You are currently viewing When Not To Engage A Career Coach

I heard someone say the other day that Oprah has 11 coaches! Well I’m not sure how true that is, but the more you look at the common traits of highly successful people, having some form of life, career or business coach is a consistent theme.

Why?

Three reasons:

1. As a leader you are often surrounded by people who are trying to do right by you so who’s going to call you out and challenge your thinking before it’s too late? We all have career blind spots that get in the way of our effectiveness and success and, as the name suggests, we can’t see them. To have someone who can listen to you with the only agenda being to help you achieve what you want to achieve no matter what can help you short circuit a lifetime of self sabotaging patterns.

2. The pace of change is ramping up more and more and with that brings a heightened expectation to perform with all this knowledge at our fingertips. With all of these distractions, it is easy to lose sight of your & your organisation’s purpose and drift off track. You might think drifting is harmless, but if you’re running a multi-million dollar company, what starts off as a small deviation from the plan can end up  having a significant impact. 

3. Fast track solutions. What I’ve noticed whenever I’ve personally engaged a coach is that I’m able to get clarity around the problem and identify a solution a lot faster when I have to articulate the thoughts floating around in my head.  We can spend ages in our head thinking, going round in circles (sound familiar?) yet within 30 minutes talking to someone can make all the difference.


Why not to engage a coach:

It is a complete waste of time and money to engage a coach if you are not prepared to be coachable! If you’re not open to change, and that means changing something about yourself: your perception, your beliefs or your behaviours, then nothing is going to change. So you need to be ready and willing to evolve rather than revolve or devolve.


Take 100% responsibility. “Since the physical world cannot be controlled, the task before us is to master our inner responses to the external world, our thoughts and emotions.” Carolyn Myss. If we attribute blame to others there is nothing we can do about them. If we take responsibility for what we can do, not only are we empowered but powerful.


It takes courage to confront those parts of us that we perhaps don’t like, and hide away but the more your run away from something, the more you run into it. When you call something for what it is you can then deal with it & move on.

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