Life Coach or Business Coach? Yes Please!

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Wayne Brown, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

So you decided you want to work with a business coach, but you’re not sure what the next step is. Congratulations! Deciding to consult a coach can be the first step to fantastic growth of your business, and also your personal life. Hopefully this checklist can give you some direction in your coach shopping.
Life Coaching and Business Coaching is a booming industry today, yet there is no real defining standard of what makes a good coach. This leaves the consumer with website surfing, in hopes of making a good choice. Coaches can be expensive, and their advice may have huge impacts on your future. So how do you shop for a coach? This is not the final definitive checklist for everyone, but if you are shopping and don’t know what you are really looking for, may I humbly submit some thoughts to consider as you shop.

1. A Business Coach should also be a Life Coach. The idea of leaving your home life outside of work is somewhat clichéd, and really rings hollow today. Your brain is not a Cloud Server. Simply closing a file you do not want to deal with right now does not make the data shut off from your brain. Your Business Coach needs to be equipped to coach you in your personal life and your work life; in order to truly make either, or both areas more successful.

2. First meeting free! I am not saying that a coach who gives away the store has anything worth taking, but you need to fit with your coach. In an ideal a successful situation, coaching is going to involve sharing specificities. That may be proprietary business data, it may be how you want to fire or promote your Sales Director, or it may be how you are afraid how the business gets carved up after a divorce. For coaching to work, deep and personal information will be shared. Both parties need to work well together in order for trust to be built. There should not be a charge for that. The coach should know their value, and be able to prove it. Go for coffee at the local coffee bar. During the meeting, once a bond is developed, you can move on to discussing a more professional strategy.

3. What has your Coach done in His or Her Life? Just to pull the cover back on a possible secret, being a Certified Coach means NOTHING! There is no governing body of Life or Business Coaches. There is no agreed curriculum. And even if there were, does having a certificate make a good coach? Probably not. Would you go to a person who passed medical school, but who has never had a single patient to treat your cancer? Any person with an internet connection can get certified as a Life Coach from one of dozens of websites. What matters is whether they know how to get what you want to accomplish. Does the coach have experience accomplishing goals you are pursuing? If not, they are probably not the coach for you. And even if they have accomplished your goals, how do you know they can show you how to achieve those goals? Ideally, your coach has experience accomplishing the things you are in pursuit of, and ideally have experience in front of a classroom. It takes a teacher to teach. Pedantic, maybe. But these are your life goals you are pursuing!

4. Avoid Perfect Coaches. First of all, as much as it may kill me to say, perfect people simply don’t exist. No, not even myself. I digress—- if you are coming to a coach to help sidestep landmines, you want to work with a person who knows what a landmine looks like. Moreover, they can identify the minefields before you are stuck in the middle of one. You want a coach who has been bloodied in life, not someone who has read about how to theoretically remove yourself from a challenging situation. Work with a coach who has been through the metaphorical war you are fighting, and thrived on the other side. Ask them about their history, and how they handled a major misstep in their lives. If they cant think of anything, run, don’t walk out of that meeting. Because either they have done nothing noteworthy, or they are lying to you. Anyone who has accomplished big things have survived big mistakes. Besides, life’s stories of struggle can be fun to recount, after you are on the other side of the conflict.

5. Create a Checklist of Wants vs. Needs. When you are looking for a coach, you may know in broad strokes why you want a coach. You know generically what areas in your life need support, guidance, and feedback. The list should become more clear, with the help of a good coach. But you should expand the list, honestly. Are you a man who will only work well with men? Be honest. Are you a man or woman looking for help with dealing with an intimidating authority figure? That might impact what you want in your coach. Be honest. A good coach will not get their feelings hurt. If you were going to buy a car, you know you want a sunroof, 4-wheel drive, and GPS… But you can live without GPS if it has a great sound system. Prioritize your list for your coach, just as you would for your car. For example, “I really want to work on my business’ sagging sales, and my wife/husband complains I already work too much, and my secretary thinks I’m impossible to work with.” All of these are manageable with one good coach, but it must be the right coach.
6. You and your coach are willing to work together! This is almost kind of 5b. You tell your coach that sales are your top concern, because you have bills to pay. But your secretary is your right hand. If she quits, you lose the person who helped to successfully build the office. But if you focus totally on work, and keep coming home at 9pm with a full plate, your spouse might leave you. “Not that you would notice…” the spouse sneers. Speaking extemporaneously, and strictly as an example of this pretend scenario, I might suggest an approach to you:
• you let me meet with your Sales Director for the next two or three appointments to get a better grasp on what’s up with those sales
• you commit to a week of 4:30pm departures, with an empty briefcase.
Simply being home from work for dinner every night might make your home life happier, which will make you happier at work, and in turn, your secretary can stop hiding under her desk when you walk by. This is why you need a business coach who can be a life coach too. Your life is like one giant spider web, and if you tug on one strand, another will shake. Make sure you have an open and cooperative relationship with your coach, so priorities can be picked off in an organized format.

7. Do they have a coach? What do they do when they are stuck? Everyone gets stuck. Will they consult an expert, or simply muddle through in the dark to the other side? If they just struggle through to the end, they don’t really believe in the coaching process. You should probably move along.

8. Be willing to hear feedback, and make changes. No matter how great you are at your career, no matter how many millions or billions you may have in the bank, you still have blind spots. It’s just life. There is some area of business where you are blinded by passion- either positively or negatively. It could be a service provider you work with, who you like so much you are willing to overlook an unacceptable level of defective work they need to rework, resulting in your customers getting angry at delayed fulfillment, or maybe its a service provider you need to endure, even though you truly don’t like them- and cannot untie yourself from them.
The key to coaching is that you need to divorce your ego from the situation. As they say in the movies, its just business. It’s not personal.

Just recently, I was in a meeting with a person who was complaining that he felt his customers were not as faithful as he felt they should be. His company’s qualities are impressive, and the price is fair. He knows they should shop with him more frequently, but cannot figure out why. He floated all sorts of ideas of reasons why they were not working with him, but had no definitive data. I offered that we could set up a survey, and use the collected data to figure out where the cracks were hiding. Knowing your product is fantastic is actually valueless, if the customers left without cause. Was it price? Convenience? Or are they just too busy?
Not every person who leaves will share the reasons, but not everyone who isn’t shopping is necessarily going to the competition. If you have built a good relationship with your clientele, and they have moved on, they will be generally more open about why they may have moved along. The question is whether the businessperson is willing to listen.
In this case, the businessperson utterly refused to hear anything more than his self-doubt. “They wont respond.” “A survey will be a waste of time, lets not even try.” Seconds before, this person was actually physically wringing their hands talking about the loss of this client base. And these are people who may not have actually gone down the street, but just had no need for that particular service for the past weeks. We don’t know. But if we don’t ask, we wont know.
Your coach is a person who can help you, if you are willing to get outside your comfort zone. This person decided that the physical pain of rejection was preferable to knowing whether his system was broken, and how to fix it. The sad part for this businessperson is, without this feedback, even if these clients never come back, and even if he does replace these people with new clients, the problem will likely repeat because we don’t have any concrete knowledge what happened.
Your coach can help you tackle the problems you don’t like dealing with- if you are willing to brave the landmines with the appropriate co-warrior. So contact a bunch of coaches. Find a warrior that you like, and attack life’s problems head on. It may be uncomfortable, but I promised you will feel better on the other side.

Wayne Brown is President and Founder of Time Well-Invested, a Life and Business Coaching Company that works with Individuals, Startups, as well as Established Businesses and Organizations.

For more information or to set up a no-obligation meeting, please call (716) 523-9135 or by email at Wayne at wayne@timewellinvested.com