Picking best coach for your growth

By SERAPHINE RULIGIRWA-KAMARA
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Summary

• Coaching is very effective when structured to offer support to the participant in mapping action-plans, provide accountability on, and follow-through to as many desired outcomes as possible within an agreed time-period.
• It is also about acknowledgement, recognition and celebration of milestone achievements.
• Your coach is the advancement partner who not only hears the words that you verbalise, but more importantly the ones that you do not to gain an understanding of your world view.

It is the process of assessing prevailing thoughts and sentiments, observing behavioural and attitudinal patterns of an individual. It is done for the purpose of discerning any existing real or perceived challenges to pave the way for intentional, specific, and time-based goals. This is coaching.

Coaching is very effective when structured to offer support to the participant in mapping action-plans, provide accountability on, and follow-through to as many desired outcomes as possible within an agreed time-period. It is also about acknowledgement, recognition and celebration of milestone achievements.

Your coach is the advancement partner who not only hears the words that you verbalise, but more importantly the ones that you do not to gain an understanding of your world view. While appreciating your past is of import, it should ideally serve as no more than a reference point. The purpose of an achievement coach is after all, to move from history, live and savour the present with the aim of forging forward to a new and improved reality in the near, mid, and distant future.

Identifying your inhibiting thought patterns and their formation will be key if your coach is to help you to excel. To enable the success of this process, It is incumbent upon you to engage meaningfully.

It will serve you well to engage a coach with whom you can create an easy enough rapport to quickly get to a comfortable space with, in the partnership so you’re secure in the vulnerability that comes with opening up, to let your coach grasp a clear understanding of exactly where you are, your real or perceived obstacles, and how your attempts to overcome your obstacles have turn out so far. It is the best way to move from your former, and probably current place to your desired peak.

If you find that you are uncomfortable with this, it is possible that you have one of two scenarios playing out; the first is that you may be more guarded than is helpful for you, and the second is that you haven’t selected a coach who is a good fit for you.

The coach that you are going to enjoy positive outcomes working with is one who will approach you with the understanding that there is a positive intention behind every behaviour, and that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. The ability to identify and interpret this feedback is just one of the more common reasons that hinder clients from their goals.

You want to commit to working with, not for, because of, or against your oach. The coaching partnership has got to develop and progress to create a forward plan-of-action to anticipate challenges, buffer you against their effects and help you to achieve your burning desires.

Belief that professionals already have abundant resources within themselves is a good coach’s credo. Upon this foundational principle, your coach co-opts you to help in his/her, detective mission - to identify the strategies that are already successful in other contexts of your life and tease out the hidden obstacles that may be keeping you from achieving your goals. From here on, your coach will move to guide you to understand how to apply time-tested strategies of overcoming your identified real or perceived obstacles.

Sera@coachsera.com | @SRuligirwa