What to Do When Your Client Isn't Progressing

This is for you if you ever get frustrated with your clients because maybe you want them to be progressing faster or further, applying what you work on and discuss in session, or start making better choices.

There’s a lot about this on social from therapists and coaches. It seems to me that the first place practitioners go in their minds in these situations is to pathologize the client, investigate what it is about them that’s not working, or shrug off their situation dissmissively.

Personally, I think this is because no practitioner wants to believe their work isn’t working, that they don’t know how to help this person, or that maybe it’s them.

But how do we get better at our jobs if not to try and meet the client exactly where they are? If your client isn’t progressing, get curious. Ask them if the interventions you discuss feel doable to them and then modify if they don’t. Ask them if they feel like they’re making progress and tailor the work so that they feel good about it. Ask them what does or doesn’t work about the way you’re doing the work together and make the shifts. Ask them how they’re feeling about how it’s going.

Ask them what they need, what would be helpful, etc and trust yourself to offer attunement and solutions that are catered specifically to them. Or if you don’t know how to do this yet, make building this skill a priority through mentorship.

I might suggest that practitioners who don’t want to engage the client in these ways or ask them pointedly how the process is going for them are less interested in truly helping clients and more interested in selling their ideology, belief system, or indoctrination.

I say this because some practitioners treat session work or group work as simply a time for others to come and get what you’re giving and if they don’t comply or they don’t progress, well, it’s because they did something wrong. It always breaks my brain to think about the fact that there are so many coaches out there that simply want to sell their packages, sell their work, but they don’t put the care and thought into the actual outcome of their work not just on an individual level, but on the society as a whole.

And yet others of us view our work with clients as time for them to show up with whatever they need and then it’s our job to try and understand those nuances and offer support and care that’s specific to them and their need. Because if we don’t do this and our work is one size fits all, then those who fall outside that range will blame themselves and think something is wrong with them that they aren’t progressing. Which, of course, is the exact opposite feeling to what we want when we’re doing healing or transformational work.

In SomaField, I call this being Client Centered and it’s the very first Core Principle because it’s so important. There’s a lot of skill that goes into not just partnering with your client to meet their needs, but also creating the type of rapport with them that they can be honest with you about how it’s going and what they need. That’s the point, isn’t it?

Just a note here: This doesn’t mean that you don’t ever offer group programming that isn’t individualized. It means that in a one-on-one container or a group container, you do your best to attend to everyone. And then if you do want to offer group programming to clients, it’s on you to be very clear what you’re offering and who it’s for and what it will do so that folks can self select whether it’s a fit for them, reducing the need for more tailored support.

Which gets into SomaField’s bonus principle that I call Ethics. This is about making sure we keep our SomaField values intact in the ways we make our policies, do our marketing, and interact with real humans through our business. I’ll write more about this soon.

Please forward this to anyone that comes to mind if you think they’d enjoy it. :)