Creating Conscious Influence & Impact
Challenge and Support Clients Without Taking Ownership of Their Decisions
Live Virtual Continuing Education Workshop for Coaches
Clients come to coaching because they want something to change.
They may want greater clarity, stronger relationships, improved performance, increased confidence, better leadership, or progress toward an important goal. Because coaches are invested in their clients’ success, it can be easy to become attached to a particular outcome, strategy, or timeline.
Questions can become subtly directive. Encouragement can become pressure. Accountability can begin to feel like judgment. Helpful suggestions can unintentionally communicate that the coach knows what the client should do.
Creating Conscious Influence & Impact helps coaches inspire reflection, responsibility, and meaningful action without taking ownership of the client’s decisions or results.
Workshop Details
Date: Friday, September 18, 2026
Time: 1:00–4:00 PM Central Time
Location: Live online via Zoom
Investment: $69
Mental Freedom community rate: $45 for current and former Mental Freedom program participants
Continuing Education
Three BCC continuing education hours are available for eligible participants who attend the full workshop and complete all CE requirements.
This Workshop Is Designed For:
Board-certified coaches
Executive and leadership coaches
Life and relationship coaches
Career coaches
Wellness coaches\Internal organizational coaches
Professionals who use coaching skills in their work
Can a Coach Know What Is Best?
A coach may have education, experience, insight, and a genuine desire to help. The coach is still a different person from the client.
Each client brings different needs, values, priorities, experiences, relationships, support systems, goals, tolerances for risk, and ideas about who they want to become.
What worked for the coach may not work for the client. An informed perspective is not the same as knowing the right answer.
Coaching Is Not Consulting
A consultant is generally hired to provide expertise, recommendations, or solutions. A coach helps clients deepen awareness, evaluate possibilities, and develop their own decisions and actions.
Some professionals have both coaching and consulting expertise. The concern is not that a coach must never provide information or recommendations. It is that the roles should not be blended without transparency and agreement.
When a coach begins prescribing solutions or directing the client toward the coach’s preferred strategy, the professional may have shifted from coaching into consulting. Conscious practice requires the coach to recognize and clearly communicate that shift rather than presenting consulting as coaching.
This workshop will help participants distinguish offering useful information from assuming the role of expert decision-maker.
Responsibility vs. Response-ability
Using Mental Freedom® Principle 1, Responsibility vs. Response-ability, participants will consider:
What belongs to the coach
What remains the client’s responsibility
How to challenge without controlling
When accountability becomes pressure
When helping becomes rescuing or over-functioning
How to remain invested in the coaching process without becoming responsible for the client’s results
When referral, consultation, or another action may be appropriate within the coach’s role and scope
The workshop will also explore what to do when a client says: “Just tell me what you think I should do.”
How can a coach remain helpful while supporting the client’s capacity to think, choose, and act?
Provide Information Without Steering
Coaches may have valuable experience, information, and observations to share. Conscious influence allows the coach to expand awareness without funneling the client toward one preferred outcome.
Participants will explore how to:
Ask permission before offering an observation or experience
Make clear whether they are coaching or offering expertise from another professional role
Make clear that what worked for the coach may not work for the client
Discuss both advantages and disadvantages
Explore risks and possible consequences
Challenge discrepancies without prescribing the answer
Help clients consider how choices align with who they want to become
Influence Happens Through Relationship
Clients receive challenge differently when they know the coach:
Cares about them
Respects their autonomy
Is genuinely listening
Is not trying to prove a point
Is not attached to being right
Will remain respectful if they choose differently
Conscious influence is not simply a set of communication techniques. It is grounded in relationship, transparency, trust, credibility, curiosity, and respect.
When the Client’s Choice Does Not Work Out
This is a Paragraph FontA coach may struggle when a client rejects advice, fails to follow through, chooses a path the coach questioned, and then experiences painful consequences.
Participants will learn how to review the coaching process honestly, take responsibility for anything that genuinely belonged to the coach, and release responsibility for decisions and outcomes that belonged to the client.
A disappointing result does not retroactively make the client’s decision the coach’s responsibility.
What You Will Explore
Conscious influence versus persuasion, pressure, manipulation, rescuing, and control
The distinction between coaching and consulting
Recognizing and communicating when the professional has shifted roles
The coach’s responsibility and the client’s responsibility
Response-ability as an alternative to over-functioning
Accountability that supports ownership rather than compliance
Providing information and experience without directing the decision
Responding when clients ask the coach to tell them what to do
Relationship-centered influence
Releasing inappropriate responsibility for client decisions and outcomes
Learning Objectives
By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
Differentiate conscious influence from control, pressure, directive persuasion, and rescuing.
Distinguish the coach’s responsibility from the client’s responsibility.
Recognize coaching behaviors that may unintentionally reduce client autonomy or ownership.
Distinguish coaching from consulting and recognize when a shift in professional role should be communicated.
Use questions, observations, experience, and information in ways that preserve client choice.
Respond constructively when a client asks the coach to make the decision.
Differentiate appropriate coaching accountability from inappropriate responsibility for client outcomes.
Instructor
Kim Olver, LCPC, NCC, BCC
Kim Olver is a board-certified coach, licensed clinical professional counselor, author, speaker, and internationally recognized educator in Choice Theory® and Reality Therapy. She is the founder of the Academy of Choice and the creator of Mental Freedom®, a framework for responding intentionally, reducing unnecessary suffering, and strengthening personal and professional relationships.
Her teaching combines decades of counseling, coaching, leadership, and professional development experience with practical strategies participants can immediately apply.
Influence With Integrity
The strongest coaching relationships do not make clients dependent on the coach’s answers.
They help clients build trust in their own capacity to think, choose, act, learn, and respond.
Registering a team?
Organizations may register five participants for $276, the cost of four standard registrations.