The Exponential Power of Group Coaching: Purpose Work with Jackie Roberge

Jackie Roberge spent a decade coaching individuals to find their purpose before she had what she calls a breakthrough — and an embarrassment. She had been holding a limiting belief that purpose work had to be done one-on-one. "I was actually embarrassed to have the limiting belief, cause I help my clients explore limiting beliefs," she admits. When she finally tried taking two people through her process together as a course, four things happened that changed her approach permanently. First, people sharing insights created a spark in others: "Somebody would share an insight and I could just see other people just lighting up and going, Oh yes, me too." Second, when someone made a bold statement of purpose, it raised the bar for everyone else. Third, seeing peers receive coaching on their homework motivated others to keep up with their own assignments. And fourth, the group format made the work more affordable, opening it to more people.

Jackie's current format pairs six weekly group sessions with three 30-minute "laser coaching" calls interspersed between them. Each group session follows a roadmap that leads to concrete outcomes: purpose statements across five categories, a life vision, a new definition of success. Between sessions, participants complete homework and submit it before the next meeting. Jackie reviews the homework and integrates it into the live session, which creates a powerful incentive for completion. "If somebody's online, they've done their homework and they're getting coaching from me based on their homework, and somebody hasn't kept up — they're going to be going, wow, look at that, when I get my homework done, I'm going to get that kind of coaching." The laser calls work because students arrive already primed by weeks of group work and homework. A 30-minute focused session becomes far more impactful than it would be as a standalone conversation.

What makes Jackie's approach distinctive is how she uses experiential techniques in a purely online format. Drawing on 25 years of meditation practice, she leads guided visualizations during live sessions that invite participants to dream beyond the limits of their comfort zone. "When we're in a visualization, it's like we're allowed to use our imagination. So we go beyond the limits and structures of our comfort zone," she explains. She also records the visualizations so students can revisit them between sessions. Perhaps her most original technique is energetic rating: when students draft their purpose statements, she has them read them aloud and rate them on a scale of one to five based on how they feel. "We play, literally we play with one or two words and we'll have maybe the same general idea written out 10 different times. And one of them will really resonate," she says. She looks for physical signs — chills, tears — as indicators that a statement has landed. In her most recent cohort, she also had students video themselves reading their purpose statements and upload them to the course platform, creating cross-pollination of inspiration across the group.