Why do I need a coach?

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Tajan Braithwaite Renderos, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

Could the Chicago Bulls have had such incredible victories if they didn’t have a coach like Phil Jackson?

A common question I get as a coach is why do I need a coach. In some fields like sports, it’s a given that professional athletes need a coach. Well, I could argue that all these athletes are talented and highly skilled by the time they get drafted to a national professional team, so why couldn’t they just self-organize and play excellently without a coach. Phil Jackson in his memoir 11 rings talks about the unconventional strategies he used as a coach to assure their success. For example, he asked Michael Jordan to lead the Bulls by under-performing, this meant asking him to reduce his game score point average so that other members of the team would have an opportunity to rise to excellence, allowing this amazing team to coalesce.

Similarly, corporate coaching is also about coaching a team of people working towards the same goal of winning just like in sports, winning for a business might mean developing new sources of business or increasing profit. Coaching can help business leaders who want to arrive at their full potential as conscious leaders. For example, a coach in the corporate setting can help leaders shift work habits that can often be toxic to building a functional team, like micro-managing, projecting insecurities, and rankism. Coaching can also help staff members work cohesively to achieve the company’s goals. Finally, A coach will often facilitate processes that help to unlock latent sources of productivity thereby maximizing potential of employees. According to the most recent study from the International Coaching Federation’s Global Coaching Client Study 86% of corporate leaders who invested in coaching said they were satisfied and would repeat the process.

A personal development or life coach works one on one with clients to facilitate strategic conversations geared towards the achievement of personal and professional goals of the client. This can help you activate areas of your life where you’re feeling stuck. Coaching can help you find answers that work to nagging questions like: What can I do to live a more stress-free, balanced life? How can I find more meaning in my job? How can I achieve financial freedom? A coach can bring out talents that you haven’t fully developed or ones that you might not even admit to yourself that you have.

Coaching helps people who are functional become highly functional. It is focused on prevention and maximizing all aspects of one’s health and well-being. It’s not cognitive behavioral therapy. Counselors/Therapists spend more time examining the past, looking for solutions to emotional concerns and seek a diagnosis. The relationship between coaches and clients is a little less formal and more collegial in nature. Like the friend you always go to ask for advice who can actually provide real guidance that works, who isn’t biased and isn’t there to be an ear for your rumination or worse supporting your stuckness. At one point in my career in public health, there was a huge lull in the work and I was bored. My boredom combined with no supportive critical process to really examine my passions or ambitions in life, I decided to become a real estate agent. Now, I had no business becoming a real estate agent and of course didn’t last too long in that. If I had a really good coach at the time, they would have helped me examine why I was feeling stuck and disconnected in my job. We could have reflected on my old and new heart’s desires and we could have discussed how I could pursue a pathway that would have been closer to what I really wanted to do with my career. This could have saved me time, money, and energy.

I believe that if we all do the work required to make ourselves the best we can be in our personal and professional lives, then we can make our world a better place. Working with a coach is a powerful catalyst for that transformation.