Who Helps the Helpers?
Written by Deb Dorchak - August 3, 2011 0 Comments
Everyone needs help at some point or another. Sometimes it’s big help, like when you’re hit with a life altering event or crisis, and other times, it’s small help, like when you’re stuck and need a bit of direction.
There’s self-help, group-help, financial help, mental help…all kinds of help for every possible situation you can imagine.
When you need help, where do you go? To see an expert, right? You go to someone who, hopefully, knows more about the subject than you do or someone who has gone through the same experience and can guide you through the situation. This could be a teacher, a doctor, or even a plumber. Even you qualify as an expert when your friends and family come to you for guidance.
But where do the experts go when they need help? You, as a business owner, have people who rely on you for your expert advice. This is why you have your particular business to begin with. You provide a service for others who aren’t capable of doing what you do. What happens when you get stuck, or reach a point where you’ve gone as far as you can go, but don’t know where to begin to get to the next level? You know you have to grow. You know you’ve reached a plateau. How can you break through it?
Send In The Coaches!
At one time, having a personal coach or mentor may have been viewed as a luxury for the rich. For a while the buzz was, “Oh, I have my mentor helping me with this or that.” Mentor? Really? Who needs someone to tell them how to live? Before we knew it, the market was flooded with all kinds of mentors and life coaches. Everyone was doing it.
But that’s the way of things on the web. Someone gets a bright idea and before you know it, everyone and their mother is doing it. Once the initial rush dies down, you can actually start to see some legitimacy blooming from the scorched ground. At first this whole coaching phenomenon looked like a case of “those who can’t do, teach.”, but now I’m seeing more and more coaches who have very real experience to share.
Coaches today encompass a great many topics. The common denominator among all of them is they have a specific story to tell. Many of them never thought they’d become coaches either. The demand from the people who heard their story and could relate to it put these coaches in a position to teach. Those in similar situations wanted to now how to lift themselves up and better themselves too.
Who Uses Coaches and Why?
There are coaches for just about anything and the people who hire coaches are just as varied.
You could say coaches are teachers without formal classrooms. They are the Helpers to the Helpers out there. Even Wendi and I have a coach we turn to for advice. We had reached a point in the growth of our business where we needed some guidance for the next level. Rather than muddle through on sheer trial and error, we turned to someone who had been there/done that to guide us through.
By asking for help ourselves, we learned how we could better serve our clients.
Using a coach is no different than taking formal classes. The coach, if they’re doing their job right, will help you see the various ways you can make improvement, whether that’s in business, or in life. A good coach won’t claim to change your life. A good coach will help you see how to change your life. The coach offers you the tools to do what you need to do and it’s up to you to use those tools and make the changes.
And isn’t that what real help is all about? Doing the work for someone or giving them a hand out won’t help. Teaching them how to empower themselves will go much farther with more spectacular results. There is nothing more satisfying for us when we see one of our own clients take flight. Sometimes it’s a small accomplishment like learning how to manage WordPress for themselves, and other times it’s a much larger leap into a thriving new business.
Is Coaching For You?
Coaching isn’t for everyone. You have to be ready for it. It’s a commitment, one in which you have to do a lot of hard work to get to where you want to be. Like I said, it’s no different than taking a formal class at college or night school. You will have assignments and tasks. Your coach will hold you accountable for doing these things. That’s the whole point. You do these exercises and projects to break old habits and foster new ones. Letting go of your old ways isn’t easy either. Nor is stepping outside your comfort zone.
Believe me, a good coach will keep pushing you out of that snuggly-warm zone each and every time. And in the end? You will thank them for it. Just ask any client of ours who has worked with Wendi. She’s a tough taskmistress, but boy-oh-boy does she get results!
The best part is watching the transformation of each individual. We can’t begin to tell you how beautiful it is to see the changes and how amazed and surprised each person is when they see what they’re capable of.
If you’re ready to make some serious changes and move up to the next level of business or living, coaching may just be the thing you need to get started.
And if you are? Give us a call. We’d love to help.
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