If You Want To Be Good at Something, Take a Course. If You Want To Be Great, Hire a Coach!

My Journey into Life Coaching

I had been in business for over 20 years and in corporate for 10 years. When I reached the limits of my knowledge in an ever-changing business and professional landscape, I turned to books, audios and videos.

These tools had a significant impact on improving my knowledge, but it didn’t give me the necessary wisdom to break free of the limits imposed in my mind.

I couldn’t begin to understand my limits from within the framework I had built about who I was and what I was. I , didn’t know this then but I know now – it requires someone outside of your social circle. An independent third-party, if you will.

This is where a life coach made the largest impact on my life. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the necessary knowledge “out there”, it was that I lacked knowledge about myself and what was really going on “in here”.

Having someone who went through a similar life journey as mine, proved useful beyond my expectations. Instead of understanding what was lacking with my business model, I began to understand why I was at this point in my life. From here my business direction and career objectives fit into place very neatly.

Once I was given the tools on how to reflect into my past and understand myself at a deeper level, I realised that what I was current doing, was not really taking me where I truly wanted to be.

This led me to change course and set sail in the direction I was always meant to be heading –

To inspire, inform, educate and communicate with people, helping them become the best versions of themselves. The closest description of an industry-recognized title was a LIFE COACH.

I’ve never looked back since.

Little did I know - I was joining the fastest growing industry today.

Life coaches are in high demand as the business world moves away from Intellectual Intelligence to Emotional Intelligence.

Pioneers in this field such as Tony Robbins, Joe Dispenza, Wayne Dyer, Simon Sinek and others have made a positive impact on this industry and the results from implementing their teachings speak for themselves.

I'm so excited about training future coaches to perfect the craft of being an effective listener, observer and sounding board - the key to becoming a great coach is:

to remove every trace of yourself and your judgement and become truly present to the client.

You have to become the client and see things from their perspective.

Thats the only time you can begin to help them uncover their strengths and guide them to their purpose.

Ted Talk by Atul Gawande - Want to be great at Something - Get a Coach

Watch Short Version of talk below:

I have taken the most important points and highlighted them below. The video is a shorter version of the full talk which can be downloaded here:

How do professionals get better at what they do? How do they get great?

There are two views about this.

One is the traditional pedagogical view. That is that you go to school, you study, you practice, you learn, you graduate, and then you go out into the world and you make your way on your own.

A professional is someone who is capable of managing their own improvement. That is the approach that virtually all professionals have learned by. That's how doctors learn, that's how lawyers do, scientists ... musicians.

And the thing is, it works.

Consider for example legendary Juilliard violin instructor Dorothy DeLay. She trained an amazing roster of violin virtuosos: Midori, Sarah Chang, Itzhak Perlman. Each of them came to her as young talents, and they worked with her over years.

What she worked on most, she said, was inculcating in them habits of thinking and of learning so that they could make their way in the world without her when they were done. 

Now, the contrasting view comes out of sports. And they say

"You are never done, everybody needs a coach."

Everyone. The greatest in the world needs a coach. 

So then which view is right?

I learned that coaching came into sports as a very American idea. In 1875, Harvard and Yale played one of the very first American-rules football games. Yale hired a head coach; Harvard did not. The results?

Over the next three decades, Harvard won just four times. Harvard hired a coach. 

Turns out there are numerous problems in making it on your own.

You don't recognize the issues that are standing in your way or if you do, you don't necessarily know how to fix them.

And the result is that somewhere along the way, you stop improving.

And I thought about that, and I realized that was exactly what had happened to me as a surgeon. 

I'd entered practice in 2003, and for the first several years, it was just this steady, upward improvement in my learning curve. I watched my complication rates drop from one year to the next.

And after about five years, they leveled out. And a few more years after that, I realized I wasn't getting any better anymore.

And I thought:

"Is this as good as I'm going to get?" 

So I thought a little more and I said ...

"OK, I'll try a coach."

So I asked a former professor of mine who had retired, his name is Bob Osteen, and he agreed to come to my operating room and observe me. The case -- I remember that first case. It went beautifully.

I didn't think there would be anything much he'd have to say when we were done.

Instead, he had a whole page dense with notes. 

"Just small things," he said. 

But it's the small things that matter.

"Did you notice that the light had swung out of the wound during the case? You spent about half an hour just operating off the light from reflected surfaces."

"Another thing I noticed," he said, "Your elbow goes up in the air every once in a while.

That means you're not in full control. A surgeon's elbows should be down at their sides resting comfortably. So that means if you feel your elbow going in the air, you should get a different instrument, or just move your feet."

It was a whole other level of awareness.

And I had to think, you know, there was something fundamentally profound about this.

After two months of coaching, I felt myself getting better again. And after a year, I saw my complications drop down even further. It was painful. I didn't like being observed, and at times I didn't want to have to work on things.

I also felt there were periods where I would get worse before I got better. But it made me realize that the coaches were onto something profoundly important. 

He was describing what great coaches do, and what they do is they are your external eyes and ears, providing a more accurate picture of your reality.

They're recognizing the fundamentals. They're breaking your actions down and then helping you build them back up again.

The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach.

They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy.

They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it.

Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention.

Consider Maxwell Perkins, the great Scribner’s editor, who found, nurtured, and published such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. “Perkins has the intangible faculty of giving you confidence in yourself and the book you are writing,” one of his writers said in a New Yorker Profile from 1944.

“He never tells you what to do,”

another writer said.

“Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”

The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction. You graduate. You’re done. You can go the rest of the way yourself.

DeLay also taught them to try new and difficult things, to perform without fear. She expanded their sense of possibility. Perlman, disabled by polio, couldn’t play the violin standing, and DeLay was one of the few who were convinced that he could have a concert career. DeLay was, her biographer, observed,

"basically in the business of teaching her pupils how to think, and to trust their ability to do so effectively.” Musical expertise meant not needing to be coached.

He had a coach?

“I was very, very lucky,”

Perlman said. His wife, Toby, whom he’d known at Juilliard, was a concert-level violinist, and he’d relied on her for the past forty years.

“The great challenge in performing is listening to yourself,”

“Your physicality, the sensation that you have as you play the violin, interferes with your accuracy of listening.”

What violinists perceive is often quite different from what audiences perceive.

“My wife always says that I don’t really know how I play,”

he told me.

“She is an extra ear.”

She’d tell him if a passage was too fast or too tight or too mechanical—if there was something that needed fixing. Sometimes she has had to puzzle out what might be wrong, asking another expert to describe what she heard as he played.

Her ear provided external judgment.

“She is very tough, and that’s what I like about it,”

Perlman says. He doesn’t always trust his response when he listens to recordings of his performances. He might think something sounds awful, and then realize he was mistaken:

“There is a variation in the ability to listen, as well, I’ve found.”

If you want to be great, get a coach!

Rishad Ahmed is a certified Life Coach, Mentor and Master Coach with over 20 years of professional experience. Reach him at zencoach.co.za or on LinkedIn.

To discover your hidden potential and uncover your greatest strengths, let me help you find your purpose and guide you to becoming the Greatest Expression of Yourself.

If you would like to become a life coach and join the world's fastest growing industry, transforming lives and helping people become extra-ordinary, get in touch!

Full Ted Talk

I suggest you watch the full length video on Ted Talks here: