Coaching Clients, Supporting People Experiencing Loss

Grief is a natural process everyone will experience in their own unique way when we lose someone or something that is near and dear to our hearts and/or tremendously important to us.

A loss could be a loved one, a job, a relationship, a community... a country. And the emotional response and the ways of dealing with loss can be so varied and dramatically different from person to person. There’s no ‘right way’ to experience it.

And as a coach and a human being, we will often partner with clients or know people experiencing grief of some kind in subtle or much more obvious ways. Naturally, it's important to approach people experiencing grief with compassion, empathy, and understanding. This means the skills of coaching lend themselves - and can be so powerful - in support of those experiencing grief.

Some of those powerful coaching skills include the following:

Listening actively: When a person is grieving, they need to feel heard and validated. As a coach, our role is to listen deeply and provide a safe and non-judgmental space for the person to express their feelings fully without judgment and in a safe psychological place.

Support self-care: Grief can be emotionally and physically draining. By being the 'mirror' to our clients and asking them what they need can support the client to recognise taking care of themselves is going to be paramount in the process of grieving and adjusting to new and unfamiliar circumstances where perhaps it feels overwhelming, fearful or daunting.

Focus on the present moment: Grief can cause a person to feel anxious about the future. Supporting the client to be in the present moment can create space to open up new thoughts, awareness and wisdom.

Explore emotions: Grief can bring up a range of emotions, such as sadness, anger, guilt, and even relief. As a coach, we can assist the person to process their emotions by naming them, being present to them and perhaps understanding how they are affecting their thoughts and choices as well as identifying the potential wisdom of the emotions.

Practice gratitude: Gratitude can help shift the focus away from what is creating not so resourceful emotions towards attention to what can create supportive emotions. When we lose something that is important to us, which leads to grief, it also means that it opens up 'doorways' to something new. A gratitude practice can support the opening of those new doorways that perhaps we didn't have any awareness of prior to the loss. Listening deeply and asking questions can support new perspectives and create appreciation for what is to come or what is opening up.

As a coach, we can provide support to the person or people we are with to navigate their own unique journey of expression of grief to find a way forward that honours and acknowledges the loss and assists with living and loving life.

In our work as Coaching Supervisors, we find that more and more coaches are bringing cases relating to grief being part of the emerging work that unfolds during coaching sessions.

Of course, as coaches, we are ethically bound to stay in our role as coaches and not move into therapeutic practice if we are not trained in this area.  We train coaches and supervise them to understand when ethical boundaries may be being crossed and to have a good referral practice for those clients who need more than coaching.

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