Intro to Coaching: Do You Need One?
What is coaching? Who needs a coach?What is the purpose of coaching? This article sets out to define, once and for all, the purpose of coaching for the people who want and need to move ahead.
Coaching in Noble Abstract
Coaching uses processes, data, and positive psychology to make better people.
In my case, I’ve simplified this to a maxim: “Make Gods.” This refers to the ancient metaphor of divine choice which makes us children of heaven or hell. Scientifically, the data shows that we create our lives by our action or inaction, modeling values which make us nihilistic or empathic, decadent or disciplined. While some things are beyond our control, we make our reality by building, maintaining, ignoring, or destroying.
Coaches help us build the world, life, and self we want, drawing on knowledge of best practice and activating principles while drawing out our best identity, our divine spark, creative capability, powerful hero, and the like.
Coaching in Practicality
It works like this. Coaches help us understand ourselves and identify our unique goals. First we analyze, identify, discover, and organize risks and rewards, challenges and obstacles. Next, we design a plan to grow, a vision of our future self. Finally, we support achieving those results – and our potential – while staying on track to success. They help us build a pathway for success and then act to achieve it.
Coaching is different from advising (consulting or counseling), mentoring, or therapy, which is optimized for sick people. Coaching is for healthy people, and powerful. For example, research shows training offers a 22% increase in productivity – which is phenomenal – but when we add weekly life coaching to the schedule, productivity soars to 88%. It’s worth its value! This happens because we need the knowledge, encouragement, support, introspective opportunity, and outside perspective of coaches to optimize our success.
This is true for normal people just as much as phenoms, kings, or CEOs.
Client Domains
Coaching is optimal for:
Gaining clarity in our values, personality, identity, purpose, and goals we want to achieve.
Improving our creative output, smart thinking, and professional power.
Growing healthier in our habits and relationships.
Finding the passion in our relationships, purpose, and desires.
Becoming an effective leader, mentor, and manager.
Planning for change, chaos, failure, and the unexpected.
Achieving the goal, life, business, revenues, joy, and/or satisfaction we want.
People Who Need a Coach
Coaches typically serve clients who fall into a few categories. These might be you if:
You are someone who wants to get ahead:
You want to improve professionally or creatively.
You want to become better through self-knowledge and definition.
You want to build a better family, find love, or ignite passion.
You want to improve their health, diet, or fitness.
You want to make the most of options.
You want to be better leaders and managers.
You want support for your managers and employees.
You struggle to do what you need to do:
You need to find goals and create values.
You need to identify opportunities for purpose and meaning.
You need to see obstacles and roadblocks.
You need to break the mold or out of the box.
You need to adopt best practices.
You need a path to success and support.
You want to create personal solutions.
You have stagnated and stalled (see previous list).
You lost your will and direction (see previous list).
You need help getting it together:
You are mostly alone and need to build relationships.
You need to transition; you can’t keep going like this. Work is a void or a struggle.
You’re making money but business culture and employees need to be improved or optimized.
You were stopped by loss or failures and can’t seem to get started again.
You are skilled and smart AF but struggle to manage people.
You have a lot to offer but dating is killing you.
You are a creative genius but stuck in creative pitfalls.
I think there’s a divine spark in everyone gravitating to a purpose, a hope, and a meaning even as we continually change for the better or worse. Maybe you want to tap into your powerful spark, or move forward at a normal pace. Maybe you’ve got it together and you’re fine except there’s just this one, little, thing which keeps holding you back. Take a look at the lists above – they’re a primer, but see what they show – we can have help to get what we want, what we need, or to move forward.
That’s Coaching.
