Should you go for coaching?

A question may come in your mind, should you go for life coaching?

Is it really worth investing time and money?

These questions are very natural for everyone who are hearing, repeatedly, on a social media platform about a Life coach and Life coaching.

If we leave aside last 8 to 10 years of period, for a common man the term ‘coach’ and coaching was associated with sports field only. This is more due to very wide and detailed coverage of sports on electronic media.

Along with players people started recognizing the coach associated with the game.

World cup football is an event where people started admiring the club, players and the coach associated with the team. Even the playing clubs and sports body have stretched far beyond their length and breadth to search best coaches for their teams and who helps team to perform the best.

In sports, it is well accepted that even a star player also need coach to help him to perform well, consistently. Sports has disapproved the belief that only weak performer need coach.

A coach helps team to perform well and guide them to lift their performance game after game. But, the coach need not be always a better performer than his players. But the coach should have experience to perform reasonably well in the area or the field in which he is coaching.

Secondly, an outstanding performers need not be a coach or need not have the ability to coach others. They can be a role model or an inspirational figure, but may not be able to help others to improve in a specific area to become high performer or a start performer.

To put it in a proper way, coaches are specialists.

Like in the game of cricket, earlier days, there used be only one coach who used to coach the players on every aspect of the game. With the time game has changed, the game challenges have changed, the bar of performance has increased, he overall stake on the tournament have increased multifold, that is why nowadays we hear about fielding coach, bowling coach, fitness coach etc. for a single team. If the format of the game is changed, perhaps the selection of coaches would also change. Finally, it’s all boil down to specialists.

The same things holds good for business too. Although, we accept in sports, coaches are required to perform well, in business scenario we still feel it’s the weaker who needs coach.

Coaching is an investment in someone or group of people who have the potential to perform far better, than what they are currently doing. While, most of the managers and leaders recognize this aspects but not able to practice. There are number of reasons for this, not just managers or leaders at fault.

 

In some cases ‘coachees’ see the appointment of a coach for them is reflecting poorly on them. They would think that if they were perceived as a good performer, they wouldn’t need coaching.

If we extend coaching further to performance appraisal situation, in our present system, performance appraisal is how well an employee has performed in the recent past and not how much potential he has to become a star performer and high achiever. In this case coaching is very important to change the thought process.

Also, on the part of organization , in the present turbulent and volatile situation, it’s hard to make decision how much an organizations should invest in coaching as people may not stay longer or de-employed due to strategic acquisition or merger may take place, or overall business model may change.

Further, it is difficult to help people to achieve to their full potential at workplace, when outside the work place they are not managing their other life challenges well. Different   life challenges can occur at different phase of individual’s life journey. This challenges are required to be examined and evaluated separately, outside the career or work-life balance conflicts or trade-offs being sought for.

This is exactly where the comprehensive life coaching is required and will help. That is why Life coaching is very much needed as it goes much beyond helping to develop new way and new approach for work in line with one’s vision for life and acquire the necessary skills to negotiate all that stands in the way of realizing the life vision and achieving set life goals.