What results are common with business coaching?

When deciding on whether or not to hire any kind of coach, one of your main concerns needs to be, “what am I going to get from this relationship?” It’s a fair question and one we tend to ask in most areas of our lives if we’re thinking things through. You wouldn’t hire a personal fitness trainer unless you thought they could get you results, so hiring a business/personal coach shouldn’t be treated any differently.

The major difference between fitness and business coaching, though, are the specific results you’re trying to see. In many ways, fitness is much easier to quantify. Did you lose the weight? Did you get stronger? Can you run further or faster? Simple measurements like this make it easy to see how far you’ve come. In contrast, knowing what to expect from a business coaching arrangement can be more nebulous. Below I’ll go into some of the most common results that clients can expect to see when they work with a skilled coach.

Reducing emotional blocks and self-sabotaging behavior

One of the foundational actions when working with a coach is to begin by identifying your goals and then the obstacles that have prevented you from reaching them to date. Emotional blocks can be things like deeply held beliefs about your own self-worth that lead you to under-perform or habits you’ve gained over time that make you less effective on a daily basis. Whatever those blocks happen to be, identifying and removing them is a high priority during coaching.

Ask yourself: how much more successful could you be if you maximize your ability to function every day?

Greater clarity of purpose

Goal-setting is a great way to define what you want out of your career or life in general. The coaching process will go through defining in detail the Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely goals that make the most sense for where you want to be in the future. What this will accomplish is very simple but very powerful: clarity of focus. Knowing with certainty where you want to be in a few months, quarters, or years does tremendous good for spurring you to action.

Ask yourself: how would knowing your destination ahead of time help you get where you want to be, sooner rather than later?

Better time and task management skills

The unfortunate truth is that many people don’t succeed at something because they mismanage their schedule and/or their task list. We spend too much time on things that don’t matter, convincing ourselves that we’re “way too busy” to work on our dream goals because we already have so much to do. The reality, though, is that we tend to create busy work for ourselves to fill the time we think we need to fill with “work”. Does it realistically take you all day to clear your email inbox, or does it only take that long because you’re periodically stopping to check social media? Will a project really take two months to complete, or is that estimation based on barely-defined requirements and needs?

Ask yourself: how much time do you waste on unnecessary things that could be better used towards getting what you want from your career and life?

Development of results-oriented planning and decision making

One of the hallmarks of the SMART goal system is that whatever you want is fine, as long as you can measure it. What does that mean? It means that your goals, planning, and actions need to be centered around achieving something that has an end-point. When do you know you’ve accomplished a goal like, “get in shape”? You don’t, because that doesn’t mean anything tangible. In contrast, if your goal is to “lose 10 lbs, reduce your waistline by 2 inches, and improve your mile run time by 1 minute” then you know when you’ve hit those milestones by just periodically measuring for the “win” conditions you’ve set. Having these measurable goals means you can plan and make decisions that will directly move towards those goals in a tangible way, rather than pointing your efforts in a given direction and hoping you get there one day.

Ask yourself: how would having a plan that helps you make good decisions towards a measurable goal help keep you on track?

Enhanced motivation and productivity

The hardest part about striving for a goal, no matter how big or small, is keeping yourself motivated to continue day in and day out until you get there. Coaching is about having another person that cares just as much about your goals as you do, but is removed enough from the emotional investment that they can help you stay motivated through the rough parts. 

Ask yourself: how much more would you get done with someone “in your corner” helping you stay motivated to succeed?

Increased income

To put it frankly, people who are more effective and happier tend to make more money during their lifetimes. The cranky worker is often replaced or just fired at the earliest opportunity, often regardless of being otherwise productive members of the team. Why? Because no one wants to work with an asshole, basically. But, I hear you ask, how can business coaching help with that? By working with a coach, you learn how to be more effective not just as a worker, but also as a person, increasing your personal happiness and productivity. Not only will you become more valuable, you’ll become more likable, and that combination goes a long way towards making you more money.

Ask yourself: if everyone you work with had a pleasant experience around you and you became one of the most productive people in your office, how much more value could you generate?

Better work/life balance

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Sound familiar? While the example set by Jack Nicholson in The Shining is kind of an extreme example of “working yourself to death” (pun totally intended), it doesn’t mean there isn’t significant truth to the statement. In the USA in particular, we have the tendency to work much, much harder and for longer hours than we really need to. This often results in a loss of good health as positive personal habits like eating well fall by the wayside. It also can easily result in the souring - or total loss - of relationships with friends and family. Coaching can be a good litmus test for whether you’re focusing too much on your work and not enough on your Self (capital “S”, for a reason). 

Ask yourself: how valuable would it be to have a third party to help you identify areas where work and life have become dangerously unbalanced?

Improved communication skills

So much of the modern world is based around the need and ability to communicate facts and ideas. We have to take whatever is going on in our brain, translate it to some useful medium, and then get another person to understand it with a totally different brain. When you think about it, the fact that we can do that at all is basically a miracle of sociobiology. Another unfortunate truth is that the majority of people aren’t as good at communicating as they think they are! Whether we’re talking about email, public speaking, or casual conversation, the majority of people are not conveying the meaning they think they are when they engage in communication with others. A skilled coach helps you identify the areas where you can improve and develop those areas so that you can get your point across in any situation.

Ask yourself: how much more smoothly would your life go if you removed most, if not all, of the communication issues you regularly experience?

Greater work/life fulfillment

The final common result of business coaching is a big one, but it’s simple at its core: you’ll be more fulfilled with both work and life. The human condition is built to seek out happiness, stimulation, relationships, and accomplishment. When we get those things lined up and moving forward at a steady rate, we tend to feel fulfilled and whole. It’s as simple, and complicated, as it sounds. Engaging a coach helps you on this path by finding the obstacles that stop you from developing areas of fulfillment, identifying what will make you feel more fulfilled at all, and keeping you on a positive path towards those goals.

Ask yourself: how much better would you feel about your whole existence if you knew that you were moving towards a happier, more connected, and more successful life?

Closing

Working with a coach is a big decision and one you shouldn’t make without knowing what you’re getting into. It’s a commitment from the client that states, unequivocally, that they are ready to maximize their life in some way. Whether it’s being a better employee, landing a management role, starting/growing a business, or balancing work with life, collaborating with a coach can benefit you in many ways.

Ready to get started? Schedule your free Discovery Call today.