Why do you need a business coach?
Business coaches lighten the load for business owners. They provide a fresh pair of eyes and ears to help you cut through the clutter of day-to-day operations and plot your most promising path forward. When you work with a business coach, you’re encouraged to clarify your most meaningful results, sense-check your ideas, troubleshoot problems and turn plans into action. Last but not least, when times are tough, it’s invaluable to have an expert in your corner who backs you when you do not and gently encourages you to keep moving towards your full potential.
Let’s take a closer look at the key benefits of working with a business coach.
A business coach helps you clarify your most meaningful results
Every action you take consumes valuable time, energy and money. As such, it’s critical that you clarify what matters most to you from the outset. Clarity helps you to:
communicate your vision to internal and external stakeholders
track your progress against short, medium and long term goals
stay true to your values while retaining strategic and tactical flexibility
protect yourself from the risk of working on the wrong thing.
Your business coach will provide you with a safe space to define your most meaningful results so that you can invest your time, energy and money in the areas that will bring you the greatest growth and fulfilment.
A business coach helps you sense-check your ideas
Every business starts with an idea, but not all ideas are created equal. Given the energy required to bring your idea to life, it’s worth double-checking that your dreams are grounded in reality. A business coach will help you challenge the assumptions underlying your ideas, prompt you to fact-check your beliefs and encourage you to consider alternatives that might better meet your objectives. When sense-checking requires you to venture out of your comfort zone, your coach will help you plan how to approach it in a way that feels manageable to you.
A business coach helps you troubleshoot problems
For every two steps forward in business, there’s one step back. Your business coach will help you rise to these challenges quickly so that ‘back steps’ don’t multiply. This involves providing you with space to talk through your problems along with feedback and tools to help you:
untangle complex decisions
resolve conflict and other communication challenges
address deficits in motivation or skill
overcome performance setbacks
resolve the tension between personal values and professional expectations.
A business coach helps you turn plans into action
Once you’ve defined your most meaningful results, it’s time to bring them to life. This requires you to lay plans that feel manageable to you. A business coach will help you craft strategic plans that guide your everyday choices as well as tactical plans that make stuff happen. (You can read more about strategy and tactics here.) As you co-create plans, you will have the opportunity to identify potential obstacles and troubleshoot them so that you can take confident actions in between coaching sessions. Your coach will help you craft plans that provide you with a clear line-of-sight to your goals and will help you hold yourself accountable to achieving them with an appropriate degree of flexibility.
A business coach believes in you
No matter how long you’ve been in business, there are times when you will feel lost. You’ll wonder if running your own business is worth the long hours, the loneliness and the uncertainty. In these moments of doubt and despair, it’s invaluable to have a business coach by your side. You can rely on your coach to listen deeply to you as grieve mistakes. You can rely on them to anchor you to the facts as your question your worth. And you can rely on them to help you extract important lessons to turn lemons into lemonade.
Getting started with a business coach
If reading this article has piqued your curiosity around working with a business coach, I’d be delighted to chat. A good place to start is to contemplate the gap between where you are now and where you want to get to. If you’d like to do this together, please get in touch.
For further reading, you might enjoy this article: What makes a business successful?