The Life Coaching Funnel IQ Matrix delves into a life coaching process you can use with your clients to help them successfully achieve their desired outcomes. The funnel walks your client through a process that helps them to transition from focusing on a problem toward building a plan of action centered around a specific goal they would like to achieve. The process involves four key steps and an additional introductory step that helps you profile your client. This profile step allows you to gain the necessary information you need to move through the life coaching funnel successfully.
The steps of this process include client profiling, clarifying the goal, exploring the issue, developing options, making a decision, and taking action. At each stage of the process, you are presented with a series of questions you can use to walk your client through the funnel. Although this technique is for life coaching, it can also be used as an effective tool for self-coaching purposes.
Here is a quick breakdown of each branch of the Life Coaching Funnel mind map.
- Client Profiling: This initial introductory step involves asking your client a specific set of questions that allows you to gather unique and valuable insights about their life and circumstances. The answers to these questions will lay down the foundations for the issue/s that you will explore as you move through the life coaching funnel.
- Clarify Goal: The first step of this life coaching funnel involves flipping the problem or issue that your client is experiencing. This might involve turning the problem into a goal that is encapsulated within a single statement. This statement will then be used as a guide as you move through the remaining stages of the life coaching funnel. This branch takes you through the first step of this process. It presents you with key questions you can ask your client to help them clarify the goal they would like to achieve.
- Explore Issues: Having specified a goal and a date for its accomplishment, it’s now time to do a little probing and explore the problem/issue in more detail. While probing your client about the issue at hand, you must gauge their internal responses to the problem. This will provide you with the relevant insights you need to ask the right questions. These questions will help your client move toward their desired objective far more effectively.
- Develop Options: The third step of life coaching funnel involves brainstorming potential solutions that may help your client overcome their problem and achieve their goal. Here, your client must think creatively and let go of all inhibitions. As a coach, you now need to become a “creative thinking director”. In other words, you must guide your client through a creative thinking process that will help them develop appropriate solutions to their problem.
- Make a Decision: Once potential solutions and options have been found, it’s now time to decide and select the most appropriate course of action moving forward. Here you need to ask your client a specific set of questions that will help them clarify the best option moving forward.
- Take Action: The final step of the life coaching funnel involves developing a very specific plan of action. This plan must help your client accomplish their desired objective. It’s important at this final stage that you get a commitment from your client. Your client must commit to these steps and must also hold themselves accountable for taking each step.
This map provides a roadmap and framework for working through a problem in a rational and structured way. Referencing it regularly and committing it to memory will help you to embed these concepts and ideas into your subconscious mind.
A mind map, of course, does this beautifully because it mirrors the synaptic connections made in your brain as you try to establish new habits of thought and behavior. It brings together key concepts and ideas that help your brain to fully integrate and process this information. The brain, subsequently, rewires itself as it attempts to establish new habits of mind. It’s an ideal tool for creating lasting change and transformation.
Stick with these principles, memorize and incorporate this process into your life coaching practice, and you will progressively help your clients move from a problem towards a desired outcome. This process can also be used for self-coaching purposes to help guide you through a structured problem-solving process.
The content for this map was adapted from Coaching Questions: A Coach’s Guide to Powerful Asking Skills, written by Tony Stoltzfus.
When you purchase the Life Coaching Funnel IQ Matrix you will receive:
- A PDF copy of the IQ Matrix, which you can use for printing in high resolution.
- A JPG image file of the IQ Matrix, which is ideal for viewing on tablets and mobile devices.
- A Desktop Background version of the map you can use for reference on your computer.
- A MindManager file for those who wish to edit the content of the IQ Matrix.
- A printable PDF summary that breaks down each branch of the IQ Matrix in detail.
Additional visual resources and variations of this IQ Matrix might be added to your account page at no extra cost in the future.
