How Our Coaching Method is Helping the Best Get Better
In the recent past, we had the opportunity to work with a very special client. Stephanie (name changed for privacy) was a top performer at a billion dollar company and at the time was being mentored by the Director of HR. He knew Carol, one of our coaches, and wanted Stephanie to work with her since Carol could help her with reaching goals, career planning and balancing work and family. Little did he know, what kind of impact the coaching would have on one of the company’s top employees.
If you’ve followed our previous posts, you’re well aware that we like to start all of our coaching with personal assessments. We did the same for Stephanie, and after Carol’s first one on one, Stephanie shared with Carol that she was being head hunted by another top Fortune 500 company in the industry. She was unsure of where she should go and had one foot out the door already. From a coaches perspective this makes for an interesting dilemma, how do you help a top performing client when they are thinking about leaving the company that is paying the coaching fees?
Carol broke it down into three points.
- Build Self Awareness
- Create Clear Goals and Objectives
- Define Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Now these seem fairly basic, but when you delve into each of these they can go quite deep and get complicated rather quickly.
How Well Do You Know Yourself?
As Carol started coaching Stephanie for the next several months she started going over the assessments and built off those with Stephanie’s input to find out answer’s to Stephanie’s questions about where to work, if she was passionate about her job, and how to achieve work life balance.
After a few hours of sincere thought, Stephanie knew she was passionate about the work she did but struggled balancing work and family. Through working with Carol, Stephanie made an agreement with her family that her husband could hide her laptop from Friday afternoon to Sunday night so that she could allow herself to focus solely on family during the weekends and not worry about work emails and tasks.
After some time of doing this Stephanie broke down in tears of gratitude for Carol’s help with bringing more life balance into her life.
Have Your Goals and Objectives Been On Hold?
The second point is essential to helping the best get better. We tend to see a significant proportion of our clients in roles such as CEO, VP, or Directors. As such, it may seem hard for most people to know how you could possibly help them get any better.
Often times Executives and other high performers are so busy and involved in the business that their real passions and goals go neglected. We often are able to evaluate their situation and help come up with actionable plans that will help them achieve their business, career and personal goals.
In Stephanie’s case, Carol personally spoke with two of her supervisors and walked through Stephanie’s action and personal development plan with them. In about a year, Carol received a call from Stephanie, she had received the promotion she always wanted and was working in an area she was highly passionate about. The client and company had both reached a win-win situation.
Do You Really Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses?
This last point is key to helping the best get better. Some weaknesses are painfully obvious to ourselves, but others we tend to naively ignore and shut out. Working with a coach and using the assessments really helps find where your true strengths lie and what weaknesses you may have that relate to your career, personal and business goals.
The coach, with those strengths and weaknesses in mind, can help make a reasonable and achievable action plan over 90 day increments. The added accountability to a coach further increases the odds of reaching those goals.
Coaching Applications in Body Building
Carol was brave in sharing this story with me, but it shows a fantastic application of how she used our coaching process with a personal goal of hers, to compete in a body building contest.
If you know Carol personally, you’d see that she doesn’t typically open her personal life to just anyone. However, she knew that if she wanted to increase her odds of reaching her personal goals she would need to hold herself accountable to others. One goal in particular that she had was to compete in a body building contest. It takes a lot of guts to tell your family, friends, and gym members that you are working towards that goal, but that’s exactly what she did.
As soon as she shared, everyone would follow up with her. “How’s the body building going? How many more weeks till the competition? Wow, you are making amazing progress!” Can you see how this could encourage you to work that much harder on your goal? Now if she wanted to give up out of laziness or lack of will power, she would have to let a whole community know about it.
Do you want to hear how it went? Carol went from 31% to 9% body fat, 150 lbs to 123lbs, and placed 3rd in her first body building competition ever. Pretty amazing results.
The coaching method we use proves successful time after time, and many of the best are getting better as a result.
Three Things to Do Next
- Pick a Goal: Find something you’ve been putting off or just need to start and put some actions in place to move it forward.
- Make Yourself Accountable: Follow Carol’s example and find someone to make yourself accountable to. It’s amazing how effective this is for reaching goals.
- Call for a Free Consultation 1-877-523-0212: We do free consultations, give us a call. Let us know what you’d like to achieve or ask any questions you have in mind.
image thaines
