterns, forgoing personal values systems, or failing to leverage natural strengths.
It’s very transactional both in the sense that it’s about helping you get what you want, so they can get more of what they want. This is not necessarily problematic (of course you should have what you desire), except when it asks the client to fit themselves into a tiny box to create ‘success’ — which of course, eventually feels like failure.
If creating the external has asked us to override who we truly are and outsource our power to someone else who ‘has the answers’ — have we stepped further away from some of the most foundational philosophies of coaching — that is, that the client has the answers, and that we are all whole and complete as we are?
Issue #2:
Transactional coaching fails to acknowledge that the destination is the surface level desire that the client assumes will elicit a desired emotional response.
More money is assumed to produce less money anxiety. More clients are assumed to produce a feeling of success, or being ‘wanted’ in business. A tighter, toned body is assumed to produce comfort in one’s own skin.
We don’t want what we say we want, we want how we think it will make us feel.
And simply having the external does not create the internal feeling.
If coaching our clients to create the external without also helping them find the internal experience they desire, have we done our job? Let me use an example. If as a coach, you’re hired to help a client to make more money, do we simply focus on creating that outcome? Or, do we get curious about how they think that money will allow them to feel, help them create that internally, and then from that place, create the financial win?
The second will result in a change to the texture, flavour, quality of their life.
Issue #3:
And to take it a layer deeper, if we have only taught them to create the external without also learning the skills to hold it sustainably, this becomes a problem.
The pursuit of that which we say we want is the perfect breeding ground to build the skills that mean we, as the coach, become obsolete. Yes, that’s right, our job is to work ourselves OUT of a job.
Skills like:
Self-efficacy — the belief in themselves to take action towards their goals independently
Self-awareness — observing their own behavioural, cognitive and emotional patterns in the moment
Self-leadership — engaging in psychological skills to make different decisions to create new, more adaptive patterns
Self-motivation — generating their own motivation to take action, even if it feels safer to stay still
If we skip over the development of these skills, we risk not actually developing the human at all. We risk perpetuating the idea that coaching is all about getting ‘things’ and that is the only definition of success. We risk clients being successful in our presence but flailing as soon as they stop paying us. Creating or perpetuating codependence might be good for the bank account in the short term, but long term, it will cost you your fulfillment and reputation.
Transformational coaching, by contrast, is about using the desire, the outcome, the tangible external as the motivation for change, acknowledging the true motivation underneath, and having a dual focus on the development of the human skills.
Success is defined as — a human being changed for the better. The byproduct, is that they either get what they thought they wanted, OR they realise they are just as complete without it, OR, they stop pursuing it for the wrong reasons (from a place of not-enoughness) and create the experience through their values instead.
For example, a client who hires a weight loss coach, comes into the relationship desiring to lose 10kgs. The underlying desire is actually to stop feeling like they let themselves down, and to start feeling like they trust themselves around food again. The transformation could include — learning emotional processing skills, learning to eat based on true desire instead of impulse, connecting to their true motivation for weight loss (to wake up feeling fit and healthy), and focusing on experiencing their values of health each time they go to the gym, instead of being overly focused on the number on the scale.
Contrast this with transactional coaching, which would usually rely on strict rules around eating, calorie counting, discipline and force to go to the gym, and defines success only by the number on the scale.
The former develops the human as a whole, building skills for life; the latter leaves them dependent upon rules, structure and force.
The ripple effect of Transformational Coaching extends far past just creating the outcome this client hired us to help them with.
A client who builds self-leadership doesn’t just hit the revenue goal. She stops checking every decision with her partner before she decides what she really wants. A parent who starts investing in her health doesn’t just go to the gym; she’s no longer modelling self-abandonment to her kids. She speaks in rooms she used to shrink in. The skills we build for the outcome don’t stay in the session — they follow her home, into her marriage, her friendships, her relationship with herself. In behaviour analysis, we call this generalisation — and it’s kinda like the gold standard of behavioural change work — has the client learned the skill and is using it across different environments, people and situations?
If we want to leave our clients truly changed for the better, with skills that outlast our direct presence in their lives, we must be actively building these skills at the same time.
Transformational coaching is how you do this.
This isn’t just about being noble or ethical. It’s also what is commercially sound.
When you are truly transformational coaching, you equip the client to be independent longer term. Your clients get much better results because they’re building the component skills between sessions, needing you less.
You stop answering so many surface level questions that could go to Google, because your clients are solving the correct problem instead of the surface level problem. Your capacity opens up, so you’re spending less time putting out fires and more time leading conversations that elevate you and the client.
Your clients don’t keep rehiring you because they ‘need’ you (codependency). They keep rehiring you because they want you (interdependency) — and more on this in a later essay too!
People buy on emotion and back it up with logic. We don’t desire the thing, we desire how we think we will feel when we have the thing. If you can show the emotional transformation — through your own transformation, and the transformation of your clients — sales becomes so much easier.
These are the clients who walk away changed as a human. They don’t just get results while they’re with you, they get results forever because of who they became. They refer their friends to you, their parents probably know of you, and you’re the first person they speak of when someone asks ‘who would you recommend?’
Okay, we’re just getting started, ready to dive into the good stuff? Here’s where we’re going next:
the common hidden desires of your clients inside ten different niches
how to help your client become aware of their hidden desires of their intentions
how to help them fulfill these hidden desires WHILE on the pathway to creating their external intentions
how to proactively guide the development of the skills they need to achieve and sustain the outcome they want
how to reactively use ‘the art of opportunistic transformation’ to guide the development of skills in the session
discounted access to an additional masterclass bundle (The Exceptional Coach Initiation) which takes you deeper into each of these coaching skills (normally priced at $188, inside you’ll access it for $44 until the end of July).
This is the second in a series called “Lessons from Psychology that Make Me a Better Coach” — my intention is that you can treat each of these as a mini professional development course to reflect on your own practice as a coach, see your own opportunities for expansion, and play with some strategies each week to develop new skills. My intention is that at the end of these 8 weeks, you’ll walk away a more confident coach, with a toolkit of new strategies grounded in psychology that you can play with.
This is a series I’m writing in the lead up to our next enrolment period of The Midas Coach (one of the only entirely psychology backed coach training programs in the world). In August, we will be opening enrolment to our waitlist, so if you desire to feel confident in using tools, philosophies and approaches from psychology in your practice as a coach, so that you can guide the most complex clients and charge high ticket, add your name to the waitlist. And if that’s not you, this series alone will be an incredible resource.
Until the end of July, you can join on an annual subscription for $90 (this saves you $126).
(You can also join on a monthly subscription with that button
— whatever feels most expansive to you)
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