When I think of coaching, I immediately think of sports.  I remember my High School coach telling us there were a lot of kids who couldn’t walk who wished they could do wind sprint after wind sprint.  He coached mainly through criticism, which worked for me on a temporary basis and totally failed to motivate many of my friends.

And yet, even with one-dimensional coaching, we were fairly successful.

Almost all athletes have a coach.  Even professional athletes.  They need a coach to fulfill their potential.

I don’t coach athletes.  I coach people who want to get some traction in their lives and move forward.  I coach people who want to be more fruitful, more productive.

Coaching helps a person move from where they are to where they would like to be.

My family recently took a family trip to the Smoky Mountains.  Looking at a map, there were several ways to get there from our house.  Most of the ways took about the same time, but had very different geography (mountains or flat), different landmarks (restaurants, sightseeing), different road types (one was interstate, another had country roads), …

There is almost always more than one way to get from one point to another, but we get in a habit of one way and forget about the other possibilities.  Or we are overwhelmed with too many possibilities and can’t ever decide which route to take.

Coaching believes that you know more than one way to get where you want to go.  You’ve been to conferences, seminars, and school.  You’ve read books, watched TV programs, and googled Wikipedia.  Coaching assumes no one knows the situation as well as you.  You just may not realize how much you already know.

On our own, we have trouble connecting the dots.  We know where our organization or our life needs to go, but our efforts to move forward have been met with resistance.  We quickly lose motivation.

Coaching can help.

• Coaching gives you more possibilities and more ways to communicate.  Your perspective will go from one view to a 360 degree view.  A clearer view of the path will appear.

• Coaching identifies obstacles on your path and helps you see multiple ways around them.  This is a reality check.

• Coaching helps you navigate fear.  Sometimes the road is too narrow or too near to the edge.  Many times you are making great progress but it doesn’t feel like you are moving at all.  Coaching provides loads of honest encouragement.

• Coaching speaks truth into your life.  Coaching gives you a mirror so you can hear what you just said.  We don’t have a very clear view of ourselves or of our dreams.  Coaching brings clarity.

• Coaching motivates.  One client I have told me that he feels like he is being coached every day.  We don’t coach every day.  In fact we coach twice a month.  But he approaches every day with new motivation just because he is being coached.  Another client says he has more hope that he can be successful since he started being coached.

If you are interested in being coached, I’d suggest you give it a try for three months.  It takes more than one coaching conversation to get things moving, but in three months, you’ll have 6 conversations.  You will be amazed at how effective coaching is.  I look forward to talking with you further!

What do you think coaching might do for your life?