What is coaching, and how can a coach help you? Are you coachable? Or do you tend to give coaching more readily than you accept it?
Who are the mentors who have helped you? Did they challenge you, push you to move beyond your limitations – imagined or real? Or did they just console you? Did they expand your universe or just reinforce your existing beliefs?
There is a lot of confusion about how a coach is supposed to help you. If you are looking for someone to talk to, to simply feel better about yourself, then you’re not looking for a coach. A coach will challenge you to make changes towards permanent positive change, new ideas, and new behavior. They will also give you the specific tools so that you can do it. They will hold you accountable to put those tools to use, and to keep using them. Anything less, and you are cheating yourself.
There’s also big myth about self-sufficiency, and self-determination, and a false idea that we should all be able to go it alone. There’s confusion about independence and interdependence. There’s a difference between being pushed out of your comfortable nest, and being able to fly with exquisite skill. A good coach will push you beyond your comfort zone and give you the skills to thrive there.
The most accomplished and successful leaders in every field have always been mentored. Professional athletes have coaches, effective organizations have consultants, even great spiritual teachers have advisers and guides! Artists, writers, musicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors .. you name it .. the best of them acknowledge the life-changing impact of their mentors,
Why would you imagine that you deserve less, or could achieve your best with less?
Perhaps you run your life by other myths, that you’re not good enough, or that you don’t deserve it, or that you can’t afford it. But your logic is backwards. You become good enough by stepping up, you come to deserve it by claiming it, and ultimately, if you want to become and do what you’re truly capable of becoming and doing, you can’t afford not to get the help you need and deserve to make it happen!
The work of a coach is not to help you feel comfortable with your limitations, real or imagined. It is not even to help you understand those limitations, however valuable understanding can sometimes be. It is to help you focus your energy so that you move beyond those limitations altogether, and to sustain that movement so that you, and everyone around you benefits.
.. And aren’t all limitations imagined ones anyway?
So, are you coachable? Ask yourself:
- Can you learn? Can you let go of what you thought you knew? Can you listen and take action based on what you hear? Can you stand directly in front of the things you have avoided because they terrified you, and learn from your fears? Can you trust .. which means, can you trust yourself, your dreams, desires, ambitions? Can you trust that life works for you, not against you, as soon as you start living and thinking for yourself.
- Can you change? Can you risk losing what you thought you depended on? Can you risk losing who you thought you were? Can you risk failing in order to achieve a greater and deeper success. Can you understand that true success is not a zero-sum game. When you win, everyone can win? Can you get out of your own way? Can you stand face to face with those old fears and trust that they may be your greatest teachers, not just something to ‘overcome’, but true guides and teachers.
A few years ago I began working with mentors who really challenged me to question my own belief system and the self-imposed limitations that were playing out in my life, as well as in my work as a teacher and mentor to others.
I realized that I had a ‘sacred’ duty to provoke, challenge, and question even more than I had been .. and to provide concrete tools, practical perspectives , and real-life skills with which people might sustain permanent change in an ongoing way. Anything less than that was merely misplaced kindness!
Genuine kindness sacrifices temporary comfort for long term achievement and ongoing, ever-evolving, fulfillment and creativity; to become a true reflection of this wild and marvelous adventure of living!
Revisiting Dante’s Divine Comedy, for the first time since I was a precocious teenager with literary aspirations, I am astonished and excited by the utter genius of this work. Words escape me. There’s simply nothing quite like it in any language from any period.
