Case Study: No Money, Liabilities, No Resources

Stephanie Brail  http://www.feelgoodgirl.com posed the following question on my email discussion list COACHTALK-L (posted here with permission).

"So how do you manage coaching someone out of an environmental hole? The person has tremendous liabilities in some form or another. Perhaps debts or a health issue or a massive depletion in energy and resources?

"What's the answer for those folks? Of course, this begs the question whether they are even able to afford a coach in the first place..."

Add your suggestions, comments, and advice for coaching a client with such problems, or your own experience coaching them below, using the comments feature.

Comments

[Judy Murdoch]

Coaching people out of a hole

This is in response to a comment Stephanie Braill made re how do you coach people who are coming from a truly rough place. For example, a drug addict in the projects or a woman with two little kids, no money, minimal education who is trying to get away from an abusive husband.

In the interest of full disclosure, for personal and professional reasons, I don't work with folks in dire situations. But I have friends and colleagues who do. Here are some resources they recommend.

1. The How to Coach Anyone ecourse. Free to Coachville members at http://www.coachville.com/cvmembers/htca/past.html

2. The 12-Step Model. It's not for everyone but I know plenty of people whose lives have been transformed through AA, NA, an so on. The strength of the program is having people who were in the hole and know what it's like helping those who want to get out.

3. Marva Collins at http://www.marvacollins.com Marva Collins has spent her career demonstrating how her approach in elementary education can break the cycle for kids labeled as "untouchables" by the public school system. I know about Marva through a client who is using Marva's model with great success here in Denver.

Judy

Originally Posted by: Judy Murdoch August 13, 2005 02:16 PM

[Susan R Meyer]

I spent seven years counseling women in dire circumstances in an inner-city minority college and currently coach women in similar circumstances in a program in East Harlem. I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I certainly have a lot of experience and a good track record!
I coach these women the same way I coach my other clients. We set goals and I work in a very practical way to help the client achieve them. We spend a lot of time developing supportive environments to combat the pressures and influences of the life the woman is trying to leave behind. We face self-imposed barriers and use techniques developed from the Core Dynamics or Energy Patterns. I hope to add NLP to this in the future.
The differences are, to me, less in how we coach; more in the unfamiliarity of the path. I was tempted to say more in the distance, but that's not accurate. Is the distance shorter from lack of self-esteem to healthy ego strength because the setting is poverty, not affluence?
Some of my clients need supportive services I can not offer. Just as a more affluent client may also have a personal trainer or therapist, mine may be in a drug rehab program or meeting with a caseworker or parole officer.
Some have time and money constraints. We usually need to factor more meetings into discussions about how the client uses her time. We may have to plan around limited subway fare or computer access, so we are very resourceful.

What's different?
We find different resources than I would for my other clients - housing resources, imigration lawyers, job placement services geared to ex-offenders.

We sometimes need more intermediate steps than with others. Although this is true in helping any client who is moving into the workforce or changing careers, some of my clients are limited by inability to get bonded or need to complete a GED.

I've had to expand my horizons and language to keep up with these clients. I've had to learn that the most surprising things can free someone's spirit. Who knew that skinning a rat at the zoo would release all of a client's self-doubts and get her back into college?

Still, most meet their short-term goals and are on their way to their bigger goals. Of course, the outcomes may be different than we are used to seeing, but the achievement is huge. They become employed. They find better apartments. They regain custody of their children, They receive their GEDs.

What needs to change? I continually work on my ideas about what constitutes a good life and how my clients "should" live or what they "should" want. I'm grateful for this because it's helped my work in other areas.

If you want to do this work, you don't have to volunteer, although that would be nice too. Most non-profits are masters at finding grant money. My program operates through a grant and I hope to set up grant-funded programs within two other agencies.
You can make a huge difference. Over 75% of the women in the East Harlem program were employed by the end of the program. Others were back in school or had made significant progress on completing programs/projects ranging from drug programs to getting off parole to giving birth.

So, how do you help people out of a deep hole? With respect, courage and compassion, one step at a time!

[Pat Gundry]

I coached a client like that. She was referred to me by my own coach, the client having contacted the coaching company my coach was affiliated with, and my coach recommending she be referred to me because I was doing some pro bono work and had recently experienced dealing with the care of my parents in a difficult situation.

The client, I'll call her Tara (not her name, and I'll also change some of the information to protect her privacy), had contacted the coaching company because she'd read a book that had some connection to it. She emailed that she was discouraged, demoralized, and feeling at the end of her rope, had very little money to spend on coaching, but had some hope that there might be some help for her there.

She had been caring for her disabled husband for several years, as the only caregiver, and realized he was near the end of his life, and felt her future looked bleak with or without him because she had given up her work and interests to care for him 24/7, had little social contact, was isolated, and was thinking she would be practically unemployable when he died, and she'd get no income after his disability payments ceased.

She, however, as I got to know her, revealed herself to be tenacious, a hard worker, witty and creative with a raucous and good sense of humor.

The first thing I did was establish rapport, find commonality between us. I also told her how I work, and that I'd be giving her assignments. Her first assignment was to clean out her closet. I often gave that, and still do, as a first assignment, because it almost always has an energizing effect, and helps people begin the change process. Then, I asked her to list tolerations and begin to eliminate them, one by one.

She felt very afraid of her financial future, seeing no way to support herself well without her husband. So, I assigned her the task of doing a complete listing of all her financial assets and possibilities. She found, to her surprise, that the situation was better than she'd thought, and she was able to even add to her resources there by eliminating some expenses.

We worked on changing the way she viewed her future, using various NLP techniques, and finding ways she could resurrect her skills and follow dreams that had been set aside when she began to care for her husband. She began small steps to set in motion a better future for herself.

She was socially isolated because she could not leave her husband alone for more than a couple of hours while he slept, and had no one to help her with his care. One solution was to invite a local interest group she used to attend to meet in her home for their monthly meetings, which they were happy to do.

Over the months we worked together she added streams of income, took correspondendence training in a new field she was interested in, re-connected with members of her family of origin and old friends, and started a research project that will earn money in the future.

Though she did not have a lot of time to work on her projects, she was able to make good progress by utilizing time when her husband was napping or asleep for the night.

She told me, at one point, "You saved my life," which I took to mean she had seriously considered suicide before our coaching together. And, I say "together" because she had some of the best resources of all, personal integrity and motivation. The very traits that made her vulnerable, her relentless determination to take the best care of her husband no matter what, and her ability to do research and work hard were what made her such a great coaching subject.