The process of choosing a coach is a difficult one. Understanding the differences in the ways people work, the experience they have and the manner in which they will approach your problem is vital to making a choice that suits you and your unique needs.
Over the course of my career I have worked with many psychologists, leaders, coaches and mentors. It would be true to say that most of them have been good at what they do, some have been inspiring and just a few have been terrible, somehow ending up in the wrong career. But most are good.
Clinical Psychologists often bring about huge and dramatic changes in people’s lives. By offering insight and increasing awareness they can help people develop the skills to manage their own lives and emotions as they move forward into the future alone, often moving from dark places of great distress into a place of hope and confidence.
Leaders in business, health, and communities have the ability to inspire change and give direction, making use of all the expertise around them and enabling groups to create better organizations, communities and drive positive change. It is less common that people excel in this area, leaders often get where they are with a focus on their specialist abilities and other areas of their identity/personality are neglected. But those who truly excel see people, they recognize their talents and abilities and are able to help them shine as they do so themselves.
Coaches typically have a niche, they have come from a particular background and they use the wealth of experience gained from this to educate and provide advice to others who are on the path they have already trodden themselves. Mentors are there to lend an ear to where people are and can come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, these are usually the people we meet coincidentally on our paths who are what we need in the moment to guide us.
I recently had the privilege of working with a marketing coach, who used her own experience, the skills she had gained in marketing to help her clients learn what she knew. Not to follow her path but to gain from the insights she had gathered along the way. She was exceptional, that was my experience of her. As I reflected on this I realized it was because she combined aspects of all the traits I mentioned above. She inspired and recognized people’s individual qualities, she enabled clients to look deeper into themselves, not in a therapeutic way but in an awareness raising manner that enabled obstacles to be overcome both now and in the future as they moved forward on their own with this new insight.
So, in choosing a coach, I first encourage you to think about what you really want and need. Is it that you need technical expertise to move your work forward, this may be the work of a consultant in that area and so they must have that specific knowledge. Do you want to overcome one obstacle that stands in your way right now, again you must choose the person that has that knowledge and be honest with yourself that you are looking for a short term intervention and fix for this current problem? Or are you looking to develop yourself, your internal attributes, your skills at moving forward and overcoming whatever obstacles stand in your way now and in the future? If this is the case there is only so much a leadership course or educational experience is going to contribute to that, it will be learnt once, applied for a short time and then mostly forgotten. For real change and development to occur you must invest in yourself, to work with someone who can bring insight to your situation, to enable development of your self-awareness and the uniqueness of who you are and the ways in which you think and work. They must inspire you, because otherwise you will not want to do the work and will not achieve your goals. And they must have real knowledge and experience in working with people in all situations, from all walks of life because the real skill in developing people is in being able to connect with them and understand who they are in a way that matches their experience of themselves. But most of all in choosing who to work with you must know your own motivation, because you cannot create sustainable change within yourself if you do not really want it and are not willing to work for it. So do you want a quick fix to a problem or to develop the ability to overcome obstacles of all kinds yourself as you move forwards through life?
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