The Best Coaching: Only Everything Helpful

At the age of 15, I gave my grandma a plaque I had made for her that read, “We are what we make ourselves.” When I was 22, I wanted to start a business called The Listening Post. I didn’t start that business then because I didn’t think anyone would believe that a 22-year-old wanted to listen to them. Fast forward 15 years to 1997 when I learned of a new business coming into being: life coaching and business coaching. And, oh, to find out that the primary focus of coaching involved helping people become who they’d most like to be. And, that one of the primary skills involved: listening. Wow! By that time, I had started, run and successfully made a living at three businesses that I’d created out of thin air: a newsmagazine for singles; a service of creating newsletters for dentists to send to their patients; and a graphic design and writing business in which I developed logos, business names, brochures, business cards and newsletters for speakers, trainers, consultants, psychotherapists and massage therapists. As I grew these businesses, I came to know and continued to develop my strengths, skills and interests. I also instinctively knew how important it was to find out what my potential clients most needed. I then offered them whatever products and/or services that lived in the intersection of their desires, interests and needs and my strengths, skills and interests. This has been not only been an effective, but also a personally fulfilling way to develop a business. My clients have gotten what they most wanted and needed from me doing what I do best and love to do! I never took official coach training. I grew my coaching business by learning from the coaches I hired to coach me and from offering marketing coaching in addition to my design and writing services to my speaker and consultant clients. I grew my coaching business as I had grown all my businesses previously: by offering coaching, consulting and teaching in the intersection of my clients desires, interests and needs and my strengths, skills and interests. Over the years, many of my clients have been coaches trained in different coaching programs. I’ve often found myself in the position of teaching my clients to trust their own instincts when they’ve begun to second-guess themselves about offering their clients more than “pure coaching” that coach training programs and the coaching industry liberally advocate as the proper way to coach and to grow a coaching business. “Coaching isn’t consulting. Coaching isn’t therapy. Coaching isn’t advice giving. Coaching doesn’t offer resources because the client is resourceful and whole.” So says the coaching industry. All of these ideas come from the ego of the coaching industry, attempting to establish coaching as completely distinct and separate from every other profession involved with personal and professional growth and transformation. While the concept of coaching as separate and distinct from every other profession may be somewhat necessary for coaching to mature into an established profession, it does not serve the coach and it certainly does not serve the coaching client! And, it’s not completely true. The pure coaching process is different than the pure consulting process, pure psychotherapy process, pure training process, pure counseling process and on and on . . . Yet, long before coaching was named coaching, some of the best consultants offered pure coaching to their clients sometimes. And, some of the most effective and successful psychiatrists, psychotherapist and counselors would occasionally use pure coaching if that’s what would best elicit healing for the client. And, so it is today with some of the best coaches. Drawing from all of their strengths, interests and skills, an exceptional coach may offer pure coaching, a timely resource, a moment of grief counseling, stand-up comedy and a teaching story all in one session! And, many of their clients work with them year after year and refer person after person. For the other 80% of coaches, they languish. Frustrated that they can’t get or keep clients, they wonder why more potential clients don’t understand or want pure coaching. Especially after they’ve done as they were taught in coach training, to carefully detail on their websites and in their conversations the distinctions between coaching and seven or eight overlapping professions . . . While the coaching industry may not approve, the coach who provides whatever a client needs that the coach wants to offer, that is the coach who has the best job in the world, making a great living. And as the coach’s clients’ lives and businesses transform, the clients are thrilled that they’ve had the good fortune to hire that coach! Are you willing to trust your own instincts and to serve the client in front of you with all you have to offer? Copyright 2010 Ann Strong. All rights reserved.