As a Christian coach, you can only do so much before you begin to hurt yourself and your client. We all have our limits, and knowing yours as well as being able to enforce them can be a huge help in your coaching.
A Refresher on Boundaries and Their Importance
Depending on where you live, there’s likely something that demarcates where your property ends and where your neighbor’s begins. It might be a wall, a fence, a rock, or a line of trees that communicates, “That’s yours, and this is mine.” These boundary markers are important for all sorts of reasons, including knowing which patch of grass is yours to mow, what you’re responsible for maintaining, and how far your legal rights extend.
These physical boundaries can be a helpful picture of the boundaries that need to exist in our relationships. Relationship boundaries help us to define where one person ends and another begins. The main function these boundaries perform is to help you protect your mental, emotional, and physical well-being. Additionally, having healthy boundaries helps you toward balanced and respectful relationships.
Healthy boundaries are important in everyday life, but they have a critical place in a Christian coach’s practice. When you’re in a position to help and guide others, that’s a relationship that runs on trust and carefully stewarded influence. Working alongside people can leave you more vulnerable to burnout, resentment, and unhealthy relational dynamics if you aren’t careful.
As a coach carries out their role of helping facilitate growth for others, and often in deeply personal areas of their lives, there’s a need for you as a coach to have clear boundaries. A lack of boundaries can put you at risk of overstepping into areas meant for therapy or pastoral counseling, for instance. You can get yourself in over your head, and you also run the risk of becoming enmeshed with clients, which can cause harm to them and to you.
Boundaries That Could Get Violated as a Christian Coach
To get a better sense of what’s at stake, it may be helpful to outline the sort of boundaries that are necessary to maintain a healthy coach-client relationship. The relationship between a Christian coach and their client has several aspects, and having boundaries in these different areas helps to create a safe, productive, and God-honoring relationship.
Some of the boundaries that could be violated include the following:
Emotional boundaries
Clients will likely share their burdens with you, and that may include painful experiences and realities. There’s a need to maintain some distance and not take on a client’s emotional burdens as your own or let their personal struggles affect your personal life.
Time boundaries
One way to protect your personal life is to carve out exclusive time for it. A time boundary can be violated when you consistently allow sessions to run over, for instance. It could also be violated if you continue responding to client messages at all hours, allowing work to intrude into the rest of your life.
Professional boundaries
Your role in your client’s life is as a Christian coach, and that comes with certain ethical and professional obligations. Coaching isn’t the same thing as therapy, and the competencies required for one don’t overlap neatly with those required for the other. It’s better for you and for your client for you to stick to your lane. Some of the ethical obligations that come with coaching include not leveraging the coaching relationship for personal gain.
Spiritual boundaries
You are a Christian coach, which means that your approach and what informs your outlook is rooted in your faith tradition. However, your clients can come from all walks of life and different or no faith backgrounds. It can be crossing a boundary to impose your personal beliefs rather than guiding the client in alignment with their own journey and faith.
What Can Happen Without Healthy Boundaries
When you maintain healthy boundaries as a Christian coach, you’re better able to serve your client effectively while also preserving your well-being. Compassion fatigue or emotional exhaustion can occur when you overextend yourself.
A lack of healthy boundaries may also result in struggles to maintain your objectivity, which can impair the guidance you give to your client. Your client may also become overdependent on you instead of developing resources to become more resilient and independent. You run the risk of getting caught up in potential ethical and moral conflicts, and there is also the possibility of damaging your credibility and relationships built over time.
Setting and Maintaining Healthy Boundaries
Setting and maintaining healthy boundaries is mainly about knowing yourself and your limits, communicating these consistently, and following through to help maintain those boundaries. Some steps that can help you are:
- Clear expectations. Establish clear expectations in a coaching agreement. This agreement can include session times, communication methods, and the scope of your practice. You should be transparent about your role as a coach and what that role entails. You aren’t responsible for pastoral counseling or therapy, for instance.
- Be self-aware. Practice self-awareness and monitor your own emotional energy. You can then take steps to preserve that energy and replenish it. If you know you don’t do well in the morning or before you eat, take steps toward self-care and set up sessions with that self-awareness.
- Communicate. Communicate boundaries kindly but firmly if a client oversteps. For instance, if they send a message after hours, you can respond the first time, telling them that you do not attend to work after hours. If it happens again, you can opt not to respond at all until you’re back on the clock.
Having healthy boundaries as a Christian coach can help the longevity and effectiveness of your coaching practice. As you go on this journey, you can lean upon others by seeking supervision or mentorship so that you remain accountable and have the support you need.
