Coaching is a powerful process. It can help with so many areas of your life. Coaching is about growing as a human being, which plays into both your personal and business life. It is important to ask yourself whether coaching is right for you now.
Coaching requires you to make an investment in yourself, in terms of time, energy and money. Coaching will often require you to take a deep dive into how you perceive the world. This takes both courage and a willingness to do the work. A coach is there to support and challenge you to create the changes you seek both within and without.
To get the most out of coaching you will need to be:
Willing to take responsibility for your own growth
Willing to look beyond your current perspective
Open to being challenged
Able to bring kindness toward yourself
Indicators that you may not be ready for coaching:
You really need someone to fix your issues or to be your advisor
You are not willing to be with the discomfort of change and self-awareness
You are not committed to the process of change right now
You are not open to experimentation
Approaching a coach may feel both exciting and scary. It is admitting that you need help and cannot do it all on your own. Recognising that what got you here may not get you to where you want to go will dramatically increase your potential for growth and success.
When I first started working with a coach, I found money to be a stumbling block for me. I soon realised that with the right coach, this was about an investment in my happiness, my success and my future. I like to feel safe enough to be challenged by my coach. There are a lot of coaches to choose from. I took some time to talk to different coaches and to get a feel for how well I would respond to their coaching style. It is not enough to simply have a conversation with a potential coach. Make sure you get a “chemistry” or “match” session to experience their coaching first-hand.
Coaches have been trained by many different schools and hold many different types and levels of certification. Some coaches are not even certified or accredited. Organisations such as the ICF and Association for Coaching provide guidance as to whether a coach is professionally qualified.
It is also important to differentiate coaching from therapy or counselling. For me, therapy is best used when there are roadblocks in your life that are seriously impacting your quality of life, here and now. Therapists and counsellors are trained to be able to hold trauma, crisis and deep emotional challenge safely, and over a long period of working with their clients. Coaches, while they may be trauma informed, are trained to support and challenge their clients to move forward and to shift their perspectives more quickly to support their goals in life.
Whatever you choose, and whatever direction you go in, I wish you the best of everything with your choices and with your future direction.