Do I Need A Coach? by Leah Nelson

Who needs a Coach? Well, just about everyone! Maybe I should say, everyone who wants to grow! Is there an area of your life you have been wanting to achieve change in, but just haven’t quite been able to do it on your own? Want to grow your business? Scale it? Or maybe you’ve sold it and you were expecting to be ecstatic, but instead you feel lost? How about learning how to have those hard conversations we all need to have without blowing things up? Make friends with reality? Grieve well? How do you do that? Successfully launch your kids? Get better at delegating? Lose weight and keep it off? Do you have a coach?

The way I look at it, Olympic athletes are pretty good at what they do. Every single one of them has a coach. It used to be in the business world that you only got assigned a coach if you were in trouble. Now, it’s a standard part of a benefits package. The higher you go, the more hours with the coach; in fact, the more surprising it would be for you not to have a coach.

Ok, maybe I’ve at least peaked your curiosity! How do you know what to look for in a Coach:

1. Someone who specialises in your area of business. Success Group International (Https://yoursgi.com/trades/roofers/), for example, specialise in contractor consultancy. They are the place for any contractor business to go to for help with their business.
2. Someone who can get in the well with you and won’t just tell you how to fix it or tell you to move on. I’ve met a bunch of coaches who are, quite frankly, pretty harsh. They revel in “truth-telling”. Brutal conversations. If change is going to be hard, who needs brutal on top of hard? We all need someone who can get in the well with us, be empathetic and sit in the hard stuff with us. They can “feel our pain.”
3. Someone you feel comfortable giving permission to tell you the last 10%. They have the grace, and you have given them permission to bring into the light the things your friends, family and coworkers haven’t had the guts to tell you; or maybe you haven’t listened because they don’t deliver that truth in a palatable way. You’ve given them permission to hold you accountable.
4. Someone who’s strong in the areas you are weak. If you want to learn to speak Spanish, you probably want a coach who speaks Spanish.
5. It’s a good fit for both of you. If you start working with someone and it’s just not a good fit, try another one. We’ve all tried on a pair of shoes that hurt our feet. We didn’t stop wearing shoes; we just found a different pair. Trust me, there is one out there for you. And if you can’t find one you like; you’ve found your first topic to coach on!

Now that you know some of the qualities to look for, how long will this take? One and done? Not quite! Change takes time. In the Growth Model, we need Grace & Truth + Time. I normally work with clients for 6 to 12 months. Some people ask, does it really take that long? Well, depends what you are working on. If you want a Million $ business, it might take a couple of years, especially if you don’t reach out for any help. Sometimes the most successful companies take years to grow, and they will face a lot of trial and error along the way. For example, learning how to improve your search engine optimization is a question on every business leader’s lips. Some SEO consultants even branch out to resellers for additional help, (click this to learn more), so they can provide the best services to you. Why? Because they want to help you on your road to success, so it shouldn’t matter how long it takes. The only thing that matters is that you achieve what you want to achieve. Been stuck in an unhelpful pattern for 15 years? It might take more than 6 months to truly transform that unhelpful pattern into a healthy one. You conquered one mountain; you may even want to climb the next one! The way I look at it, there are some things we will always do: breathe, eat, sleep…and hopefully, grow.