A new year has begun and you’ve made the decision to invest in your personal growth by working with a coach… (By the way, why do we so often wait for January 1st to start anything new? 🤷♂️)
If you work in a corporation, you’ll contact your HR partner, who might point you in the direction of an existing pool of coaches or even share their personal preference. You think, “Wow, now that’s easy! I’ll just pick a few, schedule some get-to-know calls, and see if I like what I hear.” But that’s where it might get tricky…
…and what about if you’re a small business owner, juggling all sorts of responsibilities, from sales and operations to personal development, or a student who wants to learn how to better manage stress.
How do you select a coach?
If we were to roughly categorize what a coach can ‘teach’ you (based on my limited experience so far), I think most coachees look for competency coaching. In my case, clients contact me to learn and/or master the tools of effective communication. During our sessions, we’d delve into the mastery of communication, explore the available tools, and ultimately practice the newly acquired knowledge together.
However, if you, as a coachee, want to go deeper and learn how to transform your business through personal transformation we would design a more stretched goal. So, if you’re bothered by the lack of response and ideas coming from your team, we would explore how you can share more of yourself in different situations to inspire more open conversations that can guide your strategic decisions. It sounds simple, but it’s hardly ever that easy. This is coaching for performance.
If you want to mature your leadership style (or the way you cope with stress coming back to the student above) further, you will likely be looking for something more sustainable. That’s when the hard (and, let’s be honest, mostly painful) work starts — you need to commit and go all in. Staying with the communication example, here we would explore whether you’re comfortable talking to people, what gets triggered in you by conflict, criticism, compliments, indecisiveness, or impulsive reactions. Can you read the room? Are you afraid of holding emotions or addressing the elephant in the room, etc.? Can you recognize your automatic reactions and regulate them? Eventually, can you develop and sustain a more productive communication style? Let’s call this flourish coaching.
The good news is there are many great coaches out there working at all the three levels.
Your contribution to finding the best fit for your coaching dilemma starts with you — by thinking about your needs and expectations. GOOD LUCK with the search!