No matter the field, great coaches are vital. Many of us are familiar with the difference a new head coach can bring to the fortunes of a football club, or how many of the most in-demand actors have served under the tutelage of performing arts coaches. In the business world, when we think of training, we tend to think of group sessions and teamwork. Coming together, exchanging ideas, and working towards common goals are crucial to building an effective, winning team.
Much of our life is spent working in teams, but all teams are comprised of individuals, and all individuals have their own unique strengths, weaknesses, needs, wants, motivations, etc. A great head coach at a football club improves a team’s performance by identifying how best to harness the potential of individuals. When we watch a movie with fantastic acting performances, what we’re watching is the result of a casting director identifying the right people for the roles, coached on set by a director who knew how to get the very best out of them.
For the individual, working with and learning from great coaches instils traits, attitudes, and practices that remain with them for life, offering a considerable advantage in competitive fields.
The same very much applies to one-to-one coaching in the business world. Those who invest in coaching are making an investment in their future, and one which will provide them insights and opportunities that can give them a significant head start over peers who haven’t benefitted from those experiences. Why?
Focus, Direction, Clarity
Work is stressful and often challenging. It’s stressful because so much of what we do feels out of our hands. Businesses that were performing well a few years ago have been hit by the double-whammy of a global pandemic and record inflation. Now many of those businesses are struggling, and those struggles trickle down to the individuals. When our employer feels the pinch, we do too, which manifests in fears and anxieties.
In some respects, these outside factors feel “bigger” in the modern age. Technology makes it difficult to switch off. We live in a world that is so much more aware of what’s going on minute by minute that our downtime often becomes more work time. We don’t take a break, and instead spend our supposedly private time glued to our phones and laptops, trying to find our way through the fog.
An experienced coach, one who has lived through boom-and-bust periods before, can help you switch off. They can teach you strategies for coping with unknowns, dealing with stresses, and encourage you to focus on the things you can change, not the ones you can’t. They’ll help you focus your efforts in a positive direction and aid you in finding an achievable way forward.
Accountability
It’s much easier to accomplish something when somebody else holds us accountable. While some people are phenomenally self-driven, many of us struggle to realise our goals when the only person we’re accountable to is ourselves. Life is short but offers the illusion of time. Putting something off until next week or next month doesn’t seem like a big deal when we have so much time left. It’s also very easy to make excuses to ourselves. Something else came up, we didn’t have time, we weren’t feeling our best, we needed a rest, etc.
That’s not to say there isn’t some truth in the excuses we tell ourselves, but excuse-making and procrastinating are habit-forming. When you’ve put something off once, and there was no immediate penalty, there’s no compelling reason not to put it off again, and again… And again…
However, that illusion of time eventually catches up with you when you realise how much time you’ve wasted. When months or even years have passed by without taking genuine steps towards your goals, the consequence is often demoralising. Maybe you try and rush it through, or more likely you try and convince yourself it wasn’t that important anyway and give up.
Those who work with coaches are less likely to waste time and more likely to succeed at their goals. Undertaking coaching is an investment, and we all tend to do a lot better when we make such commitments. Moreover, a coach will help you identify where you can find the time to make those little changes that snowball into real changes.
Learning For Yourself
Almost anyone can teach something, and almost anyone can learn something from them. However, there is a difference between learning by receiving information and learning for yourself. Think about the subjects you are most interested in and compare how much you know about those subjects to the ones that you’re not that interested in.
Chances are if there’s a particular subject that interests you, then you seek out more information about it regularly, and often without realising it you learn about other subjects at the same time. For example, somebody with an interest in the space programme likely knows more than they think about physics, astronomy, engineering, evolution, Cold War politics, etc., because of the way all of those subjects intersect.
When we take the time to learn about something for ourselves, we end up with a much more expansive knowledge about both the subject we’re interested in and related subjects. When somebody just tells us a fact, we gain less overall knowledge because the focus is so much narrower.
A great coach knows this because that’s how they’ve learned so much themselves. Consequently, a coach isn’t there to give you all the answers. They’re not there to solve your problems or tell you what to do. What they will do is teach you how to find answers, how to solve problems, and how to work out what to do for yourself. In doing so, you gain a substantial advantage over those whose knowledge is limited by only learning from being told.
Interested in Coaching?
If you want someone who has the experience to help you see through the fog in these trying times, to offer the benefits of accountability, and to set you on a path of exponential self-motivated learning that will benefit you throughout your life, Robin Lines Associates provides a complete, tailored programme of bite-sized coaching sessions that can equip you with the skills, knowledge, and traits to outperform your peers and achieve your goals.
Visit Robin Lines Coaching for more information.
