As a contract dev agency, bringing in mindset coaching helped me have more successful interactions with clients.

It's obvious when we think about it. Getting to clarity is a collaborative process and when they see you as a partner in that, they will trust you with their projects. The juicy question is, how does mindset coaching work when you are engaged in technical discussions?

Here's my approach -
While engaged in technological discussions, we often live in our abstract rational brain. I've found that being more embodied in this context allows me to track emotions in the background while engaging the rational brain in the foreground. This is a useful skill to master so that you can tune into the person in front of you and help them get to clarity and make decisions confidently.

As someone trained in the product management discipline, I formerly relied on lean startup frameworks to achieve clarity in discussions related to product development. I would ask questions like, "What is your company's value proposition? Who is the target audience? What does market fit mean for this specific product? What are the correct metrics to track development and scale?" While these questions are beneficial, I have been experimenting with experience design frameworks to attain clarity. I found that product thinking often leads people to abstract reasoning, whereas experience design keeps people grounded in their current state, tapping into their feelings, emotions, and primal instincts. In my understanding of how the world works, we ultimately make decisions from that place and then justify them with rationale to maintain alignment between body, mind, and intellect.

So, instead of asking, "What is your target consumer?" I ask, "When you're at a party, who do you want to talk to about your product, and what do you want to say? How do you want them to perceive you? What feeling do you want to capture when talking about X?"

Instead of, "What does market fit look like?" I ask, "In a distant future, what story do you want to tell people about X? And in the nearer future, like six months from now, what do you want to be able to tell people about X?"

Instead of, "What is your value proposition?" I ask, "What do you see in the world that you want to change? How do you want to feel when you achieve the end goal? What do you observe in people who have achieved something similar?"

Instead of, "What are some assumptions about X you'd want to test?" I ask, "What do you fear most about this approach? What aspects of your training make you unique or qualified to do this work?"

Instead of asking about the target market, I ask, "What type of people do you want to interact with? What do you want to be able to say?"

These are some of the ways I've reframed my approach to better tune into the person in front of me and engage with the problem from the perspective of how this person relates to it rather than the objectivity of the problem itself.