Are you Coachable?

You’re ready to take your health and fitness to the next level. AWESOME, congratulations! You decide you need some help and accountability, so you look into hiring a coach. Here’s what you need to consider…

Are you coachable? What does that even mean???? Well, let’s start with a few definitions….

As quoted by www.wikipedia.org, a “coach” is: “… a person involved in the direction, instruction and training of the operations of a sports team or of individuals. A coach may also be a teacher working with a student”.

A student as defined by Wikipedia is “..anyone who is learning”.

Learning can further be defined as “….the act of acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing, existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans”.

Wow. So us as humans, have the ability to LEARN! Crazy concept hey? You DON’T have to stay where you are….you CAN learn new skills. But are you ready? No, are you REALLY ready?

Coaching is a relationship, plain and simple. The foundation of it is communication as its a 2 way street….after gathering information, the coach provides the tools, the client applies (or doesn’t) the tools, feedback is given to the coach, the tools are re-evaluated and so on. If we are truly coachable, we need to be prepared to be wrong….and be OK with that! We are being evaluated by someone else and at times, what we are doing may need to be corrected. Now if you actually act upon and are open to those corrections….then congratulations, you ARE coachable!

Let’s talk about feedback for a second, the crucial part of communication. It’s imperative to the outcome of your actions. With no feedback or very limited information given, how do we know what is or isn’t working? How do we identify where your challenges are and develop skills to overcome them? How do WE, as coaches, help YOU the client become better? We can’t. Now how you apply that feedback is entirely up to you: “…listening to feedback does not mean you actually hear it, and hearing it does not mean you actually apply it to get better.” ~Doug Lemov, Practice Perfect

Let’s say someone walks up to you with 3 bricks and tells you that these are the bricks they are building their house out of. Good for you, right? Now they ask you “what will my house look like? How long will it take to build? Can I build a swimming pool too?” Ummmm…. HOW THE HECK WOULD I KNOW?????

I’ve worked with a lot of clients over the span of my career….some successful, some not (depending how you define success). The common denominator in all of it is communication between myself, the coach, and the client. Good, bad or ugly, we want and NEED to know it all! Achieving a specific goal is never linear, there are going to be successes and road blocks along the way….if you aren’t communicating those things to your coach, how will we know? How will we HELP YOU if we are unaware of what’s really going on? Honesty and being OK with whatever information you are passing on is important….not everything you tell your coach will be a victory. But guess what? We don’t expect that! We’re all human beings and NO ONE is perfect! You telling us what you are struggling with?? GUESS WHAT? That HELPS us be better coaches! Which makes YOUR results that much closer!!!

Some of the most successful clients I’ve had are the ones that fall repeatedly over and over…but the keep getting back up, learning a few new skills and continuing ahead. Every time a client “fails”, I ask what they learned. Then together (together being the key word here) we figure out a way to turn that “failure” into a future success. It may not be a fast uphill climb, but the climb does happen and they are a stronger, wiser person for it.

If a client comes to me and they are really struggling with social situations and being prepared, the first thing I will ask is “are you there for the FOOD or the SITUATION?”. Yes, social situations can be very challenging when you are on some kind of meal plan. However, it’s not impossible to stay the course….take your food with you, be prepared ahead of time. If that makes you uncomfortable, make wise choices and be OK with that. Most importantly, if you make not the best food choices, own it. Be honest and communicate that with your coach. It may or may not set you back, but if it does and we don’t know….how can we help YOU?

Bottom line is this: what you put in is what you get out of your experience working with a coach. You may have the best coach in the world with best meal plan and training program…but if you aren’t fully disclosing all the information to your coach, applying the tools and learning to better yourself, who are you really helping? At the end of it, you are only doing a disservice to yourself. Accept responsibility on your end for your actions and let us do the same. A coach is simply that…someone to guide you along the way.