Is Personal Coaching Exclusively for People with Problems?
A potential client wrote me an email the other day. He explained that he had decided that he didn’t need personal coaching nor professional coaching. He said his business was going fine and he didn’t have any emotional issues to work out. His reasoning raised one of my eyebrows. It got me thinking.
He is probably not the only one who perceives coaches as either business consultants or pseudo-psychologists. That’s a shame because, whatever a coach is, they are neither a consultant or a psychologist. Even if many consultants and psychologists offer to coach. Confusing isn’t it?
I’m constantly hunting for my right definition of a coach. I don’t think there can be one right answer because the word coach represents so many different things to different people.
Personal coaching or professional coaching? Why not both?
Sometimes a coach is someone whose main purpose is to snap you out of complacency — enabling you to live your life by design, not default. A coach can also be someone who awakens you to the fact that you have many more choices than you perceived. Someone who helps you recognize that you almost always have a choice, no matter the circumstances or conditions. Another view is that a coach is someone who helps you realize that even small choices are significant in helping you fulfill your goals. Even if you haven’t explicitly decided what your goals are, they can aid you in that process as well. I could keep going. There are probably as many definitions of a coach as there are clients.
The main thing is that a coach is there to support you in whatever journey you are on, and from whatever starting point.
While I have helped individuals with emotional issues as well as helped them turn around their business, those are just end-results; the means being: helping my clients perceive themselves differently, increasing their confidence, illuminating choices, and latent possibilities. Even if the result is often what we measure success by, the means are the stuff of coaching and are, in my opinion, useful to everyone – even those already attaining jubilant success.
