Why Coaching is Important for You and Your Business

Coaching is important for business leaders

Why Coaching is Important for You and Your Business

[Time to read: 8 minutes]

I sometimes get asked “Why is Coaching important for me and my Business?”

I coach Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs and for many of my clients ‘they’ are the business. Thus, the performance of their business is directly proportional to their personal performance.

It can often be the case that if the Business Leader is having a bad day – then so does the business.

So, you may ask yourself “Why do I need Business Coaching?”

In this blog I’ll introduce you to how coaching could help you to create more success for you and your business by helping you develop three key areas:

  • Confidence
  • Resourcefulness
  • Stress Management

So, let’s jump right in!

Feel free to watch the video or read below:

Confidence

It can be surprising to some that many Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs struggle with confidence. Well, not all leaders are extroverts, outgoing and confident.

In-fact in Bonnie Monych’s article on the Insperity website, she reveals “The Surprising Reasons Why Introverts Make Exceptional Leaders”

Being self-confident is trusting yourself and trusting in your abilities. Here are some examples of how coaching could help you to build your self-confidence:

1. Improving Presentation Skills

Most leaders are not trained speakers and are not used to speaking to a room full of people. For many, presenting to people can create anxiety and stress. Presenting whilst anxious can affect how well you communicate with the audience and can reduce the impact of your presentation. Your coach could help you to practice different presentation techniques and prepare for your up and coming presentation so that you become more confident at presenting.

2. Increasing Self-awareness

Having more clarity on how we see ourselves can help us to become more confident: Capturing our thoughts and questioning them can help reveal and change thought patterns that do not support us. Looking at ourselves from a different perspective can also help us to learn more about ourselves and apply that learning to improve how we communicate with other people. One of the aims of coaching is to help people create more awareness.

3. Creating Better Relationships

As the saying goes “People Buy from People”. Learning how to nurture customer relationships to build rapport and trust is key to ensuring long lasting, loyal customers. Coaching can help you to become more confident in creating better relationships with your customers, your staff, your suppliers, and your business partners.

4. Leveraging Your Existing Strengths

We all have strengths. Many people don’t know what their strengths are – in-fact it can be other people that notice their strengths first. Your coach can help you to identify your strengths and help you to learn how to utilize them more effectively so that you can make a bigger impact in your Business and Life.

Resourcefulness

The dictionary describes resourcefulness as “the ability to deal skillfully and promptly with new situations, difficulties, etc.”. Resourcefulness is a key differentiator between a good leader and a great leader. The ability to think clearly and act skillfully, can boost your personal performance as well as the performance of the business.

Being more resourceful can also help you to break through barriers that have been holding you back.

Here are ways that Coaching could help you to become more Resourceful:

1. Decision Making

Your coach can help you to break down the process of decision making and improve your evaluation of the options available. This can help improve decision making and can help build resourcefulness.

2. Creating Clarity with Goals and Actions

Your coach can help you to create more clarity with your goals, by helping you to define your goals with clear action steps. The practice of goal setting can also improve resourcefulness.

3. Developing a Clear Strategy

Every business needs a strategy. It’s difficult to get where you want to get to in Business without one. If your coach helps you to improve decision making and goal setting – then these two skills will help you to define a clear strategy.

4. Improving Productivity

Are you working too hard? Many Business Leaders do. Working too hard is counter-productive. It can create fatigue which in-turn and can affect decision making. Your coach will be able to help you identify the most important tasks that you should work on and brain-storm ways to help you to use your time more effectively. This can help you to be more resourceful.

Stress Management

High levels of stress can show up in different ways for different people. For example: Some people lose their temper, some withdraw themselves and some make bad decisions. One thing is for sure high stress can impact negatively on personal performance as well as the performance of the business.

The ability to manage stress will serve you well as most Business Leaders will experience highly stressful situations from time to time.

Coaching can help you manage stress more effectively in the following ways:

1. Identifying Stress ‘Triggers’

Coaching can help you to identify the ‘triggers’ that can cause you to feel high stress. Being more aware of your stress triggers is one of the first steps to help with stress management.

2. Step Back From The ‘Drama’

My clients comment that sometimes they arrive at a coaching session, stressed and overwhelmed about a ‘calamity’ that’s going on with their business or in their life – but they leave the session with energy – feeling refreshed. Coaching sessions give you an opportunity to step back from the ‘drama’ which means you’ll be able to look at it from a different perspective; feel less stress and leave the sessions feeling more resourceful.

3. Stress Management Techniques

Coaching can help you to explore stress management techniques and practice using them so that you’ll be better equipped to handle stressful situations in the future.

Feel free to download my FREE eBook “The Stress Management Guide for Business Leaders”. This guide will introduce you to….

‘The 7 Steps to a healthier, happier business-life’ which will help you boost your well-being.

The Stress Management Guide For Business Leaders

You’ll learn strategies to help you to manage high stress so that you’ll feel more resourceful and confident to run your business and manage stressful situations in the future.

Conclusion

In this blog we’ve learned how Coaching can help Business Leaders to develop Self-Confidence, Resourcefulness and Manage Stress.

The combination of these three areas can help the Business Leader to improve their performance as well as the performance of their Business.

Being more self-confident, resourceful, and having the ability to manage stress can improve leadership in many ways, including:

  • Communicating more effectively
  • Creating better relationships
  • Leveraging your strengths
  • Becoming a better decision maker
  • Creating clarity in your Strategy, Goals, and Actions
  • Improving personal productivity
  • Being better equipped to handle difficult situations that may show up

I believe that mastering these three areas makes the difference between a good leader and a great leader.

Hopefully, you can see the importance of Coaching and how it could help you to create more success in your Business and Life.

I hope you enjoyed reading this. If you did, please comment and share.

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Top 9 ways that Coaching helps Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs

Top 9 ways that Coaching helps Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs

Coaching for Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs

[Time to read: 8 minutes]

Coaching…Coaching…Coaching

These days the word ‘Coaching’ is used in virtually every market, and this word is sometimes overused!

So, what is coaching and how can coaching help Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs?

In this article I’m going to provide an introduction into coaching.

I’ll walk you through the top 9 ways that Coaching helps Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs.

I’ll also share some recommendations on how to select a coach.

Let’s get started!

Feel free to watch the video or read below:

What is Coaching for Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs?

There are many different forms of coaching available: Life Coaching, Business Coaching, Executive Coaching, Sports Coaching, Wellbeing Coaching…and many more!

In general terms Coaching is a solution for growing and developing people.

It’s a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires the coaching client to develop their personal and professional potential. It facilitates their growth.

Coaching for Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs can help them to develop their own performance. It is also used to help them develop the performance of their business.

Coaching is not mentoring. A Mentor is someone with a specific set of skills or knowledge that passes this information on to their client.

Sir John Whitmore sums up coaching, succinctly:

“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.”

Sir John Whitmore, in Coaching for Performance

It can be tough at the top!

Being a Business Leader and Entrepreneur can be exciting and incredibly rewarding. However, it can also be ‘lonely at the top’. Many leaders don’t have anyone they can turn to for support. They are expected to have all the answers and always know the next step to take with their business.

Many leaders are also under intense pressure and experience high levels of stress.

Coaching is helping the coaching client to think differently. For the purpose of this article we will assume that the coaching client is a Business Leader or an Entrepreneur.

It’s about leveraging their strengths to overcome ‘blind-spots’; helping them to create a new perspective on the situations they see in their Business or Life.

Coaching is helping the coaching client learn about their strengths and how to better apply them. It helps the client learn about their behaviours. Coaching helps them to create new insights, new perspectives, and new actions to move forward.

It’s about taking ‘high-performers’ and helping them to improve their performance.

Top 9 ways that Coaching helps Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs

If you’re considering coaching, how could it help you? 

Here are 9 ways that my clients have commented that coaching has helped them:

Time to Think

It’s rare in business today to have time to think without any interruptions. In the coaching sessions there’s no phone to answer and no emails to respond to. This means you’ll have time to clear your head, see your priorities clearly and think about what you want for you and your business.

Time to Think

Manage Stress

My clients often comment that they arrive at the coaching sessions, stressed, and overwhelmed about a ‘calamity’ that’s going on with their business or in their life – but they leave the sessions with energy – feeling refreshed.

The coaching sessions give you an opportunity to step back from the ‘drama’ which means you’ll be able to look at it from a different perspective; feel less stress and leave the sessions feeling more resourceful.

Stress Management

Confidential conversations

Many of my clients don’t have anyone that they can talk to confidentially about the challenges that they face in their business or the ideas they have for the future.

Unless you’re working with an ‘Internal Coach’ employed by the business, Coaches are typically independent to your business – which can be a bonus, as the coach can help provide a different perspective on your situation.

In either case the ‘Coaching Programme’ is usually covered by a coaching agreement which includes a confidentiality clause. In my case, confidentiality underpins everything I do. I also subscribe to the International Coach Federation (ICF) Code of Ethics.

Extracting Your Ideas

One of my clients mentioned that one of the main benefits of coaching was the opportunity to extract all the ideas in his head. Which meant that he could ‘see’ them and then figure out what to do with them!

Problem Solving

The coaching sessions are often used to help resolve a business or life-related problem.

The coach will help you to explore problems that you face and look for options to resolve them. Coaching helps you to become more resourceful. This means you’ll better equipped to handle other problems that may show up in the future.

Eliminating Limiting Beliefs

Many business leaders and Entrepreneurs (at times) struggle with limiting assumptions and limiting beliefs that prevent them from making decisions; moving forward and resolving the challenges that they face. For example, some leaders develop a limiting belief pattern where they say to themselves “I always mess this up” or “I just can’t do it” or “I’ll never make it in business”.

Limiting beliefs restrict the actions that you are prepared to take, which in turn affects the results you’ll get. The limited results that you see re-enforce the limiting belief and then the cycle repeats again and again.

The coaching sessions can help you to break-free of this cycle by challenging your limiting assumptions and limiting beliefs so that you can make more informed choices and decisions and break-through what’s been holding you back in your business and life.

Developing Strategy & Direction

The coaching sessions can be used to help you to create a strategy and direction for you and your business.

With your coach you’ll be able to focus on the desired outcomes you want for your business and you’ll ‘brain-storm’ solutions to achieve them.

The coach will help you to clarify goals and actions so that you’ll be able to create and implement a strategy to take you in the direction that you want to go.

Your Sounding Board

The Coach is on your side. Being your ‘sounding board’ means that the coach will ‘test’ and challenge your ideas and any limiting beliefs that show up! The coach is like your ‘ideas’ sparring partner!

Sounding Board

Developing Leadership

This last one sums up all the previous ways that coaching can help you and brings us back to one of the key-aims of coaching that I described earlier:

“Coaching is a solution for growing and developing people.”

In the case of the Business Leader and Entrepreneur, coaching helps them develop their Leadership – not just in their Business, but Leadership in their Life as well. Which is why coaching is so important for Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs.

In my coaching practice, I focus on helping Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs develop their Leadership by helping them to become more resourceful, confident, and capable leaders.

This ultimately helps them to create more success in their Business and Life.

Leadership

Should you try coaching?

Well, only you can answer that question! Hopefully this article has answered the questions you had and has given you a clearer understanding of what coaching is.

Each of my clients tends to have something unique about what brings them to coaching – a specific result that they want to achieve. However, one thing that is common with all my clients is their desire for change.

Most have hit a ‘threshold’, where they’ve ‘had enough’ about their situation or something that’s going on with their business or life.

If coaching is something you would like to try, I suggest searching for a few coaches initially, and check-out their profile, background, accreditations, testimonials and perhaps most importantly of all – ask yourself “Does this coach resonate with me?”.

Conclusion

So, in summary we have learned that one of the core-aims of coaching is to help people to grow and develop.

We’ve learnt that Coaching is different to Mentoring.

I’ve shared 9 ways that coaching can help Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs:

  • Time to Think
  • Managing Stress
  • Confidential Conversations
  • Extracting Your Ideas
  • Problem Solving
  • Eliminating Limiting Beliefs
  • Developing Strategy & Direction
  • Your Sounding Board
  • Developing Leadership

And I’ve also provided some recommendations on how to select a coach.

One thing I want to leave you with is that the coaching experience is unique for each coaching client. Some of my Clients comment on other ways in which coaching helps them.

The success of the coaching sessions is not just dependent on the coach – it is just as dependent on the client, as what the client gets out of coaching session, is really down to what they put in!

Coaching can also be an uncomfortable experience for some, as it often requires them to go out of their comfort zone for them to grow and develop.

But if the coaching client is committed to the coaching process, the rewards can be unlimited!

I hope you enjoyed reading this article if you did please comment and share!

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Interested to see how Coaching could help you and your business?

Book a free Coaching Consultation with me, by clicking the button below:

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