You may or may not have experience with being coached. It could be at work, on a personal level or perhaps in sport and training. Whatever it is, having a coach or mentor is one of the most valuable things we can do in any area of our lives that we want to excel in.
But why?
Accountability. Objectivity. Perspective.
3 big reasons that getting coaching is invaluable.
Accountability
We’ve all had that feeling. Do I HAVE to do this? Do I HAVE to get up at 5am and do this session? Do I HAVE to step outside my comfort zone right now? Do I HAVE to do the hard thing?
Ultimately, the answer is no, you don’t HAVE to do anything. Except for the bare essentials of breathing, drinking, eating and sleeping, every decision you make is a CHOICE. You don’t HAVE to do any of the things you said you’d do. So why do you do them? Well you have a certain level of accountability to yourself. Your own “willpower” and degree of determination and commitment to do something, whether it’s because you’re aware of the impact on yourself or those around you, will get you up and running for a lot of things. But when it comes to growth and pushing yourself out of your comfortable present self, sometimes that willpower seems to dry up. That’s where having accountability to another person helps. Why is it any different? Because it forces you to have an honest and open conversation with yourself. That may sound off, but accountability from a coach, is just like holding a mirror up except you can’t just walk away. The difficult questions get asked and you have to give the difficult answers. That means, you suddenly have to own up when you’ve been making excuses for yourself.
Objectivity
I know first hand how easy it is to sometimes get swept up in your own emotions – usually RAGE for me…
Sometimes stuff doesn’t go to plan or things get in the way. Sometimes things, seemingly without explanation, just don’t seem to be yielding the results you expected. That’s when coaches really earn their money. The ability to have a second pair of eyes on the situation – with more experience than you, someone that’s seen the pitfalls and developed the solutions – is invaluable. Being able to talk you down from a ledge, stop the big green Avenger coming out in you and being able to give you answers, reasons, solutions to problems that perhaps you couldn’t see for yourself, is vital. We all have our own little emotional personalities; some of us blow up seemingly irrationally at the tiniest of misfortunes, others of us quietly withdraw into our shell and try and hide away from difficulty. Sometimes both these characters just need someone to say “let’s remove the emotion from this situation shall we?” Because it’s funny how once you remove the red mist, everything has a lot more clarity.
Perspective
Sometimes it’s just really not that bad. Or sometimes it’s just now how you think it is. Perspective within coaching is about having someone to remind you of your long term goals, having someone who can look at things from a bird’s eye view and see where you are, relative to not just where you’ve been, but also where you’re going. It can feel like the end of the world when one day or week doesn’t go to plan. Having someone to remind you to shrug it off and realise this is all part of a bigger plan and that that day or week only accounts for a small fraction of that plan, is essential to success. Likewise, we need the same person to remind us how important it is to stay on track when we shrug off something as “a little thing”, when perhaps the truth is, it’s a big thing. Having perspective on barriers and opportunities to progress and success is often something we’re really bad at observing ourselves.
I’ve been coached for a while now, in business, in triathlon and also on a personal level in the past. I’ve had profession-specific mentors and I’ve surrounded myself with people I can talk to. Whatever it is you want to achieve, you can’t do it alone. Read that last sentence again and again until it sinks in good and proper. The older you get, the more your own narrative becomes more and more personalised to you. That can be great for the things you really excel at, but not so good for the things that are getting in your way. What’s key here is having someone who can identify what’s really holding you back. And the thing about coaching is, you never know how much you need a coach until you invest in one…