How Hiring a Business Coach Can Improve Your Life, Career, and Company

“What do you?really?do as a coach?”

If you know me or if you’ve ever met me in person, I usually introduce myself as a brand psychologist, leadership coach, and marketing & business consultant. But what is the difference between a coach and a consultant?

As a certified executive coach and the creator of The 7-Step Story Process, I focus on how established and emerging leaders show up and live fully self-expressed - both in their personal and professional lives. Through my validated process clients step into their stories, unleash their potential, and reach success in new and dynamic ways. That includes helping clients gain clarity, generate energy, increase impact, improve or manage their influence, demonstrate courage, and find fulfillment.

The coaching process focuses on seven areas that help you improve not only your career but your personal life and your company's success as well.?

Making Sense of Where You’re At in Your Life

The first thing that coaching helps you do is to make sense of where you’re at in your life.?

What's working? What's not working? What brings you energy? What takes energy away? What do you really want? Who are you? What are your values??

What I often see are clients who, no matter their age or professional experience, struggle to come up with a coherent story of who they are and who they want to be. This can be at home, at work, in relationships, and beyond.

They're struggling to make sense of their lives.

When this occurs, there are three roads you can pick from:

• Self-study in personal development
• Therapy?
• Coaching?

A lot of how I show up for clients is simply asking them, especially at the beginning of our coaching relationship, how are you making sense of your life right now? And what does it all mean to you? And then I ask, how can we make this more meaningful??

Awareness Opening

How many of us feel fully aware in our daily lives? So many have lost awareness of how they feel or what they accomplish simply because they’ve become so busy and are rushing through every item on their to-do list.?

Often it takes one great conversation to open you up, slow you down and gain perspective. As a coach, I open the space for reflection.?

It’s in these moments that my clients have profound realizations or can simply see an experience or encounter with fresh eyes. That awareness also shifts something inside of them. It gives them permission to go from 100 mph to 25 mph. And while many of my clients claim they don’t have the time to slow down, the time we share together in our coaching sessions provides them a rest from the go-go-go hustle culture they may be operating in.?

Meaning-Making

Identifying the things that bring meaning or fulfillment to a person’s life is one of the greatest joys and benefits of the coaching process. What brings you joy? Satisfaction? Connection? Fulfillment??

People hustle and strive and work so hard and yet, at the end of their lives, often look back and realize they may have lost their way. What was it all for??

In the coaching process, I ask that from the start. What are you working so hard for? Creating meaning in the moment aligns leaders with their life’s work and avoids steering off path, which is so easily done today.

Goal-Setting?

When it comes to goals, many of us make them and most of us break them. That’s why, in the coaching process, we work together to identify your big goals and the actions we can take to meet those goals head-on.?

And while goals are very important, they must also align with your big vision, purpose, and everyday actions. If your not setting goals, then it’s harder to gain steam in all areas of your life.?

Attitude & Mindset Shifts?

A lot of my work centers around the attitude and mindset of my clients. Running a business can be very challenging. Founding a startup is often very stressful. Hiring, firing and training team members - not to mention whole departments - is part of the process when my clients want to grow and scale.?

And yet, they often shoulder the burden 100% on themselves. That’s why we gotta get their mind right. Between layoffs, recessions, pandemics, and other global struggles, I help leaders and CEOs get motivated, stay confident, and overcome those external challenges so that they can come back to their companies, teams and families centered, focused, and grounded in their mission and values.?

Everyone has bad days, that’s part of being human. What really matters is how we allow those bad days to influence our future goals and dreams. How do we let bad days hinder our possibilities and potential? As I always say, “We quit the day. We don’t quit the business.”?

Performance Monitoring & Tuning

If you’re running a company, your performance and that of your team are the center of what makes a successful business. In coaching, we look at how you’re doing. What worked? What hasn’t worked? What could you do better next time? And in each performance experience, we look together to see what can be improved and new ways of finding success if needed.?

There is no judgment in the performance monitoring process. It’s a space to be totally honest about what went wrong or right and to take those lessons forward.?

For my clients, it’s not just the business we discuss. Are you showing up for your family? Your friends? Are you rocking it at home and falling flat in your personal life? A well-rounded leader and human is a person who is finding connection with others, living into purpose, and living a life of joy - even when stressed or under pressure.?

Relationship Building

A lot of your meaning is in relationships - with family, partners, work partners, etc. Who do you get to be with others? What impact are you making on others, either positive or negative? Are there relationships that are struggling right now??

Our relationships define our impact. That’s why, in the coaching process, we develop a relationship-building framework to support the impact and direction of your life. Leaders don’t exist in a vacuum, or locked away in a tower by themselves. What often matters most is who you are with others.

Take your leadership skills to the next level

Increase productivity, creativity and a growth mindset with these daily leadership journal prompts.?Designed for ambitious entrepreneurs and aspiring leaders, this workbook breaks down the benefits of journaling and provides?5 daily prompts?you can use to succeed as a leader today.?Access it here.