Is Coaching Right for You? How a Coach Can Help You Shift Your Work--and Life.

A good coach can change how you work. A great coach can change your life.

Written by Allison Schultz

People come to coaching for a wide variety of reasons, both professional and personal. Mostly, they feel a stagnancy, a stuckness perhaps, and a big desire for something to be different. Often, it’s a longing or a knowing in their bones.

Yet, navigating from point A to point B is a whole different ball game. If we knew how to make the change we’d like to see, we’d be doing that already. Coaching helps us see where and how we get stuck, and what holds us back from what we’d really like.?

A coach helps you see your unconscious patterns, something that is harder for us to catch by ourselves. Yet, by reflection and gaining self-awareness, we can learn about those patterns and learn how to make other choices on the menu of life. Perhaps, we begin to reach for things we didn’t believe were possible. In this way, a good coach helps you unlock who you are and who you always may have known you could be.

Coaching is applicable in many different situations in life and work, such as:

• During big transitions at work or in significant relationships.?
• Needing a neutral third party or sounding board to talk things through.?
• When we’re in burnout or fatigue.
• When we’re out of alignment with our role, or in our organization.
• When we want to level up our leadership or how we do life.
• Working toward or through a transformation, like stepping into a new position, navigating a transition, or discovering a new way to be in the world.?
• Leading and working in difficult places.
• Cultivating a grounded presence in the most challenging of situations.
• Learning how to work with your body-knowing or intuition.

To make lasting changes in our lives, we need to look within ourselves and understand our inner landscape.

Coaching allows us to gain self-awareness and new tools to navigate life with more choice. When we can make choices from a better understanding of ourselves, the changes are “sticky” as my colleague Dan Putt notes in this episode of the Reboot Podcast. From those sticky choices and ways of being, we gain positive momentum toward what it is that we want.?

As my colleague Chrystal Bell, ACC notes about a big life transition in her podcast conversation with Mike Trugman, "Something in me wanted a challenge, and I wanted to level up, yet my body knew before my mind did. Before I could articulate the words, I had a sense that I needed something more because something felt out of alignment. It felt really good to trust that sense."

(Good coaching will involve the body versus simply processing only verbally. For more on how this is crucial to lasting change, read Chrystal Bell’s post The Body-mind: Working Somatically for Lasting Change.)

So often, this is where folks are when they reach out to us for coaching. They are at this precipice of knowing that they want something to be different, but not necessarily knowing what that is in full articulation. The coaching container allows that nudge, that longing for change, to emerge and unfold.?

Prospective clients often ask us: What is it that determines the success of a coaching relationship? Who is a right fit for coaching? Who are the clients that you see the most change in or who do the best?

The answer most broadly is: a willingness to do the work required and a willingness to heed the longing that brings them to consider whether or not coaching might be a fit for them in the first place.

For more about Reboot Coaching, and what coaching is and isn’t, check out our Introduction to Coaching.

“For this world ahead we don't need more gurus.?

We need more translators of soul.?

The soul of the world is stirring.?

We are shedding old skins of oppression that constrict us collectively and personally.?

Catching the scent of freedom, like the fragrance of air just before rain.?

What is the soul of the world saying to you, dear one??

What is your soul saying?”

- Jaiya John