Monday 20 September 2010

What Can Coaching Do for Me and My Business?


 Hello Richard,

You asked how exactly, coaching can help you. I'm happy to clarify that for you.

You say you're not making progress, you're stressed, your work/life balance is bent, and you want a change. The driving issue is your strategic direction.

You don't rate yourself as being busy, but you want more time for yourself, so, if we worked together I'd clarify that with you. You say you want to change your job, but you need to continue to service financial commitments - very normal. I'm not sure if you want to fix your strategic direction with your business - of if you want to ditch the whole thing. Perhaps you're not sure either - maybe you have no faith in the former and are afraid of the latter.

This is the kind of mess we often find ourselves in, and, by asking simple questions, coaches can really help clients sort out what's in their own heads. WORRY is a poor background to thinking clearly, so I often work on that with the client too, freeing up energy and creativity to apply it to the problem at hand.

So, being as concrete as I can without knowing more about your situation, the steps are:
  1. Clarify and improve understanding of your problem space. In your case, this is likely the business and your future. There are usually secondary issues which are affecting this - and you may not even be consciously aware of some of them. Almost universally, aspects of your own mind live in here - perhaps fear, ambivalence, conflict, hidden faulty beliefs and so on.
  2. Clarifying what you want. Again - sounds simple, but I'm betting it isn't. You're probably in conflict here too. Usually people bend what they really want into what they think they can really have - and in that process, they lose the spark that would drive them to win. So we would find clear, crisp, inspiring but entirely achievable goals.
  3. We would look at how to accomplish them. In reality, these steps are not usually linear - we move between them, horse-trading what you're prepared to swallow as being realistic with what you're prepared to work for, and often integrating effects come into play - a small win builds confidence, and so goals change, and that becomes more inspirational.
It's often intrinsically messy, but that's OK if we emerge with a clear understanding of your situation and a direction to move in which inspires you, and some tools to begin the journey.

Sometimes clients stay with me all the way, other times, they set out on their own once they have their new direction.


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