The coaching revolution is currently sweeping the globe at breakneck pace, making it the second-fastest growing industry in the world behind the information technology sector. What is that? What is going on?
What we’re seeing is a shift in the ways that individuals are leading and managing their organizations, giving their staff more autonomy and responsibility, discovering and pursuing their true passions, and fully developing their abilities. What we’re witnessing is a fundamental change in the way individuals think about and conduct their daily lives and careers. Essentially, individuals are experiencing a paradigm shift in terms of the significance they assign to their lives.
Yet despite coaching’s revolutionary impact on professional and personal growth, it is not for everyone. Not everyone has the emotional fortitude to deal with it. There are those who aren’t quite ready for coaching just yet. Those who have experienced trauma or psychological harm, or who lack the requisite knowledge and abilities in a particular field, are not good candidates for coaching. Additionally, coaching is not for individuals who seek merely tranquility in their lives.
If coaching is distinct from more traditional forms of mental health care like therapy or counselling, then its prospective clients must be in good mental health to begin with. This is due of the nature of coaching and its efficacy. In addition, coaching is difficult because it requires its participants to honestly assess their strengths and weaknesses, set and pursue ambitious goals, and dig deep to bring out their absolute best performance.
So, what in the world is Coaching?
To put it simply, coaching is a strategy and process that aims to do the following:
- Awaken a person’s untapped potentials and prospects.
- Mobilize resources for becoming more, feeling more, thinking better, experiencing more, having more, and contributing more,
- Challenge a person to create new and more expansive description of a bold and compelling outcome that sets forth an exciting direction,
- Facilitate the actualization of that new game into actual behavior to take performance to a new level of achievement in actual behavior and new habits.
- Unleash new potentials, unique talents and aptitudes, and incredible possibilities.
In a word, coaching is all about self-actualizing. Personal growth is the central focus of any coaching relationship. It’s about liberating our inner selves so that we can live up to our fullest potentials. To leave a lasting legacy, outstanding coaches encourage their charges to embrace the uncertainty and chaos of the future while drawing on their own sense of ego power to reach new heights. Isn’t that exciting?
Getting Ready for Your Coaching Adventure
So, what exactly are the requirements for hiring a coach and beginning a coaching relationship? There are several. If you think coaching may be the next step for you, here are six (6) things to consider in assessing your readiness for coaching.
1. Sufficient and Robust Ego-Strength
Coaching assumes that a person has enough ego-strength not just to be “okay,” but to fully use their skills and abilities. Coaching assumes that a person has “dealt with the past,” is fully in the present, and is ready to look to the future and make goals that are big, bold, and even audacious. Coaching is different from therapy in that it is not as much about nurturing, re-parenting, or dealing with problems and hurts. Coaching is about pushing, challenging, waking up, and putting one’s best dreams into action. To do that, a good coach will have a tough conversation with the client that “quickly gets to the heart of things” to push them. To face that, you need a lot of ego-strength.
2. Positive Attitude about Mistakes
Because coaching is about the future, making big dreams come true, and stretching to reach impossible goals, the coaching client needs to have enough ego strength to look at his or her weaknesses, failures, and mistakes without blinking, giving up, or getting defensive. In the coaching process, mistakes are seen as a way to learn. In coaching, a client learns to look forward to failures as opportunities for breakthroughs, learning, and change.
This requires a whole new and radical way of thinking, a way of thinking that knows our mistakes and failures are just new chances to learn and grow. To be ready for full-on coaching, you need to reframe failure as learning and feedback that’s “in the muscles,” so that failure is nothing to fear and everything to embrace.
3. Openness to Feedback
In order to use failures and mistakes as stepping stones to the next level of development and success, a client needs to have enough self-confidence to be open to feedback about what didn’t work and what needs to be fixed or improved. It takes a strong mind to be able to look into a mirror that doesn’t hide anything and shows you exactly how you’re doing, how you come across, and how others see you.
Being open to feedback means being willing to be held responsible for what you say you want. This accountability is a big part of why coaching works so well. In fact, the client signs a contract that says the coach won’t let him or her off the hook, but will put the client’s agenda first and hold the client’s feet to the fire.
4. Commitment to Development
Since coaching isn’t about the past or getting over old things, but about making a bold, compelling, exciting, and challenging path to the future, it requires (yes, “requires”) a full commitment to oneself. This is often where coaching starts, by giving a client a bigger vision and dream of what’s possible and getting them to commit to it. Coaches often ask, “Would you do whatever it takes to make this dream of yours come true?”
This is also a part of being accountable in a coaching relationship: letting the coach call your bluff and continuing to talk about what you’re doing or not doing that might be keeping you from reaching your highest values and goals. In this, a coaching client is willing to be open and vulnerable about his or her needs, drives, possibilities, beliefs, values, meanings, etc. And it’s the fact that they accept this weakness that makes the coaching work.
5. Commitment to Change and Transformation
Coaching clients are people who are open to change. They think about change, make plans for it, and want it. They aren’t happy with the way things are now, and they often enjoy the uncertainty of the unknown for the sake of the adventure. This is different from the typical therapy client, who fights against the change they need and may even know they need, or goes back to an old pattern.
6. Embracing Ambiguity and Dis-equilibrium
When Abraham Maslow made the distinction between lower and higher needs, he also made a distinction between two types of motivation. One is to satisfy needs so that they go away and leave a person in peace and balance. The other set of needs, called meta-needs or self-actualization needs, lets us show our higher drives. This doesn’t get rid of the drive like gratification does with lower needs. Gratification of self-actualization meta-needs amplify the needs and creates even more dis-equilibrium.
Conclusion
If coaching is this challenging, exciting, disorienting, and dis-comforting, then obviously it is not for everyone. It’s not for someone who needs therapy, for sure. It is more for people who are courageous, who embrace change, who are ready to actualize new potentials, who are ready to make paradigm shifts and transformations, and so on. It is also for people who have a lot of ego strength.
Curated by Danielle Tan.
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