Coaching to Peace

By Stacy LaMorte

I have recently embarked on a new journey: coaching. I have been a fitness coach and for decades, but life coaching is very different.

As a personal trainer/fitness coach, it is my job to be the “expert,” helping my clients reach their health, fitness and wellness goals. Even when I worked as a classroom teacher, it was my job to create lesson plans and learning objectives for my students and assess mastery.

Now, growing and learning as a coach, my client is the expert. It is exciting to see how, by just listening deeply to them and asking them powerful questions, my clients come up with their own solutions to whatever is keeping them stuck or holding them back.

As I am applying these techniques to my mothering, I realize how important it is to allow your child to be the “expert” on him/herself.

It can be a challenge, sometimes, to allow our children to have input in decisions that affect them, but this is how they will truly learn their own likes and dislikes and not just learn to “people please,” which is a prevalent issue I deal with in coaching.

Try asking your child(ren) open-ended questions when they are telling you things that are going on in their lives. Here are some general examples that work well: “Can you tell me more about that?”; “What did you think/feel about that?”; “How could you have handled that differently?”; and, one of my personal favorites, “Why is this so important to you?”

These may allow you to really get to the bottom of what your child is thinking and feeling and let you know them on a deeper level. After all, God created them just the way they are!