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The Time Traveler’s Wife<\/em> is a novel by Audrey Niffenegger, where the main character interacts with his past self and future self. It was recently made into a limited TV series, and within the first few moments of watching, I was hooked.<\/p>\n It got me thinking: maybe we time travel as coaches.<\/p>\n New coaches, my heart goes out to you. First, we insist that you should never give advice. Then, when we see you\u2019re ready, we teach you how to give advice\u2014sometimes. Next, we tell you to always stay in the present moment, and here I am about to give you permission to time travel.<\/p>\n The truth is that we may start out in the present (\u201cSo, what would you like to talk about today?\u201d), but we don\u2019t necessarily stay there. We may jump to the past by asking, \u201cWhen has something like this happened to you in the past? What did you do?\u201d<\/p>\n Some new coaches think they can\u2019t coach in the past because then they\u2019d be doing therapy. But there\u2019s no reason we can\u2019t talk about the past, and it can be extremely helpful. A client may realize, \u201cOh! This is not a problem; I know how to deal with this!\u201d They see that they\u2019ve successfully managed to cope with a similar situation, if not in their professional life, then in their personal one.<\/p>\n How does making that link help the client? It\u2019s a way to go deeper, and get at the root of the issue. There is something to learn, even if their previous experience was negative. \u201cIf you don\u2019t want that to happen again, what\u2019s different today? How are you different from when you dealt with this before?\u201d<\/p>\n Future work seems more natural in the realm of coaching. We always want to be moving forward. Jumping to the future might look like asking, \u201cWhat\u2019s the vision for how you\u2019ve handled this event? What do things look like in the future? What will your future self have learned that would be useful to know now? How could that help you today?\u201d<\/p>\n Have your client think through different possible courses of action, asking about each one, \u201cHow would doing that impact your future?\u201d Often, if we can picture this imagined future, it leads us to a clear set of steps that will get us there.<\/p>\n Another struggle for new coaches is changing<\/em> time zones. Ideally, we want to be fluid, not spending too much time in the past or future, and always coming back to the present. Step in, step out, come back to the present\u2014after all, it\u2019s the only time we really have, and we don\u2019t want to miss it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Step in, step out, come back to the present\u2014after all, it\u2019s the only time we really have, and we don\u2019t want to miss it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_meta":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2577"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2577"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2597,"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2577\/revisions\/2597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coaching4todaysleaders.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}