Are You Coachable?

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Maia Berens, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Life Coaching – Are you able?

Not every person is right for life coaching. If you don’t believe that you can learn and grow from life coaching than you won’t and you are wasting your money. It is important to choose the right coach when you are thinking about life coaching, but just as important is determining if you are truly coachable. If not, you will also be wasting your money. You must believe that the process can help you and you must be willing to commit the time and effort to the process.

You need to be able to learn how to look inside yourself and be honest with yourself and your coach. Don’t try to take over as the coach and coach yourself. It won’t work. You obviously felt the need to hire the coach at some point for some reason. Let them do what you hired them for. They have the experience, the outside perspective and the tools to help you and that is why you hired them. Work with the coach instead of against and the coaching could change your life forever.

For example, Betty called me and wanted to work on relationships. She had a boyfriend who didn’t seem to feel about her the way she felt about him. As we began our coaching relationship, I tried to find out about her past relationships to help her see her patterns. But all she wanted me to do was tell her how to get her boyfriend to like her more. That’s not coaching. If she had wanted to look at herself, the ways she might be getting in her own way or the ways she didn’t value herself enough and stayed in a relationship like she was in, we could have made some coaching progress. As it was, she was not coachable.

It is said that coaches need to be coachable also. My understanding of that is that I need to keep my ego out of the mix, support my client’s point of view and be open to when I have it all wrong. That’s coachable.