Offering life coaching services digitally is intensely satisfying for inspired professionals—it allows you to be creative and differentiate your services while making a bigger impact on your clients’ lives.
If you’re new to virtual coaching or tired of personalizing hard-copy solutions, this resource will introduce some of Quenza’s best tools for life coaches. Keep reading to discover some great worksheets and exercises for your programs, plus the best ways to use them with your clients!
How Life Coaching Tools Benefit Your Clients
For those who want to make progress, unlock their unique potential, and achieve greater fulfillment, you can play a very valuable supporting role as a life coach.
But while you can foster accountability, create clarity, challenge perspectives, and set your clients on the right track, the responsibility for making positive, lasting change ultimately comes down to the coachee.
That’s why you need effective, reliable life coaching tools—they’re an absolute essential if you want to equip your clients with the specific skills and knowledge they need to:
- Move forward on their own
- Build and sustain motivation for change, and
- Take the action that is required to achieve their goals.
They can be thought of as practical complements to a professional life coach’s specialized skills and the progress that takes place during sessions. They can also take many forms depending on an individual coachee’s specific goals.
Digital life coaching tools are a convenient, affordable, and engaging way for your clients to develop and achieve their goals.
Digital life coaching tools, in particular, have a few specialized benefits. They are:
- A convenient, easily accessible way for clients to develop – especially when clients can access their through smartphone apps or coaching portals
- An affordable way to access knowledge – online learning software being a cost-effective way to deliver and personalize self-paced e-courses and learning modules at scale, and
- Engaging and motivational – because digital tools can be personalized and made interactive to suit a client’s specific needs, goals, interests, and requirements.
14 Best Tools for Life Coaches
The approaches used by life coaches to empower and develop their clients vary widely, and always come down to what’s most suited to their coachee’s unique circumstances.
Some life coaching tools may draw on psychological schools such as mindfulness, values, character strengths, and emotional intelligence to help clients cope with specific challenges, while others may use the same principles to facilitate goal-directed achievement or personal development.
Other life coaches might prefer tools from cognitive or clinical psychology, such as online CBT, ACT, or Applied Behavioral Analysis – but at the end of the day, they must stem from a good understanding of a client’s current context and goals.
6 Life Coaching Assessment Examples
To achieve this, life coaching typically begins with assessment using tools and exercises such as:
- Strengths Assessments, e.g. the Signature Strength Questionnaire (SSQ-72), or a custom Strengths Interview[1]
- Values Assessments, such as the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS) or Valued Living Questionnaire[2][3]
- Life Satisfaction Assessments, e.g. the Wheel of Life or Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS)[4], and
- Emotional Intelligence Assessments, like the Emotional Quotient Inventory 2.0 (EQ-i-2.0)[5]
Knowing more about a specific client’s circumstances can be part of intake or even carried out prior to onboarding, and it helps life coaches and their clients to develop a strong working relationship.
Together, they can work on identifying the goals that will inform a client’s unique development journey.
Here are a few examples of goal-setting and assessment life coach resources.
5 Goal-Setting Exercises for Life Coaching
These example goal-setting exercises are a mix of customizable Quenza Expansion templates and proven approaches that can be used with individuals, groups, workshops, or employee training programs:
- Goal Visualization: as pictured above, this exercise invites your clients to use mental imagery in building clarity and motivation
- Motivational Interviewing: This isn’t an Expansion, but a technique that encourages the coachee to take responsibility for their actions[6]
- A Self Contract: this is Quenza Expansion encourages coachees to take a more active approach to accountability-building
- The Best Possible Self exercise: Here’s another Expansion that uses positive imagery and optimism to build resilience, and
- Habit Journals are among the most popular accountability-building tools for life coaches and can include mood trackers, habit diaries, or gratitude journals like Quenza’s Three Good Things Exercise (pictured below).
3 Life Coaching Tools for Assessment
Before your virtual sessions even begin, intake and assessment tools for life coaching allow you to understand your client’s current status, as well as their goals and drivers.
The following are a few examples of life coaching tools that fall into this category, from Quenza’s Expansion library:
- Pre-Coaching Questionnaire: Before sessions begin, you can use assessments to gather information on your client’s background, hopes, and expectations for their coaching (e.g., Quenza’s Pre-Coaching Questionnaire, pictured above)
- Life Domain Satisfaction Survey: To identify how clients feel about 16 different life domains, e.g. work, relationships, money, and family
- Wheel of Life: One of the best-known life coaching tools, this Wheel of Life assessment can give you insight into a coachee’s perceived satisfaction with various domains of life, as pictured below.
How To Use Life Coaching Activities and Exercises Effectively
Life coaching tools and exercises are most effective at shaping positive behavior change when they fit neatly into a client’s lifestyle.
When a daily habit journal or mood tracker, for example, is top of mind and easy to access, coachees are more likely to engage with them for longer periods.
Whether you are sharing personal coaching exercises or group coaching programs, therefore, it’s a good idea to use a specialized life coaching app.
With coaching software that has the right tools, you can achieve a few important things.
Most critically, you can:
- Craft standardized and professional, yet personalized tools in less time
- Share them through the one platform, rather than constantly emailing PDFs to your life coaching clients
- Adapt done-for-you, brandable templates and saved exercises rather than recreating all your resources from scratch every time (or reinventing the Wheel of Life!)
- Collect all their responses and data in a way that’s secure, private, and timely (i.e., in real-time)
- Automate the delivery of your tools, so your clients can receive them on a schedule (without you having to log in).
When choosing a platform, make sure you choose a platform that allows you to adapt your tools conveniently, so they align with your client’s capabilities, needs, desires, and interests. This not only helps you deliver more relevant solutions but also allows you to share your own content if you’re looking to differentiate your offer or expand your practice.
Click here for our in-depth review of the best coaching software available in 2022.
Where To Find Customizable Worksheets and Resources
The beauty of specialized life coaching software is that it is uniquely designed to help you coach—with the right tool, you can even find customizable templates for popular life coaching exercises.
Quenza is a great example. The HIPAA-compliant app comes with an entire library of templates (Expansions), including the following life coach resources that you can personalize, brand with your own logo, and share with clients in your coaching programs.
As well as the tools and exercises we already covered, for instance, you might want to include any of the following in your solutions.
4 Most Versatile Life Coaching Tools
- Strength Interview: This example strength-spotting activity guides your clients through an exploration of their capabilities, skills, and positive character strengths. As shown above, you can use a worksheet like this Quenza Expansion to help coachees identify internal resources that they can draw on throughout their development journeys.
- Realizing Long-Lasting Change by Setting Process Goals: This life coaching worksheet can be used to help clients build positive habits that support their goals and guide goal-oriented actions.
- Life Domain Satisfaction: If you help clients find meaning and value, this assessment explores a coachee’s satisfaction with important life categories, including money, work, health, family, friends, learning, and partner, and
- Finding Your Ikigai: This is a universal worksheet that can help clients discover and connect with meaningful life aspects. As shown below, this resource invites them to find where their passions and talents converge with what others need and are willing to pay for. As well as within life coaching programs, it’s a great tool for leadership, career, or executive coaching.
3 Tools For Tackling Limiting Beliefs
Where clients are struggling to overcome perceived obstacles to their development, or where problematic perspectives prevent them from feeling fulfilled, these three life coaching tool Expansions for limiting beliefs can also be helpful:
- Beyond Limitations Question Technique: A customizable life coaching exercise that encourages coachees to think outside of their perceived boundaries, as pictured above
- 20 Guidelines for Developing a Growth Mindset: This activity offers 20 basic rules for developing a flexible, open, and growth-oriented mindset about development, and
- Solution-Focused Guided Imagery: A visualization exercise that helps clients explore their strengths and the actions they need to take to overcome challenges.
The most important resource a life coach has is one’s mind. Why not invest in improving this resource by reading any (or all!) of these valuable life coaching books?
An Alternative to Sending PDFs to Clients Over Email
One of the biggest advantages of having a digital life coaching toolkit is that you no longer need to email your PDF worksheets, exercises, and resources to clients.
As soon as you start to build and personalize your solutions with a life coaching app like Quenza, you can start to share them through the platform.
There are two ways to send life coaching tools to your clients with Quenza, both of which afford you full flexibility over when you’d like them delivered to your client’s coaching portal:
- You can send individual tools or Activities directly from your Library in a few clicks, or
- Integrate them as steps in a program, using Quenza’s Pathway Builder.
Sharing Life Coaching Exercises On Autopilot: A Quick Look
Pathways are ideal for sharing entire life coaching journeys to individual or group clients if you already know the order in which you’d like to share your exercises.
They can be used to deliver programs, e-courses, workshops, or tailored sequences such as life coaching packages that you’ve agreed on with a client or class.
As shown below, you can use Quenza’s tools to order your resources as steps in Pathway, then schedule them for delivery ahead of time to ‘drip feed’ your content to clients:
There are infinite ways to enhance your impact with the right tools, and hopefully you find some valuable ways to apply the exercises we’ve shared here.
If you’re looking for more resources for your coaching arsenal, here are more valuable links to check out:
Final Thoughts
Life coaching is one of the most individualized services it’s possible to find, but that doesn’t mean you need to create everything from scratch.
Feel free to personalize these life coaching exercises and use them with your clients using your $1 Quenza trial, and do let us know how you apply them!
References
- ^ Rashid, T., Anjum, A., Lennox, C., Quinlan, D., Niemiec, R. M., Mayerson, D., & Kazemi, F. (2013). Assessment of character strengths in children and adolescents. In C. Proctor & P. A. Linley (Eds.), Research, applications, and interventions for children and adolescents: A positive psychology perspective (pp. 81-115). Dordrecht: Springer.
- ^ Peterson, C. & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.
- ^ Wilson, K. G., Sandoz, E. K., Kitchens, J., & Roberts, M. (2010). The Valued Living Questionnaire: Defining and measuring valued action within a behavioral framework. The Psychological Record, 60(2), 249-272.
- ^ Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The Satisfaction with Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49, 71-75.
- ^ Bar-On, R. (2004). The Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i): Rationale, description and psychometric properties. In G. Geher (Ed.), Measuring emotional intelligence: Common ground and controversy. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science.
- ^ Miller, W. & Rollnick, S. (2002). Motivational interviewing: Preparing people to change addictive behavior. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
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