Part One: Anatomy of a Coach-CEO Relationship
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”Ernest Hemingway
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?Having a coach, or in my case, coaches, early in my career made a significant and positive difference in my life. And, mea culpa, I realize now that I could have achieved transformative growth if I had moved beyond my personal comfort zone and sought out a specific type of coach.
?Often, we all make the same mistakes. And the next generation makes the same ones and so on. As consulting evolved for me, I found myself spending as much of my time coaching and mentoring others as I did solving problems for them. In many cases it’s been about getting people through tough times and being an advisor and sounding board. And while I am a longtime “doer,” I find the most passion and joy in coaching others to success.
?For example, I had a client who was a young executive in their mid-40s who was asked to start a business from scratch by their employer, without a road map. The level of stress this was causing was palpable. I had a long-established consulting relationship with the company. In what turned out to be my first paid coaching assignment, the client asked if I would accept an assignment to coach the executive.
?I loved every minute of it.
?And to this day, they are my single biggest advocate and referral source. The executive got the company up and they operated it successfully in a minimum amount of time and with a minimum of mistakes. They had great fun and great success doing it. They grew tremendously in the process. And I know I found great joy in sharing my experiences, approaches, and a road map on how to avoid the landmines. They were simply amazing!
?Among the most interesting and consistent comments from my clients is that they hear the sound of my voice and our conversations in their heads as they go through their daily processes. In other words, our processes becomes their processes. And they have become processes they employ with their teams. Remarkable!
?Working with a coaching has myriad benefits: a much-needed ego check, a nudge to leap forward, a seasoned resource as a sounding board, help expanding their network. A coach can give you both the tools and perspective you need to go from point A to point B successfully.??
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?I am deeply passionate about coaching because I see the profound difference it has made in my own life and in the lives of people I coach.
?I have one client that has a successful entrepreneurial operation and retained me as a coach to get them over some immediate “hump.” Initially, we worked to get practical processes in place to eliminate pain points. We then quickly moved from tactical to strategic. When we began our coaching journey, the client was a reasonably financially successful person who was miserable on nearly every level, carrying a ton of stress every day to get it “right.” We now meet weekly to discuss strategy and tactics, challenge each other through dialog and exercises, role play key relationships and future events, bounce ideas, etc. They are abundantly joyful in their personal and professional life. They have created a business that is 3 or 4 times larger with a fraction of the stress and burden. And they will likely double in size again in the next 24 months. They are amazing. For me, to the degree I played some small part in that, it is awesome! It is hard to put into words, but as an experience I appreciate their success enormously.
As always, thanks for your engagement and for your thoughtfulness in reading along!
Ken Lund?
619-916-1171?
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