Hello, friends, welcome to the Bright Morning podcast.

I'm your host, Elena Aguilar.

And in each podcast episode, you'll hear me demonstrate how you can lead conversations

that build connection and spark change.

Today, we're diving into what can be one of the trickiest

and sometimes the saddest situations for a coach to have to navigate with a client at the end of

the school year. And I'm talking about the painful reality of when a client doesn't make meaningful progress towards their

goals. So this topic comes from my new skill session, which is called gathering data and reflecting

on a client's growth. That entire session is focused on the ways that you can capture growth and then

structure an end of your conversation with your client. Overwhelmingly, this will be the

situation. There will be so much learning and celebrating to do. But that isn't always the case.

So today I'm going to share a few suggestions for how to navigate the times when it feels like your client doesn't meet their goals

or when they feel like they haven't made progress. Okay, so you are facilitating an end-of-year reflection with your client, and they look at their

goals for the year and conclude that they didn't meet them, and they didn't make any growth.

The first thing that you need to do as the coach is to get curious. And the second thing is to help your client get curious.

You will probably also want to acknowledge their emotions because these kinds of moments can feel

painful. But see what happens if you nudge them quickly towards curiosity. You can always come back to the

emotions if necessary or if the client really wants to process those first, but see what happens

if you ask some or all of the following questions. Ask them. What do you think happened? Where did the breakdown occur?

Were these the wrong goals? Were the goals too ambitious or too much of a reach? Did you have too many goals?

What came up that prevented you from meeting your goals?

And if you could travel back in time, what would you do differently?

...