“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It’s helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” — Tim Gallwey
At some point, we will hit a plateau in our self-learning. We might find ourselves finally having a breakthrough in our business, only to find ourselves stuck. We ask ourselves, “Where do I go from here to keep winning?” As Michael Hyatt said, “Getting to number one and staying at number one are two different things.” When do we need to hire a coach to continue succeeding in our business?
You hire a coach when you want something to change and you are ready to learn more from someone else. If you are satisfied with your current performance or feel like you don’t need one, then you don’t need one.
Here are some scenarios when a coach might be beneficial for your growth.
When you are getting a startup off the ground, you might need a coach to help you beat the odds. Statistically, only 4% of businesses survive in the first 10 years, and what entrepreneur starts a business only to let it fail, right?
If you are a beginner, it is a smart move to hire someone with more experience and expertise to guide you through the learning process. If you’ve ever played sports, you know the value of training with proper form right from the start, instead of having to unlearn bad form and relearn from scratch.
Similarly, with businesses, it is better to decrease your losses and reduce your liabilities, especially in the early stages. We all learn a lot from trial and error, but it doesn’t always have to be your error—you can also learn from the mistakes of others.
You benefit from getting guidance and wisdom based on real-world experience from a coach who’s “been there, done that.”
Maintaining a winning streak and beating personal records means continuous improvement. As leaders, the growth of our businesses and our teams depends on our personal and professional growth. As John Maxwell says, “Everything rises and falls on leadership.”
During your business’s growth period, things can get pretty overwhelming. There are a lot of new developments coming in, as well as status quos to maintain. Having a coach to help you set clear business goals and achieve them through day-to-day practices helps.
They can point you in the right direction when it comes to leading, managing, and hiring your team; improving business processes and marketing strategies; identifying and predicting trends in your industry; and how to fail forward and make iterations to your frameworks, systems, and processes.
We’ve all gotten to a point where we don’t know what we don’t know. We feel overwhelmed and don't know where to focus. We keep missing our goals, and our profit margins continue shrinking despite doing all the right things that used to work.
When we are stuck, it helps to borrow a different perspective from someone who sees the picture from outside the frame. We tend to get so engrossed in working on our business that we are too close to everything—too close to see things from the right perspective.
A fresh pair of eyes can help us see old problems in a new light and can spark new ideas and possible solutions. It helps us consider things we have never thought of or noticed before. And having a coach who can see things objectively from the outside can help challenge the way we think.
The right coach can help challenge you to have a growth mindset, keep you accountable to your goals, teach you to be better at communicating and leading your team, and help you establish systems and build frameworks that drive growth.
We all are capable of stretching ourselves beyond what we thought were our limits. Sometimes, the difference between becoming stagnant and continuing to win is having the right coach in our corner.
Thank you for reading A Brilliant Tribe.
