Favorite Coaching Exercises For Clients

Want to broaden your coaching exercises for clients? For this podcast episode, I tapped graduates of the Courageous Living Coach Certification for their suggestions on favorite coaching exercises for clients. Listen in and consider which ones you’ll utilize as you work with your own clients.

Favorite Coaching Exercises for Clients: What CLCC Graduates Actually Use

Every coach eventually faces the moment when a powerful question isn't enough — when a client needs something more experiential, more embodied, more alive. That's where coaching exercises come in. In this episode of the Craft of Coaching podcast, we asked CLCC graduates to share their favorite coaching exercises for clients, and what came back was a collection of approaches that are creative, somatically grounded, and genuinely effective.

What Makes a Coaching Exercise Different from a Practice

How we see “exercises” and “practices”: exercises happen during a session, in real time with a client. Practices are what clients take away and continue between sessions. Some exercises can become practices — a visualization done on a call can be repeated independently — but the focus here is on in-session work that moves a client when conversation alone isn't cutting through.

Six Favorite Coaching Exercises from CLCC Graduates

The Word Map (from Alyssa Kennedy): After a brief grounding exercise, clients free-write for two minutes — any words or phrases that describe them, what they want to feel, what they want to provide. The list becomes the starting point for a rich conversation about what they actually want to create, in their business or their life. It sidesteps the rigidity of metrics-based visioning and gets to something more honest.

The Somatic Spectrum (from Maribeth Thomas): The client identifies how they currently feel (often overwhelmed) and how they want to feel (often accomplished). They sit with each state separately, noticing bodily sensations and emotions, with a brief shake and breath reset in between. Comparing the two states often surfaces insights that direct questioning wouldn't reach.

The Role Reversal (from Jocelyn Young): Particularly powerful for coaches who work with helping professionals. The client is asked: if one of your students (or clients, or children) were experiencing exactly what you're experiencing right now, what would you offer them? Then: what if that person were you? The compassion clients extend to others, turned inward, can be genuinely transformative.

The Mind-Body Motivation Anchor (from Morgan Dolginow): The client recalls a time when they felt genuinely motivated and in flow, creates a physical anchor point on their body, and then steps — imaginatively — from that past memory into a detailed future scene where they're experiencing what they want. Sensory and somatic detail makes this more than visualization; it's rehearsal.

The Tonal Exploration (from Kim Romain): When a client keeps returning to a loaded word — diva, bossy, too much, not enough — the coach has them say it in different emotional registers. Flat, then empowered. Ashamed, then reclaimed. Shifting the tone shifts the story, and clients often find they've been carrying more weight in a single word than they realized.

The Timed Brain Dump (from Sarah Doell): When a client is stuck between two options, they get one minute to free-write on each — what's stopping them, and what the ideal outcome looks like. The time constraint bypasses overthinking. Reading the lists back often reveals where the client already knows what they want.

Why Experiential Coaching Works

What these exercises share is a refusal to rush past where the client actually is. Each one creates space to acknowledge the present — which might be uncomfortable — before moving toward what's possible. That's not a detour from the coaching work. That's the coaching work.

If you want to try any of these, the most useful first step is a peer coaching swap: bring one exercise, record the session with permission, and listen back specifically for your transitions. Getting into and out of an exercise smoothly is usually where the growth is.