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Coaching a Sad Client: Go Beyond Empathy to Self-Connection (Backed by Research)

The sad client Ever have any clients that are sad, client comes through, comes to you, they're crying, they're upset, they tell you they're sad, what do you do? You just empathize with them. Hold their hand, cry with them. Tell them, gee, I'm sad that you're sad. It might be better than nothing, right? A shareholder to cry on, but not exactly.

Very helpful. And that doesn't get them outta sadness other than the fact that, hey, maybe they're just looking for somebody to care about them. But the problem with that. Their sadness then becomes a way to cry for help to get other people's attention. And all of a sudden they're sad all the time. 'cause they're addicted to that because they're addicted to the attention and you helping them that could enable a client, not set them free.

So what's a coach to do? Sadness in general is a reaction to a loss of connection. Oneself. So your client has a feeling for whatever reason that they're disconnected with themselves or other people, but at the deepest level with yourself, like, why do you wanna connect with your wife or husband? Why do you want to connect with mom or dad is because you're connecting with the part within yourself that you see in them.

So when somebody loses a loved one, they'll get sad, but after the sadness, they reconnect with the part of themself that that connection with the family member actually triggered in them. So we're really ultimately not connecting with other people. We're really connecting with ourselves, what we see in others.

Make sense? So the bottom line is when your client is sad, they're missing out on a connection with themselves, whether it's because there's somebody that they wanna be that they're not being, and they feel like they're. Shortchanging themselves, or it's someone else that they want to connect with and they see themselves in them, like I said, and so they're missing that connection within themselves and they're trying to get it from somebody else, and they're attached to that relationship, right?

They're losing that. They get sad because they lost connection. So help your client reconnect with the deepest part of themselves with who they really are. If they can connect with other people to help trigger that, great. That's wonderful. But sometimes that's a luxury. Not everybody can control that all the time.

So ultimately the ideal solution is, hey, you're sad. What are you deeply connected with within yourself? What is that sadness telling you, begging you to connect with within yourself? And how do you need to connect with that? As soon as they start connecting with that, the sadness will start to subside. In fact, there's a very fine line between sadness and being touched between sadness.

And feeling moved. What can they be touched up by? What could they be moved by? Guess what? It's within them. The only thing that really touches and moves us, the only really thing that we really have deep feelings about is usually something within us. Right. We just project the rest onto the world. So help your client be moved deeply by who they are and connect with that.

And then sadness becomes depth. The negative experience of SAD becomes the positive experience of meaning, gratitude, connection. Call it self love.

Ever had a client come to you in tears, upset and openly admitting their sadness? As a professional, your instinct might be to empathize, to hold their hand, and share in their pain. While this may provide some comfort—a metaphorical shoulder to cry on—it doesn't necessarily guide them out of their sadness. It’s important to recognize that these moments can sometimes make clients dependent on external support to feel better, rather than addressing the root cause of their emotions.

Sadness often signals a loss of connection with oneself. Clients may feel disconnected from themselves or others, which triggers their emotional response. This disconnection is often mistaken for a need to connect with someone else—a partner, parent, or friend—believing they only feel sadness because of this external relationship.

However, the reality is that sadness stems from a missing internal connection. When a loved one is lost, sadness can follow, but it eventually leads to a reconnection with parts of oneself that the relationship with the loved one helped bring to the surface. It’s crucial for coaches to help clients recognize this self-connection, rather than seeking it externally.

The key lies in helping clients discover what they are deeply connected with internally. Encourage them to explore what the sadness is pointing towards inside themselves. As they start engaging with these internal connections, their sadness can transform. They may move from mere sadness to feeling touched or moved—emotions that are often directly linked to self-discovery.