If you’re uncertain about how coaching can fit into your life, you’re not alone. Most people can get by without a coach, but the most successful people take every possible advantage in life to help them meet their goals. A coach could inspire you to get the results you desire.
If you’ve ever benefited from having a personal trainer at the gym, imagine using that guidance and accountability in other areas of your life. Don’t make the mistake of thinking coaches are just there to help you overcome bad habits or help “train” you out of a specific negative mindset. As a Harvard Business Review study found, companies are increasingly hiring coaches to help their best, brightest, most high-potential employees optimize their performance. It can get lonely at the top, but a coach could provide you with the support you need to make the bold moves that allow you to continuously progress forward. Although coaching may seem like a luxury, some of the most successful people in the world credit their coaches for guiding them to enormous results in their lives, careers, and businesses.
If you think that you’re not entirely living up to your fullest potential, here’s how a coach could help you.
What Does a Coach Do?
In sports, a coach can help you improve your skills and strategize games while holding you accountable to your workout schedule. Similarly, a coach can help you achieve any life, career, or business goal through a variety of services. These services include:
- Identifying goals that matter
- Strategizing to help you meet those goals
- Providing support as you execute on your plans
- Being the support you need when you hit obstacles in the plan
- Sharing additional resources and suggestions
- Giving you insight as to how to make significant career moves or get yourself out of a rut
- Acting as a sounding board to help you make the best decisions on your own
- Holding you accountable more reliably than a family member, friend, or colleague
What are the Benefits of Coaching?
A coach provides many services that you can’t receive from other people around you. Your family may not understand the stressors of your industry. Your friends can’t always be there to provide constant strategizing and career support. Your colleagues may hold a bias toward your performance or want to compete with it. That is where a coach comes in to support you.
Below, we highlight three of the top benefits of coaching.
- Clarity
If you feel conflicted or confused about your next steps, a coach can diffuse that cloud over your judgment. Through structured questioning and experimenting, a coach can help you determine the most advantageous solutions. A coach helps you strengthen your decision-making skills so that you can move toward your goals with confidence. Clarity and confidence will make you more decisive. Decisive people, however, can still make poor decisions, so a coach can help you look past your inherent biases, uncover every possible solution to your problem, improve your judgment, and make you into a stronger leader.
Furthermore, a coach can help you work out the criteria for your ideal solution. Ultimately, the Arootah decision-making process enables you to make the best decision possible which, in turn, enhances your judgment. A leader who is worth their salt is a good decision-maker.
- Strategy
Often, leaders benefit from working with an objective sounding board to strategize their plans moving forward. Discussing a problem or decision with a coach helps you get an objective point of view on the facts. By working with an objective, third-party figure you can mitigate cognitive biases and stay focused on the big picture. The most respected leaders are level-headed and open-minded. They eliminate biases (and emotion) from their leadership style by remaining objective. If you are always confiding your experiences in your friends, family, or colleagues, you might be missing impartiality. Over time, your team can get sucked into “groupthink,” creating myopic leadership and decision-making. Break that tendency to be like the others and have an objective ally in your circle. Working with a coach enables you to make impactful strategies that no one in your industry would anticipate.
- Accountability
A coach provides guaranteed accountability, which can motivate you to meet your goals. While you can disappoint yourself, your friends, or your family with few ramifications, you would actively pay your coach to hold you accountable to your goals. By not living up to those goals, you would be wasting your own money and your coach would be failing to do their job, so they would work much harder to keep you accountable than anyone else in your life. No one is more reliable for accountability than a professional coach. If you are having trouble executing your goals, a coach can also help you identify and overcome roadblocks in your plan. Coaches want for you to succeed in whatever way matters most to you. Coaching should result in significant, positive outcomes.
What are the Outcomes of Coaching?
In the list below, we outline the results you can expect when you invest in the accountability, decisiveness, and objectivity of a coach:
- Thriving Personal Life
Expect a thriving personal life. Most people don’t set significant goals or plans for their personal life. They simply assume that health, relationships, and significant life milestones will just happen. These milestones don’t happen by accident and you can make progress in your personal life by setting goals and plans to convert your dreams into reality. Plans can make you proactive about your future. Find more life fulfillment by maximizing your productivity. According to the Institute of Coaching, you will see a significant ROI in your performance and your general sense of self-worth and confidence when you hire a coach. That extra decisiveness and confidence can significantly enhance your personal life and help you find more fulfillment. Whether you’ve set a goal of losing weight or starting a family, a coach can help you move in the right direction.
If you are looking to achieve results in your personal life, check out Life Coaching by Arootah here.
- Professional Advancement
Coaching, in turn, optimizes your work performance which may lead you to a new dream job or advancement within your current company. A coach can encourage you to maximize your performance using tools and strategies for enhancement. By working with a coach to optimize your priorities, time management, and habit stacking, you can improve your work-life balance. Learning these leadership skills also sets you up to influence your team and others in your realm.
Additionally, coaches help you stand out from the pack if you are trying to get ahead in your career. According to Forbes, only 1% of leaders hire a business coach, giving those leaders who do work with a coach a significant edge. Consider that 90% of leaders who hire a coach see improvement in the areas that matter most to them.
If you seek results in your career, check out Career Coaching by Arootah here.
- Successful Business
From a business standpoint, you can trust your coach to be your ally through crisis management, resource management, entries into new markets, and new product launches. If you’re in a leadership position, you may find yourself making changes to your leadership style as you guide your team into new industries. At the same time, you will find yourself working to remain relevant in your field to get ahead of your competition, and to optimize your resources. As a leader, you are responsible for your company’s ability to change in the business environment, and it is also your responsibility to stay level-headed through crisis management. If investments are stressing you out, use a coach to cope with the challenges. A coach can be your anchor through business volatility and can keep you on your path to success.
Forbes notes that business leaders that hire coaches see a…
– 53% increase in overall productivity
– 23% decrease in costs
– 22% increase in profitability
– 61% increase in job satisfaction
– 34% decrease in client complaints
Learn more about how a coach can become your business ally with Executive Coaching by Arootah here.
The Bottom Line
Although coaching may seem like a luxury, some of the most successful people in the world credit their coaches for guiding them to enormous results in their lives, careers, and businesses. If you want to escape a mundane life to begin leading a life that makes you feel proud, a coach can get you there. Coaching separates you from the pack and enables you to rise to the top. Whether your career goals are hazy, you need help defining concrete plans, or you have a clear picture of what you want from life but are not sure how to get there, a coach can help. You’ll see the benefits of coaching in every aspect of your life as you learn greater self-confidence, better leadership skills, decision-making skills, and more.
Check out Arootah’s coaching services to learn more. Book a free, 30-minute introductory coaching call to kickstart your future and get started.
Sources:
What Can Coaches Do for You? (Harvard Business Review)
Should I Hire a Business Coach? (Forbes)
Benefits of Coaching (Institute of Coaching, McLean, Affiliate of Harvard Medical School)