Bad and Useless Advice from Soms Coaches, Mentors, Advisors and Motivational Speakers on Achieving Success, Performance and Results Tranformation

In life, we often turn to other people for advice when to solve our problems, achieve our goals, realise our dreams, excel or to produce our desired results in life in general or in certain areas of our life such as careers, professions, business, entrepreneurship, employment, leadership, management, marketing, sales, education, sport and even relationships. These types of help include coaches, advisors, mentors, trainers, teachers, strategists, motivational speakers and personal development experts. The concept of seeking help is an excellent approach because, when done the right way, it indeed makes the different between super-ordinary success and catastrophic failure, between embarrassing performance and out of this world performance and between mediocre results and unbelievable results. The reality is that the whole thing is often done very badly and there is a lot of dangerous, poor and bad advice as well as useless solutions given in the process of asking for, and seeking help.

Many people seek the help of coaches, mentors, advisors, motivational speakers, person developers, teachers, trainers, motivational speakers and strategists because they want to solve their problems or achieve their goals which may include maximising their performance, successfully start something, to successfully grow something or to successfully turn around their lives, situations, performance or results. Some also seek to get the best out of your life or the best out of yourself, to “ignite or unleash your potential or to get something or to prevent or end something undesirable. When people to these people for help, they are often given dangerous, bad or poor help our useless help.

First, there is a still a huge confusion when it comes to concepts of coaching, advice, mentorship, person development, teaching, training, strategy and motivation. This confusion exists the floor of the help seekers and the help providers.

First, the majority of people lack clarity in what each of the concepts of coaching, advising, mentorship, person development, teaching, training, strategy and motivational speaking. People confuse coaching and mentoring how exactly each of the two means, how it works and what they benefit from each. Many think coaching and mentoring are the same while many others believe they get better value from mentoring than from coaching, which totally wrong. Mentorship and coaching provide two very different types of help. The idea that mentorship provides better value than coaching is incredibly wrong. ?

Mentorship helps, but many people are hoodwinked into believing that they will get more effective help in improving their performance and results and in achieving their goals by using a mentor instead of a coaching they believe that since a mentor is someone who is successful in the areas of mentorship, then the mentor must have a clear and conscious success formula that he or she used to achieve that success. In reality and much more often than most, highly successful people in any field are not successful because they used a conscious, deliberate formula that they can share. Contrary to this believe, many of these highly successful people either stumbled on success through trial and trial or through some unconscious formula that they are not even aware that they possess in their minds. In other words, they cannot provide their mentees or anyone else with an accurate “do this, do that”, formula that someone else can use to produce a success similar to the one that they produce. They have what is called unconscious competence or called it unconscious genius. Then add that some mentees are not good communicators and even if they knew exactly how they did it, they may fail to communicate it accurately and effectively. ?

Most people also confuse teaching and training and use them to mean one and the same. There is a lot of teaching and learning that is mistaken for training and this is a major contributor to poor training results and to training that hardly improves performance and results. Training and teaching are related but are very different in their objectives and you cannot get the results of training from teaching and vice versa. The impact of training on results, if we use the term training correctly, are way higher than those of teaching. ?Here is the thing;

Dangerous, Bad and Poor Answers to the Question, “How Do I Become Successful in This Area or How Do I Achieve this Goal or Mission?

The one ingredient myth

?If you approach a typical mentor, coach, motivational speaker or advice asking help to achieve success in a certain area you are likely to get answers such as;

To succeed you must have….for example “You must have courage or persistent”

To succeed you must be…..for example “You must be persistent”

To succeed you must follow…for example “You must follow your passion”

To succeed you must love…for example, “You must love what you do”

These answers may be correct, but they do not help someone who is seeking a solution to achieve her goals or shift her performance or results very much. This is because;

1.??In reality success in achieving a goal or changing a situation or performance or results is not produce by one ingredient such as courage, or passion, or vision or mission or purpose. Many factors or ingredients are involved is as much as many ingredients are involved in baking a cake. Telling someone that for the them to successfully bake a cake they must have flour is partially correct, but having flour alone as useless as having no flour because you cannot bake any cake using flower alone. Giving someone such a solution clearly shows that you also have no clue how exactly to solve the problem or achieve the goal consciously and deliberately and you would rather own up and say you have no idea so that you allow the person seeking your help to move on to someone who can help her with a real and complete and results producing solution.

Listen, achieving a goal is a product of many ingredients combined together in a specific ways and in specific quantities and processed in a certain way by individuals and teams under specific conditions. Think about producing a performance or a results the same way you successfully bake a cake and you will understand it. The formula

Results=A is flawed and misleading

At least two elements work together to produce a certain performance or result or to achieve a certain goal, not one factor like courage, or vision, or purpose or persistence.

It is not even an A + B thing but an A X B affair. For example;

2.??Most of these “advisors” also concentrate of telling people in vague terms such as have this, be this and do this. This may be even true but it does help much because most people get stuck not in the knowwhat but the knowhow. People want to know how to solve their problems or achieve their goal. How means the process and the means and not just the what to have or what to do. Just telling a person to do this and to do that and to have that without suggest also how the person can have this, do that is not provide a complete solution. You cannot tell a person. “To succeed, you must have courage.” The person can know it but how does a person who lacks courage then become courageous? How do you expect a coward to know how to have courage? This is the same as merely telling a person that to succeed you must have confidence. It is useless to the person you are advising if the person does not even know what confidence is and how to have it in the first place. But we hear these things all the time from many motivational speakers, mentors, coach and some very successful people in different areas of life trying to help others achieve success. ?

People Want Complete Solutions and Results Not Just General Ideas and Raw (often Academic) Knowledge

Many people in the help industry still operate academically and think the people who come to them just want general knowledge and information. Many of them work with these people who need help in a teacher student modus operandi where they see themselves more or less the same way teachers see themselves in a formal academic setting. They therefore operate like teachers and think their job is to pump more knowledge and information into their help seekers. Many actually simply pluck knowledge from books and website and transmit it as it to their students in some cases in brazenly fraudulent fashion in that they do not disclose to the people they are helping that is not their knowledge or ideas they are teaching them but someone’s else ideas. This approach leads to mediocrity and poor results because in the real world people are much less interested in acquiring more knowledge or half-baked ideas and solutions that do not address their problems or helping them achieve their goals.

Many helpers do very badly in this area because they continue providing raw, abstract often general knowledge and information not adapted or configured to solve the problems the mentees, coaches, trainees or students face in relation to their specific situation. To regurgitate “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” to an individual or a group and a team and not helping out with how the individual can apply it and develop the habits is not useful at all because you can as well just tell the person to go a buy the book and read it for herself.

Advice To Coaches, Advisors, Mentors, Person Developers, Educators, Teachers, Trainers, Motivational, Instructors, Facilitators, Speakers and Strategists.

If you are one of the above helping occupations or professions, it will pay you greatly to revisit what you are doing and how you are doing it.

1.??You must develop absolute clarity of substance of your occupation, for example, developing a very clear understanding of

1.??What is coaching?

2.??What are the key results areas of a coach?

3.??What is the difference between coaching, mentoring, teaching and training and developing a person?

4.??What is involved in coaching?

5.??What do I need to be a real and effective coach?

2.??Second you must also understand that coaching can be an occupation or full time job on its own or it can be a role within another profession or occupation. A manager can also assume the role of a coach, or mentor or teacher or trainer or advisor.

3.??You must also know what sort qualifications makes one a coach, or mentor, or teacher, or trainer or educator or person developer. This includes specific skills and qualities if any.

4.??There is the age myth where many people think that your mentor must be older than you. Wrong. Mentorship has nothing to do with age. An older person can have a younger mentor.

5.??There is myth that as a coach you must have played the game in which you coach. Wrong! To be a competent you just need coaching skills and abilities with or without having played the game in which you are coaching. Many brilliant people in a game cannot coach effectively in that area while some people without any playing experience in a field excel in coaching in those areas and outcompete many. Listen, there is a big difference between coaching, training, teaching and mentorship.

The Bottom Line

The core message today is;

1.??Results and success are not produced by one ingredient like courage, vision or persistent. Telling people that to succeed or achieve a goal or solve problem they need this one thing or ingredient is flawed and even misleading and in some cases harmful.

2.??Success and achieving a goal is like baking a cake; it needs more than one ingredient, they need many ingredients of certain qualities and amounts, a process or mythology and certain defined conditions and parameters. Just mentioning some or even all of the ingredients minus everything else needed to successfully bake the cake won’t help someone much especially if the someone has never heard cakes and has not any other information about baking cakes.

3.??Telling a pace what the person must be and have and do without specifying how the person can be, how she can have and how she can do is almost useless unless the person already knows the how tos or can quickly and effortlessly figure out the how. Anyone can tell people the what to, but few can tell people the how to. People can also easily know the what to be, what to have and what do but few can easily know the how to.

Feedback [email protected] ???????+263-77-444-74-38

?Simon Bere, 2022