Your shelves are littered with books and CDs from business coaches. Your budget is stretched by attending seminars and conferences that promise to improve your business. Yet you're still at the same production level as you were a year ago. The reason? You might be a coaching addict.
In a 2007 posting, personal development blogger and coach Steve Pavlina wrote, "For the self-help junkie, the pursuit of personal development becomes a means of escape, at best a form of procrastination and at worst a serious addiction."
Pavlina isn't against trying to improve your life or your business. Personal development is his business. But he makes an important distinction:
"The intelligent pursuit of new growth experiences can do a lot of good for us, producing measurable results. But we need to be sure those positive, measurable results are indeed materializing. If we are truly growing, we'd better have something to show for it ... If you can't measure your growth in a tangible, objective manner, it's a virtual certainty you're wallowing in self-delusion."
Coaching is an excellent way to move your business forward. But being a successful "coachee" requires you to take full responsibility for your own thoughts and behavior - and ultimately for the outcomes those thoughts and behaviors have created in your life. Being coachable means you must have a willingness to learn and the ability to convert that knowledge into action. Once you've taken action, you need to measure your results.
If you find yourself chasing the bright shiny objects - new programs that come along promising bigger, better, faster and easier results - you may have a problem with commitment. Signing up for multiple programs and constantly trying to implement new ideas and practices - which may even conflict with one another - will make you frustrated, confused and exhausted. Instead, find one or two programs that really resonate with you and stick with them for at least a year. At the end of the year, measure your results. If you haven't moved forward, ask yourself if you truly followed through with actions based on the knowledge you acquired. You may know more - but have you done more?
If you followed through on the program by implementing what you learned, but you still did not achieve results, you selected the wrong program. So how do you find a coaching program that fits your needs?
- Ask your successful peers. In a survey of its advisors who produce $1 million or more, Securities America found that most have utilized a coaching program. Find out whether they feel the program was a good value - results achieved for time and money spent.
- Have a thorough discussion with the coach before you commit. What expectations do you have of the coach and the coach of you? How will the coaching be delivered - in person, by phone, on a teleconference? Is the coaching one-on-one, or does it include peer discussions and activities?
- Set measurable results. Together, you and your coach should discuss how you will measure your success in the program. That could mean hours away from work with your family, increased revenue, increased assets under management, additional advisors in your office or any number of things. The important factor is that they be measurable. "Work less, play more" is not a measurable goal.
- Keep the end in mind. The idea of a coaching program is to teach you to fish, not bring you fish. Your coach should have a process in place for wrapping up your program and releasing you to go it alone. Periodic check ups can be useful for ensuring you stay accountable and on track, but you should not be calling your coach every time you need to make a business decision, and your coach should be discouraging that kind of dependence.
- When you choose wisely, coaching programs can create dramatic results in your practice. So pick a program for 2009 and make the resolution to stick to it.
Kirk Hulett is senior vice president of strategy and practice management for Omaha, Neb.-based Securities America, an independent broker/dealer.
