With everything swirling around us, technology advancing in every moment and our jobs shifting and changing in a heartbeat, I ask you again. Why go it alone?
The best players have a personal coach
Team coaches are great, but sometimes there are skills to develop and goals to reach that are outside of the team. For that, players employ a personal coach to work with them. I have several very successful friends in a variety of businesses. The one thing they have in common is a coach. They have expressed to me the most valuable resource they have is the coaching they receive.
Executives have personal coaches
If they have personal coaches to help them navigate their careers, why would you think for a moment you wouldn’t be able to benefit from one? Regardless of your age, the state of your career, or where you are in your life, a personal coach can provide value. No one with a modicum of success goes it alone, why would you?
I can tell you, from someone who did go it alone for most of my career, I could have benefitted from some early coaching. It really never occurred to me. I had skills and talents I didn’t recognize early on in my career. And because I didn’t recognize those skills and talents, others didn’t either.
Nobody held me back but me
I’ve had a great life so far and a great career. And once I realized the value of coaching, I’ve invested in it in a variety of ways. Each time I’ve taken that step, it has helped me to advance my life in ways I wasn’t able to see as possible. I have had beliefs about myself that simply were not true. I lived within the limits I set for myself. Fortunately, with coaching, I’ve been able to expand some of those limits. But we can only do something about the limits we see.
The sooner the better
I can say from my own experience that ping-ponging around in my career during my formative years, was unfortunate. I was in my 40s before I was made aware of the value of coaching. I would recommend not waiting that long. I have lots of excuses for why I ping-ponged, being a single mom, not having a degree, being too young, being too old, being a woman, you name it, I tagged myself with it. Those excuses never, ever served me. Of course, I didn’t see those “reasons” as excuses, I thought they were true. Only when it was revealed to me that my reasons were simply stories I told myself and not the truth was able to see a different path.
Comfort zones confine
We generally like to live in comfort zones where our life feels safe. Everything outside those zones seems threatening to our brain, so our brains, designed to keep us safe, will do what it can to keep us tightly confined in our comfort zone. Coaches can keep us growing in spite of that tendency. They can help us manage the expansion of our comfort zones. They can assist with balancing home and career. I once had a dating coach. She helped me see how I repelled relationships and helped me work my way into a really great one. I had grown very comfortable in my singleness. It took some work on my part to expand that zone to include another person.
It can take someone from the outside…
Not only can a coach let us know objectively what to work on, they can also let us know when it’s time to launch. We can be on the verge of a breakthrough and just not see it. So why not let ourselves get that edge, that objective point of view to take the leap up to the next level? There are so many next steps out there that we don’t see for a multitude of “reasons” let’s not let our temporary blindness stop us.
What are your thoughts on coaching?