Transformational Coaching Techniques You Need to Know

Are you ready to help others discover their untapped potential that’s waiting to be unleashed? If so, I’m going to clarify the transformational coaching techniques you need to know to make that happen.

What is Transformational Coaching?

Transformational Coaching is the process of working with an individual to create a major change in their personal or professional life. It goes beyond the surface and digs deeper to discover and change the limiting thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that keep a person stuck. 

Transformational coaching enables an individual to create fundamental shifts in their capacity to change their habitual ways of doing things in their lives (P Hawkins, N Smith, 2020). Transformational coaching is all about helping your clients to make a change whether big or small.

A complete transformational coach training program teaches how to help clients:

• Understand their brain and make better use of it
• Master their mindset
• Overcome their fears
• Find their purpose and discover meaning in their life
• Avoid procrastination and gain unstoppable discipline
• Destroy bad habits and adopt new, good, and fulfilling habits
• Tap into a powerful flow state and perform at their very best
• Have healthier relationships
• Have better health and gain more energy and vitality with simple changes

5 Transformational Coaching Techniques You Need to Know

If you are thinking of becoming a Transformational Coach there are a few essential scientific studies and techniques you should know to help your clients create lasting change.

1. Neuroscience – the scientific study of the human brain and nervous system.

2. Positive Psychology – the scientific study of strengths with techniques to help individuals thrive at their highest.

3. Motivational Interviewing (MI) – a client-centered, directive method for encouraging clients through the stages of change.

4. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – a type of psychotherapy in which negative patterns of thought about the self and the world are challenged in order to alter unwanted behavior patterns.

5. Neuro-Linguistic Programming – a field of study that attempts to build a set of transferable skills by programming the subconscious and unconscious mind.

A Brief Summary of the Coaching Techniques

1. Neuroscience Techniques

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the human brain and nervous system.

As the understanding of neuroscience continues to advance, coaches will increasingly draw from this wisdom when helping their clients with:

• mindfulness
• self-awareness
• motivation
• resilience
• optimism
• critical thinking
• stress management

Every client is different. What may work for one client’s personal development may not work for another.

Coaches will need to be able to have an understanding and show their clients how the brain actually works; why some tools and techniques for personal development may or may not work for an individual; deliver results and be able to scientifically prove it.

The study of neuroscience will help you stand out as a coach.

2. Positive Psychology Techniques

Positive Psychology is a recent branch of psychology and a philosophical approach that asks what is “going right” rather than what is “going wrong”.

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of optimal functioning. It is an area of study that seeks to identify and promote those qualities that lead to greater fulfillment in our lives.

It seeks to identify the strengths and skills that enable individuals and communities to thrive. We view positive psychology not so much as a distinct field, but rather a distinct way of viewing the human condition. Positive psychologists do not see people as broken or as having something missing. Rather, they see all people as having the potential to thrive given the right skills, strengths, and social context.

3. Motivational Interviewing Techniques

Motivational Interviewing (MI), a counseling style initially used to treat addictions, increasingly has been used in health care and public health settings. Motivational interviewing will help you coach your clients through the stages of change.

MI is found to resolve ambivalence, enhance intrinsic motivation, increase self-efficacy, promote confidence in a person’s ability to make behavior changes.

MI has been defined as a person-centered method of guiding to elicit and strengthen personal motivation for change. Strategies include reflective listening and eliciting change talk.

MI encourages individuals to work through their ambivalence about behavior change and to explore the discrepancy between their current behavior and broader life goals and values.

A key challenge for coaches is deciding when and how to transition from building motivation to the goal setting and planning phases of coaching. To address this, UCI presents a model from building motivation to more action-oriented coaching, within a person-centered framework.

4. Cognitive Behavioral Techniques

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy that is used to help people change thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are causing them problems. CBT differs from other therapy approaches by focusing on the ways that an individual’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are interconnected, and how they each affect one another. Because emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are all linked and when negative, they prevent an individual from moving forward, CBT approaches allow for coaches to intervene using CBT techniques.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy combined with Motivational Interviewing

When MI is combined with CBT, it is effective in helping an individual to change a behavior that is not serving them in a positive way. It uses discussion, coping strategies, and motivational interviewing principles to help the person initiate a plan to change his/her behavior and motivate them to follow through.

Throughout the sessions, the coach will guide the client through their plan to stop said behavior and will continue to motivate and encourage his/her progress.

5. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Techniques

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the 1970s.

• Neuro means relating to the nervous system.
• Linguistic is about language.
• Programming here refers to habits.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming – using language to program our nervous system into more useful habits.

Neuro-Linguistic programming’s belief is that we all build our own maps of reality.

These maps, or worldviews, are filtered by our senses, experiences, beliefs, and neurology. In other words, many of the challenges we have are based upon our perceptions of the world, not the world itself.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is commonly understood as a set of tools that can affect:

• Personal Change
• Excellent Relationships
• Producing real results in Life
• Self-Motivation
• Overcome blocks and challenges

NLP can affect these changes often extremely fast.

Combining the Techniques for Total Transformation

All of these techniques can be used to work together in coaching sessions.

First, you will be able to help clients to understand with scientific evidence how their brain works and why they do what they do. Through neuroscience coaches will be able to explain, from a scientific point of view the methods and techniques of Positive Psychology, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. When clients understand they will be less resistant to transformational coaching.

Second, you will be able to help clients to change their limiting thoughts, emotions, and behaviors from a conscious level using Cognitive Behavioral Techniques and subconscious level using Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Third, you will also be able to help clients create transformation by doing only what’s authentic for them and achieving optimal results through Positive Psychology techniques.

Lastly, you will be able to coach clients through the entire process of transformation, in addition, help them to maintain the transformation using Motivational Interviewing.

Universal Coach Institute’s Transformational Coach Training and Certification program teaches all of the above so that you can help your client create total transformation and so you can stand out as a coach.

Please click here to learn more: Transformational Coach Training and Certification

Read next: How Transformational Coaching Works