Last updated on February 6, 2024
Choosing relationship coaching as a career path might have been a no-brainer, but figuring out the most effective tools in this niche is far trickier. The right set of relationship coaching tools can make a world of difference in your sessions, which is what brings us to this article.
Today, we’ll share a list of the most effective and proven relationship coaching tools, exercises, and templates that can support your work with clients. Having these resources at your disposal can help you guide clients toward healthier and happier relationships, so let’s see what they are.
Table of Contents
1. Life Map Template
Opening up can be difficult for some, so it’s helpful to have an ace up your sleeve to warm up the atmosphere in those initial sessions. The Life Map Template is the more effective replacement for “Tell me about yourself.” Through different tasks and assignments, your clients will reveal what shaped their lives, relationships, and themselves.
2. Detox Your Toxic Relationships Exercise
To help your clients distinguish between the people around them who energize and motivate them and those who bring them down, you can use the Detox Your Toxic Relationships Exercise. This one-page worksheet encourages clients to write down people in their surroundings, score their influence on themselves, and, most importantly, define the actions that correspond to individuals with the highest and lowest scores.
3. Identify Your Spark Team
This is such a beautiful exercise that shifts the perspective on the wonderful people that surround us. Identify Your Spark Team introduces the concept of a Spark Team, a group of people who positively influence, inspire, support, and energize your clients. The idea is rooted in the understanding that successful people often surround themselves with other successful individuals. So, by identifying and cultivating a Spark Team, clients can create a supportive network that contributes to their happiness, success, and overall well-being.
4. Proactive Friend Finder
Instead of clients wallowing in despair over their solitude, help them take actionable steps toward meeting new people and making meaningful friendships. Proactive Friend Finder is a coaching tool designed to inspire a conversation with clients about the significance of having friends, the qualities they seek in friendships, potential friends in their existing network, and self-awareness regarding any obstacles in building connections. After completing the exercise, clients will complete three actionable steps to initiate the process of making new friendships.
5. Letting Go Exercise
Holding a grudge is a slow killer of many relationships. Letting go is hard and sometimes painful, but it’s necessary for growth and healthy relations.
Support your clients in identifying and moving past the situations that drain their energy and harm their relationships with the Letting Go Exercise. In addition to asking what needs to be let go of, the exercise proposes the question of why one is holding on and the perceived benefits of not letting go, so that they can understand why they couldn’t move forward.
6. Self-Care Check-In and Needs
Lack of self-love is often the reason behind bad relationships or the unsuccessful pursuit of finding someone special. If your clients need to learn to put themselves first and nurture self-relationship before committing to someone else, here’s an exercise that can benefit them. The Self-Care Check-In and Needs exercise provides clients with insight into their needs and the areas in their lives where they need to prioritize self-care. It also invites them to identify one specific action to focus on for improved well-being.
7. What Makes My Heart Sing? Exercise
People tend to be unaware of the blessings they have. Maybe they’re surrounded by love and joyful moments, but they struggle to take a minute and revel in them. The What Makes My Heart Sing? exercise can help clients identify and realize what and who truly makes them happy. This is a deeply impactful exercise that brings clients closer to their true needs and the people they should cherish.
8. Build a Bridge Coaching Exercise
Are your clients feeling stuck in their lives and relationships? The Build a Bridge Coaching Exercise is designed for precisely those occasions. The metaphor of “building a bridge” illustrates that people don’t always need a clear view of the destination before taking action. The tool prompts clients to assess their goals and current progress and then to identify three immediate actions to take a step forward and overcome stagnation.
9. 3-Month Vision Worksheet
Shared goals bring people together. Clients in rocky relationships may not be able to envision a distant future together, but you can encourage them to take a step forward with joint short-term goals—and this 3-Month Vision Worksheet can help. Clients need to envision how they want various areas of their life to be in three months. When couples use this exercise, they can come up with goals together, or they can complete the exercise separately and then see where their objectives align.
10. The Feelings Wheel
If your clients have trouble verbalizing their emotions, the Feelings Wheel can be the perfect solution to the problem. The Feelings Wheel was developed by Dr. Gloria Wilcox as a tool designed to improve emotional intelligence by helping individuals navigate their emotional landscapes. The wheel organizes feelings into categories and subcategories. It includes primary, secondary, and tertiary emotions so that clients can understand the complexity of emotions and pinpoint their feelings with precision. This tool can be especially useful during intense conversations.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this list of practical relationship tools has shed light on new and powerful ways of helping clients deal with their interpersonal struggles. There’s something for every scenario, whether your clients are in toxic relationships, searching for meaningful friendships, or having difficulties with loving themselves. Have these tools ready in your toolkit for your upcoming relationship coaching sessions, and you’ll be able to face any challenge with confidence.
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