Don’t Hire A Coach Until You Read This

How many coaches does it take so you to screw in a light bulb?

5.

1 to explain how to screw it in

1 to explain what not to do

1 to support you in your screwing efforts

1 to tell you what you’re doing wrong and get you back on the right path and

1 to go over what you just did and how you could do it better next time.

Well, I never said coaches are funny.

The job of any coach is to get their client to play their game at a higher level than when they started with coaching.

 I coach coaches, trainers and speakers. In this post I’m going to give you all my coaching secrets. So listen up coaches.

The Real Reason for Coaching

A good coach takes you from where you are to where you want to be.

A great coach creates a roadmap of that journey so you can duplicate your first success again and again.

Whether you’re an elite athlete, a CEO, a start-up entrepreneur, a breastfeeding mother, or a novice meditator coaching can take you from bumbling through your routine to a confident adept.

Great coaching doesn’t just assist you in achieving success. A great coach imbues in her client an awareness of the steps to attain that success. That awareness allows the client to repeat that success.

A great coach helps you uncover the steps you take toward your goal while handing you the blueprint of what you just did.

Great coaches create autonomous professionals.

That’s why they’re always out of work 😉

If you’re already a professional a great coach will make you a self-sustaining professional. And if you’re a novice, great coaching will turn you into a self-reliant professional.

That is the power of coaching. To play your game bigger, better and bolder, while teaching you to trust your instincts and inner voice.

Related Post:    How To Use Public Speaking As Your #1 Growth Strategy
Related Post:   How To Overcome Fear: Why Scary Work Pays Well
Related Post:   Closely Guarded Secrets of Productivity

4 Skills Every Coach Should Know

I’ve been a coaching consultant for many years now. I’ve coached coaches and trainers. I’ve coached first-time entrepreneurs, CEOs of fortune 500 companies and people who’s businesses were tanking when they came to me.

And I’ve been coached. I continue to be coached. I have 3 coaches that I work with currently. Coaching, to me, is a lifelong process. And coaching, mentoring, apprenticeship has a long and invaluable history. It’s been around as long as people have been on earth.

What’s the best and fastest way to learn how to do something? Emulate someone else. And when you’re not sure what you’re doing ask them and listen. That’s the essence of coaching.

Babies and children do this naturally when they look at and study their parents for how to do something, everything. Why stop the process? Don’t ever stop asking questions. Don’t ever stop reaching out and asking for help.

By reaching out you are continuing one of the longest traditions known to humankind.

Through my experience coaching and allowing myself to be coached I’ve identified 4 skills. These skills take good coaching to great coaching. They allow the coach to create a portable blueprint for her client.

Identifying Strengths

What is a strength? Is it something you’re good at?

No.

I’m good at doing my taxes and I hate doing my taxes. I hate it. It drains me every time I sit down to focus on that task. I dread the experience. That’s not a strength.

A strength is something you’re good at that energizes you. A strength is something you’re good at that you look forward to doing!

A great coach will observe you in your daily life and question you to discover what your true strengths are: the tasks or experiences you excel at and that energize you while doing them.

Excuse me while I coach you through this post…What are the tasks or experiences you’re great at doing and that energize you? The things you look forward to doing during your day?

Identifying Weaknesses

Conversely, a weakness is something that you may or may not be good at and definitely drains you. You see the difference? This isn’t about identifying your skills and ‘problem areas’.

The kind of coaching I do is about identifying what draws you out as a person.

What excites you? What terrifies you? What do you live for? What would you die for?

Sounds dramatic doesn’t it? But great coaching is about assisting you in playing a much bigger game than you came in with. Is that life or death? Many times, yes.

It could mean the life or death of your company. It could mean the life or death of your marriage. It could mean the life or death of a thriving, exciting life!

So when I identify someone’s weaknesses I literally look at what makes you weak. What makes you weak in your body, weak in your heart, and weak in your head?

What are the activities or tasks you do that drain you, that make you feel weak physically, mentally or emotionally?

Identifying Obstacles

Albert Einstein said, “nothing happens until something moves.” That’s true for physics and it’s true in our everyday lives.

A body in motion stays in motion. So put your body motion. But how?

A great coach helps you uncover where you are stuck. Usually it’s the stuck areas that cause a person to seek coaching. So an examination of where someone is stuck in their business or personal life is imperative.

What’s also imperative is to then look at the root causes of those obstacles. Why is something an obstacle? Looking at the root cause raises the client’s awareness.

It’s this awareness that imprints the roadmap or blueprint to keep moving forward. And then to duplicate success.

What’s an obstacle for you in your business or personal life? What is something that comes up again and again that holds you back from breaking through to that next level of success? It could be a pattern, a person or a voice in your head.

Identifying Blind Spots

The most important identifier I use while coaching my clients is uncovering their blind spots.

What do you know you know?

What do you know that you don’t know?

What do you not know that you know?

What do you not know that you don’t know?

All of these areas of knowledge or the lack thereof are blind spots. Huh???

What the hell do I mean?

In order to to get from point A, where are you right now, to point B, where you want to go in your business, in your life, in your game, you need a roadmap. Yes or yes?

You create that roadmap by becoming Aware. That word encompasses not just your strengths and weaknesses. It doesn’t just encompass your obstacles.

Raising awareness means becoming aware of:

• what you know you know
• what you know that you don’t know
• what you don’t know that you know
• what you don’t know that you don’t know

Sounds like a riddle but I’m not screwing with your mind.

By becoming aware of of these four areas of your subject of investigation or expertise you can begin to build a roadmap of duplicatable success.

By deliberately staying ignorant of these four areas of your knowledge base you are staying blind. You remain blind to opportunities for growth. You remain blind to recurring obstacles. You remain blind to repeating patterns of behavior that keep you stuck.

But you can’t do this alone. It’s almost impossible to figure out by yourself what you don’t know that you don’t know. Hell, it’s difficult to figure out what you actually know, by yourself, much less what you don’t know.

Great coaching is about unlocking these four areas of your knowledge base and identifying your blind spots. You simply can’t do this work alone with enough time leftover in your life to build a successful business or lead a successful life.

You can do this work over a lifetime. Great thinkers throughout history have sat on mountaintops or in research labs and attained this knowledge. But that’s because they made it their job, their very reason for living to discover these answers.

You don’t have time to devote your life to those big questions if you’re running a business, managing a household or going for the literal gold.

But having those answers is literal gold. And a coach can help you unlock those answers and focus light on those blind spots. Finding out what you don’t know that you know could help you discover more strengths that you didn’t know you have.

Discovering the things that you don’t know that you don’t know can increase your knowledge thereby increasing your opportunities.

This is, by the way, the essence of good parenting: raising your children’s awareness of these four areas. Not giving them all the answers to life but teaching them how look for the answers and how to think about problems.

It’s the same with great coaching.

Take a few minutes right now and ask yourself to name a couple of things that you don’t know that you don’t know. And make it about your business or about an area of your personal life. Be specific.

For instance, let’s say you’re a public speaker:

“As a public speaker what don’t I know about public speaking that could accelerate my business’s growth?

Meditate on that for a few minutes. Then write down what comes to your mind.

That’s a hard question, isn’t it? How do you figure out what you don’t know by yourself?

Related Post:    How To Use Public Speaking As Your #1 Growth Strategy
Related Post:   How To Overcome Fear: Why Scary Work Pays Well
Related Post:   Closely Guarded Secrets of Productivity

The Wrap Up

A good coach is a great cheerleader.

A great coach assists you in building a roadmap of duplicatable success. Success that you can recreate “out of the lab” over and over again for the rest of your life.

A great coach identifies your strengths and weaknesses but also identifies your what’s holding you back and getting in your way.

A great coach also helps you reveal what you know and what you don’t know about yourself, your business, your life’s work.

This is why people pay thousands upon thousands of dollars. Because this kind of coaching is truly worth its weight in gold.

Do you have that kind of coaching?

If not, why not? I believe success is your birthright. What are you doing to attain it?

Over the next few weeks I’m going to go even deeper into the process of coaching, how great coaching should work and the mistakes a lot of good coaches make. I’m a coach and teaching is my life’s passion.

And everything I’ve spelled out in this post I’ve been coached on myself. Coaching that has paid off in thousands if not millions of dollars over the last 25 years. How coachable are You?

Are you a coach or consultant? Would you like more confidence to go after the premium clients on your list? Click here to learn how to enroll more high-end clients for your premium programs and increase your practice now.

Ever hired a coach for your business or personal life? How did it work out? What areas did they help you in?  Join the conversation here >>