Why We All Need a Coach Sometimes

Posted on September 03, 2017 by Josh Li, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

Recently, I had a coaching session with my own life coach. Every time I have a session with her (my coach), I learn a great deal about myself and am able to be even more effective at reaching my own life goals. I reflected on why we all need a coach sometimes, even those of us who are life coaches or career coaches. I believe three of the top reasons why having a coach is helpful are: Objectivity, Honesty and Accountability.

Objectivity

When we hire a coach, whether it’s a tennis coach, fitness coach, life coach or career coach, our coach can be totally objective when it comes to our current level of performance. Our coach can leverage her years of experience to observe us in action or ask us probing questions in order to determine exactly where we are at (our starting point). The reason why we may not be able to do this ourselves is that we’re subjective when it comes to our own performance or life situation. We may subconsciously rationalize why we’re not doing as well as we would like, or we imagine that we’re doing better than our actual performance. The coach’s job is to be able to assess our starting point accurately.

Honesty

Once our coach figures out our current performance level, her honesty in giving us that feedback (or helping us to see that for ourselves) is a really important characteristic. Sometimes we may know these things ourselves deep down, but we don’t want to admit to ourselves that there is a large gap in where we are at and the ideal end state that we would like to achieve. We may think over optimistically that we can achieve our career goals or life goals if we only did “X”. However, weeks or months later, we still haven’t done “X” and achieved our goals. Our coach can see that the gap between our starting point and desired end state is large, and that our current trajectory of doing things (or lack of doing things), won’t allow us to achieve our goals. Her honesty is pointing out this situation (through powerful questioning and communications), will hopefully give us the awareness that we need to take a new set of actions in order to achieve our goals.

Accountability

After our coach helps us have that “Aha” moment that we need to take a new course of action, she helps us to brainstorm new options and potential actions to achieve our life or career goals. She may also help us consider what obstacles and challenges may stand in the way, and help us think about ways to overcome those obstacles or challenges. The last key reason why we all need a coach sometimes is that our coach helps to keep us accountable. After we agree with the coach upon a specific course of action that we ourselves will take, our coach will follow up with us at the next coaching session, (or check in via email or phone call). Knowing that our coach will keep us accountable may provide that extra incentive for us to take the action items that we agreed upon in advance. As a result of this, we achieve our desired life goal or career goal.

So, if you have a life goal, such as starting a business, or a career goal, such as finding a dream job or making a career change, and you haven’t been able to achieve your goals yourself, I encourage you to find a life coach or career coach to help you. Her objectivity, honesty, and keeping you accountable may just be what you need to achieve your life goal or career goal. Good luck!