Coaching for Anxiety. Tips and Techniques for Helping Clients

The ability to manage anxiety and worry is a unique experience for each person who feels these emotions.

However, the primary goal of anxiety treatment is to learn how to establish a more solid sense of self.

Coaching seeks to change an individual's perception by encouraging them to work on themselves (Westfall, 2021). Coaching is a helpful strategy in helping some people overcome anxiety since it focuses on goal setting and adjusting individual perspectives.

This blog post covers anxiety coaching tools and strategies for sessions with clients suffering from anxiety symptoms.

The primary distinction between coaching and professional therapy interventions is that a therapist is regarded as an expert who advises tools to assist a client with specific challenges. On the other hand, a coach concentrates on helping their clients to see new possibilities and be motivated to engage in change.

Another distinction is what your clients choose to think about to cope with anxiety. Therapy frequently examines questions that arise as a result of past experiences and trauma. Coaching seeks to assist clients in gaining fresh perspectives that would help them improve their future and look forward to attaining their goals.

Clients who exhibit symptoms of a mental disorder, such as GAD or PTSD, should be referred to a mental health specialist. These clients are unsuitable for anxiety coaching, and coaches are not equipped to help them.

Anxiety coaching combats anxiety-related symptoms by helping clients feel more in control of the outcome and fostering more positive thought patterns, as anxiety is often centred on fear of the future.

How to Counsel Anxious Clients

The most fundamental aspect of any coaching practice is empathising with your clients.

Anxiety counselling entails asking clients questions to better understand their anxiety. Coaches may want to take the following steps to narrow down the source of their customers' concerns (derived from Life Coach Directory, n.d.):

Begin by asking, "What is your end goal?"

It's critical to understand why your clients sought to coach in the first place. A specific goal for someone suffering from anxiety can be to minimise their stress in social circumstances or lower their daily pressure to a bearable level.

Examine the underlying ideas that are causing the anxiety.

After you've assisted your client in identifying their goals, it's time to figure out what's causing their anxiety. Their beliefs may be founded on past events, possibly from childhood, and behaviours observed in loved ones.

Learn how to reframe these sensations and ideas to manage anxiety.

Once you've discovered these beliefs and how they may contribute to anxiety, it's time to reframe them to minimise your client's anxiety-related symptoms. For example, suppose clients believe they will always feel embarrassed in social situations. In that case, a coaching session may assist them in learning how to be more confident.

Make a strategy.

After these ideas have been recognised and reconfigured, individuals must apply what they have learned. For example, suppose this same client is working to overcome their fear of social situations. In that case, they can use the knowledge obtained through coaching sessions to attend social occasions without feeling apprehensive.

2 Anti-Anxiety Techniques Coaches

Coaching is a client-centred approach in which coaches enable clients to confront their difficulties. This is accomplished by increasing the client's understanding of what drives them, their motivations, and their purpose and finding areas for improvement (Drake, 2011).

Several coaching strategies can be developed to assist clients suffering anxiety that interferes with their regular functioning.

Balanced time perspective

Time perspective coaching enables clients to be aware of what is happening around them. The past is separated into past negative and past positive in time perspective coaching. The present is classified into present fatalism and present hedonism (Jarosz, 2017). If any of these viewpoints is given too much weight, clients may be unable to focus on what is happening now and may be concerned about the future.

When anxiety is centred on anticipating future occurrences, time perspective coaching can assist clients in seeing how their stress is affecting them. The first step could be encouraging clients to start a diary to reflect on their future best selves.

Clients can also respond to thoughtful questions aloud or in writing, such as (modified from Boniwell & Osin, 2015):

·         What are your main priorities?

·         How would you like to spend the next five years in an ideal world?

·         Assume you were told you only had a year to live. What would you do with this time? How would you react?

Having this perspective can assist lessen your client's anxiety caused by future decisions. It will also support your clients as they figure out how to connect their behaviours with their inner values.

Theory of self-determination

The notion of self-determination focuses on the environments that encourage people to achieve their goals and feel happy throughout their lives. Self-determination theory, in particular, investigates what motivates people to develop objectives and identify their purpose, with the ultimate goal of obtaining autonomy (Spence & Oades, 2011).

Self-determination is also concerned with ensuring that specific socio-cultural conditions (for example, family relationships, friendships, workplace culture, political system, and cultural norms) support the innate need to freely engage in exciting activities (autonomy), producing valued outcomes through the use of our capacities (competence), and feeling closely and securely connected to significant others (relatedness; Spence & Oades, 2011).

Coaches can assist clients in meeting these objectives and goals by concentrating on and developing their personal talents. This can be accomplished by introducing clients to a process model such as the GROW (goal-reality-options-wrap-up) (Whitemore, 1996).

Clients can target the stage of the goal-setting process they are in after filling out the GROW coaching model template. Here's how coaches and clients might collaborate to implement this model in their sessions (modified from Whitemore, 1996):

Goal

Agree on a precise aim with the clients; select discussion subjects to develop long-term goals.

Reality

Provide specific examples for feedback and encourage clients to conduct self-evaluations of their long-term goals.

Options

Weigh the complete range of choices for each goal and make appropriate recommendations.

Wrap-up

Commit to taking action; identify potential roadblocks and set specific activities with timetables to achieve each goal.

A Point to Consider

Anxiety may be a crippling experience if it is not addressed promptly. Anxiety coaching can be a valuable tool for assisting clients in setting objectives and engaging in self-reflection to recognise damaging thought patterns.

Coaching can be a helpful strategy for many people with anxiety to overcome some of their symptoms because it focuses on individuals taking ownership to assist alter future actions.

If you are a coach, we hope this post provides valuable tools to assist your clients. If you are experiencing anxiety, we recommend that you seek help from a coach who specialises in fear. This will provide you with a foundation for a better future.

We hope you found this post interesting. Please remember to contact john@thehelpinghandcoaching.com to learn more about health & wellness coaching.