“Get a coach: The best advice I ever got”

What is coaching?

There are many ways to define coaching. Simply put, it is a process through which a coach helps you—the client or coachee—improve your professional or personal performance in order to accomplish a predetermined goal. Being coached both increases your awareness of the obstacles interfering with your progress and supports you in the development of the skills and abilities necessary to overcome these obstacles.

Coaching is attained through open conversation, powerful questioning, and accompanied reflection. It fully focuses on what matters most to you and on what you want to change. It is a future-oriented process that can last from a few weeks to a few months, depending on the objectives that have been defined. A coach has the ability to inspire and help you maximize your own resources, and—through incremental changes—obtain radical, measurable, and lasting results.

Why would you want a coach?

From time to time, we all find ourselves stopping to consider something about our lives that we would like to change or a key aspect of our career that we would like to improve.

But when you set a new goal for yourself, what gets in the way? There may be issues that you don’t want to deal with right then, or perhaps you say to yourself things like “I don’t have time,” “My boss doesn’t support me,” “I don’t have money for that,” “I am not good enough,” and so on.

Consequently, if you are determined and convinced that now is the time to stop procrastinating and get a move on, if something must be done, if you need a breakthrough, get a coach. You may well find that it proves to be a turning point in your career or in your life (m. Most likely both). This probably explains why, during an interview with Fortune magazine, Mr. Eric Schmidt—Former Chairman and CEO of Google—indicated that “get a coach” was one of the best pieces of advice he ever received.

If you commit yourself to the process, you will achieve results. It will not be temporary improvement, but lasting change: you will feel accomplished and successful, which is a fundamental stepping stone for further change and advancement. This is because, while skills and resources are important, mindset plays an even more critical role in achieving what you really want.

How does coaching work?

What would you like to work on today? What would you like to walk out with today? These are typical questions that coaching sessions often open with. Coaching is a dialogue in which nothing is prescribed. It is about helping a client see things with a different perspective and assisting him or her in eliminating the obstacles that prevent them from moving forward or progressing faster. The coach will ask thought-provoking questions that motivate the coachee to really, really think.

This is about you, only you, and nobody else. It is about being of service to you and having a person—the coach—exclusively devote his attention to you. Through this process, the coach will help you focus on the objective that you genuinely want to achieve and make the decisions necessary to advance in that direction.

You will be accountable only to yourself. If you are determined to achieve the results you want, you must be completely committed to the process. There is no magic here. If you really want things to change, you must focus on what you want to change (this will be defined at the beginning of the engagement). It may include your relationships, health, communication skills, team motivation, decision making, time management, and so on. Your coach will help you structure a plan and put you in the right mentality to obtain the results you seek. There will be incremental changes that you’ll continuously monitor and measure (yes, your progress can be measured!). You will evolve through small actions and decisions. You will develop habits that will last a lifetime; a slight shift in the right direction—if it becomes a consistent pattern—will result in significant advances in your life, job, health, and overall performance.

What do you get?

Let me reiterate this: you will get tangible, measurable results as well as lasting improved performance. The feeling of growth derived from a successful coaching process and the realization that you can continue growing even further will feed a very strong feeling of fulfillment. There will come a moment in which you will know—not just believe—that you can make your dreams happen.

Knowing that you are contributing to others and to the whole (society, your company, your family), is also a very powerful experience. You are not alone, and the fact that others will be positively influenced by you and your newly gained positive energy will also be a very powerful motivator.

At the end of it all, you’ll find that it’s not about the resources that may or may not be given to you. It’s about perseverance, it is about being inventive, and it is about being resourceful. You will also learn that you have it all within you. So why not get started now?