Celebrate Your Strengths: Part 1 of My Coaching Framework

When anyone new starts coaching with me, they want immediate results. Even if the problem they walk into my door was created over 10 years, they want me to fix it…now. Today. In a 90-minute session.

That’s not how rock-solid coaching works and I don’t even really believe that is what you want.

You don’t want a flimsy relationship that can be shifted by a fly-by-night coach offering the latest quick-fix for your relationship. Why not? Because think how shallow the roots are on that fix. The next big wind (or your next big conflict) will blow over any shallowly-rooted-relationship.

Here’s an example:

My husband injured himself earlier this year. He fell off his bike and dislocated his ankle. The fix required lots of metal and screws and a night in the hospital. He was a great sport for the 8 weeks he was on crutches. But now the hard work of rebuilding all those muscles and ligaments is really showing itself, and it’s daunting.

As a result, he was not in a great headspace yesterday and I was being incredible dense and insensitive. 20 years ago, I guarantee we would have gotten in a big fight, with each of us finding fault with the other. We would dredge up old examples to justify why we were each RIGHT and the other person was WRONG.

But, our marriage has deep roots. For decades, we’ve been operating with a framework that sets us up to remain deeply connected.

Today, I’m going to share this framework with you. It’s the same framework that I use for all my private coaching.

 

My 4-part coaching framework

My coaching framework includes 4 key elements:

• Celebrate
• “Good to notice”
• Tools and invitations
• and the Takeaway.

Think of a way in which you’d like your relationship to change, and let’s go through my framework together so that, 20 years from now, or 20 days, or even 20 minutes from now, you have a better framework to connect you to your partner than, “Well, I’m RIGHT and you’re WRONG.”

After a client coaches with me, I send a detailed summary with notes about what we discussed, framed up in a way that my client can begin to think about their life, and their relationship, differently. And they can have a specific and practical tool to help them practice the shift we explored in our session.

Because when you can have a different perspective, and a simple, clear way to practice that renewed perspective, everything is able to change.

#1: Celebrate your strengths

The very first thing a client reads in any note that comes from me focuses on celebrating strengths already in place.

I always start my note–and by extension my framework—with a celebration. As a coach, I like to build on strengths. There is a lot of habit research that says the best way to secure a habit is with positive emotions. Consequently, I’m not just “trying to be positive” but rather offering you an invitation to TRULY celebrate the positive things on this list. When you notice them and celebrate them, that anchors those behaviors as habits.

Let’s look at how a practice like this one impacts the not-so-great-moment with my husband this morning. Once I emerged from my insensitive stupor and realized that my husband was struggling, I hugged him. I made a list of a few things to offer him perspective:

• “You are tenacious,” I told him. “You love having a goal to chase and you’ve got a big goal.”
• “You gave yourself time to rest. That was a critical part of your healing, and resting well isn’t easy. But you did it well.”
• “For the rest of your life, you’re going to see your health differently. There’s nothing like 8 weeks on crutches to make you grateful every day that you can simply walk across a room without effort.”

As I said these things to my husband, I hugged him. I rubbed his back. I did this to remind him that, even though he’s feeling broken in this moment, I see so much more than just this moment when I look at him.

I reinforced his identity as a tenacious person who doesn’t give up. I congratulated him for doing the hard, hard thing of holding still while his initial injury healed. And I tried to inspire hope that this injury, for all the bad it did, also did something good: it gives him a different way to view his current level of health.

 

There are a variety of ways to celebrate the very thing that might be bugging you

Our temptation is to double down. Believe me I wanted to double down and tell my husband how RIGHT I was as I was sitting at the kitchen island. I am searching for the particulars of my RIGHTNESS right now, and I can’t even find them because this framework is so good at changing your perspective.

Once I was able to emerge from my insensitive stupor, I saw that my husband was bummed and it stopped mattering to me that I was RIGHT. Instead, I wanted him to feel loved.

Celebrating those strengths in my husband did more than buck up his mood, however. As I stood there rubbing his back, I also had time to reflect. I was reminded that, while he looks whole and healed on the outside, he’s still struggling inside.

Anyone whose had a sports injury knows that the path to recover is filled with muscles that need rebuilding, and aches and tightness that were never part of your life before you were injured.

Just having a moment to remember this awakened my compassion. Compassion feels good. Remember what I said about how celebrating the strengths helps us gain momentum? That’s what was happening for me. I’d lost perspective that David was still healing.

But the instant I got a chance to remember, the compassion I felt was real. And it instantly bonded me to my husband and erased my need to be RIGHT and “win the fight.”

 

Have you ever had this happen to you?

Have you ever been in a conflict with your partner and you could feel that compulsion to prove how justified your position is and then your partner says one thing and instantly you’re flooded with a brand new perspective you couldn’t even see a moment ago?

When we remind ourselves of our strengths and our values and we celebrate how we’re living into them, we get reminded to live the life we care most about.

You’re going to see how the rest of the framework will help you to shift your perspective, but before we move on, let’s name a few things that you might want to celebrate.

If you and your partner are having trouble communicating, what can you celebrate before you dive straight into the deep end of sharpening your skills?

• You could celebrate the love you have for each other that you even WANT to communicate better. That love is deep and it will inspire change.
• You could celebrate a world filled with resources to help you. There are so many people talking about better communication strategies that you have a world of support around you.
• You could (and I hope you WILL) celebrate yourself. You are, right this very moment, reading a blog dedicated to strengthening your relationship. Look at you go! Look how you are living your values.

I cannot stress the importance of this celebration enough. Your habits and your world view are shaped by positive emotion. When you like something, you will repeat it. That is natural. Because it feels good. We like to repeat things that feel good.

Be intentional to think about your life, your relationship, your career, your friendships in a way that asks the question:

• What’s already good about this situation?
• What strengths am I bringing to this situation?
• How am I improving in this area?

Your brain answers the questions you give it. And your brain is constantly serving up questions for you to ponder.

 

Pause. Consider how this part of the framework fits in your life.

The first element of my coaching (and living) framework is to celebrate. Celebrate the strengths you have. Celebrate the chance to learn and grow. Celebrate how you’re already rising to the occasion of the change you want to make in your life.

Take a minute now. Articulate three things you want to celebrate about the situation you conjured at the beginning of this episode.

Did you pause? Do you have your celebrations? If you paused and did that, let’s give you an extra round of applause. Because you are exceptional! If you’re like most people, you didn’t pause…I mean who can bother with something so silly?

But here’s the thing. You’re going to have a kitchen moment like mine yesterday. There will come a day when you think life is going along swimmingly, and suddenly your partner’s mood is off-kilter, or you’ve had a stack of bad things happen at work, and you’ll come home and your bad moods are contagious and suddenly you and your partner are fighting and now one knows why. But you keep hurting each other.

Instead, let this framework guide you have a more thoughtful response when you or your partner is hurting, or just off in your mood.

 

Do you want to coach with me?

I have open spots in my private coaching practice. That doesn’t happen very often, so I’d love to extend that invitation to you if you’ve been wanting to coach with me.

Reach out via my text number, 970-210-4480, or you can go to this page on my website. I can’t wait to get to know you.