The best of the best in the world have life and business coaches. Not sure that you agree with that statement? Well, consider this – the best golfer in the world, Tiger Woods, has a coach. Michael Jordan, the best basketball player of all time, had a coach. The President of the United States Barack Obama has coaches and advisers in his life. Wayne Gretzky one of the best hockey players in the history of the game has a coach. Lance Armstrong – the winningest cyclist in the world – has a coach. Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Sir Richard Branson, and Tony Robbins, an impressive group of the most successful business minds in the world – all have coaches. These are not the only high performers that have coaches, however, because many of the top entertainers, musicians, performers, entrepreneurs, investors, and leaders on the planet also have coaches. The undeniable conclusion is that most successful people have life and business coaches.
What about you? Do you have a coach? If you are reading this article, I know you are the type of person that wants more out of life. You are driven and likely self-motivated. You have already achieved some level of success and some of you have already achieved a very high level of success. High performers, however, recognize the world and their business environments are always changing. They understand and embrace opportunities to learn new and better ways to what they do. Most importantly, they understand that the best and most efficient way to stay on top of their game is to have a coach or coaches in their lives that can help them perform at their highest levels.
Still many people question whether they really need a coach. Some believe that because they have already achieved a certain level of success, they don’t need a coach because they can continue to succeed without a coach. Others believe they can learn whatever they need to know and do whatever they need to on their own and without a coach. Some others believe they cannot afford the cost of hiring a coach.
One of the best ways to learn how to do anything is to learn from someone who has mastered doing what you want to do. Every personal development and high performance expert you consult will agree with this statement. There is a very simple reason why. It’s true and we all know it’s true! Nearly all of the highest performing people in the world have a coach and they always have been coached. Michael Jordon was coached by Dean Smith and Phil Jackson. Tiger Woods has several coaches. Payton Manning has a coach and so does every other successful professional athlete.
It’s not just the highest performing athletes that have coaches. Tony Robbins – one of the kings of personal development and an extremely knowledgeable and successful businessman has a coach. So does Bill Gates and several other very successful business people.
So if the world’s highest performers have coaches and we all know the coaches help them maintain a consistent level of high performance, why is it that most non-high performing people don’t have a coach? If you ask them if they want to improve their lives, they will tell you they do?” If you ask them if they think coaching would help them improve their lives, most will agree that it would, but still they resist coaching and come up with all sorts of excuses for not living the life of their dreams. Two of the most common excuses are they think that they can “do it on their own” or they are not willing to investment in themselves. In my opinion, this is a trap that many people fall into that holds them back from achieving massive success.
When people say: “I can’t afford it.” I often look at their current situation and say: “You can’t afford not to hire a coach!” Often when people say that they can’t afford something or don’t have the money, it’s not the money that’s stopping them. Instead, it’s the lack of value that they perceive from coaching. When you view your world from a perspective of scarcity, you tend to want to hold onto whatever you have out of fear that you may not get more. When you view the world from an abundant perspective, you invest in yourself and your business so that you can receive more of the great opportunities that the investment will make available to you.
Okay, so if you are not an athlete, what type of coach would you want? Well there are life coaches, high performance coaches, business coaches, relationship coaches and several others. A coach is not a psychiatrist or psychologist, although some coaches do have formal training in psychology. Generally, a coach will help you improve your personal and/or professional life by offering support and encouragement while making suggestions about new ways you can achieve your goals. A coach is a partnership as much as anything else. It is a support system with one goal in mind: improving the quality of your life.
The idea of a life, business and high performance coaching is nothing new, and below I offer you seven good reasons that you need a coach.
- Having A Life Coach or Business Coach Makes You More Accountable and You Produce Better Results.
How many times have you said to yourself you were going to do something, only to let weeks or perhaps months go by without getting it done? If we are honest, we would all admit to doing this. Helping you avoid this situation is one of the biggest things that a coach can help you with. A good coach will help you set goals and develop specific timelines for getting things accomplished. Once the goals and timelines are established, you become more accountable to follow through on whatever you’re procrastinating on or stopping yourself from doing. Unless we are very conscious and pay attention to our thoughts, we allow limiting beliefs to slip into our minds. Those limiting beliefs and patterns hold us back, prevent us from fulfilling our true potential and most often are not based on the truth. Having a coach there to push you beyond your limits and your beliefs about you thought was possible or impossible helps you break through those beliefs and achieve your dreams just like a personal physical training coach helps you break though your perceived physical limits. A good coach can help you examine your entire belief system and make changes where you have blocks so you can take your life to another level.
That’s not all a good coach can do. Most people reading this article are already smart and have achieved some level of success in their life. Generally that means you also already know what you need to do, but sometimes you still do not do what you know you need to do. A good coach is someone that gets you to do it, and do it now. Good coaches are all about taking massive action. No stories. No B.S. No excuses. Just take action and get results. Without a coach, you’re only accountable to yourself – and that’s the problem for many people. When you’re only accountable to yourself, unless you have a tremendous amount of self-discipline, you can and will make up with stories and excuses that you tell yourself and others for why you didn’t get something done. With a good coach, none of that stuff flies and instead you’re accountable to high performing human being, and that creates leverage which forces you to show up in your life, career and business at a higher level.
- Having a Life Coach or Business Coach Saves You Time and Gets You Faster Results.
Time is the most sacred and scarce resource that you have. Each of us has 24 hours in a day – Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have 24 hours in each of their days. Barack Obama and Jacqueline Mars have 24 hours in their days. You and I have 24 hours in our days. If your reading this article, you know how to make money and you can always make more money, but you can’t get more time. No matter how wealthy, influential, connected or successful you are, you cannot get any more than 24 hours per day. Just as importantly, you have a limited amount of time in a lifetime and until the end of your life none of us knows how much time will have in our life. This makes our time even more valuable because all the time we have for sure is the present moment we are living.
So if time is so limited and valuable, why do some people seem to be able to accomplish more in 24 hours of their valuable time than other can accomplish in a week? Often it is because people don’t think about the value of their time or because they don’t have a specific plan for what they will do with their time. Sometimes, it’s because we waste time or burn more time then necessary trying to figure out how to do something that we have never done before. If you moving out of tyour comfort zone and into uncharted territory, sometimes without evening knowing it you attempt to do things on our own and end up taking the long route and wasting time. Having a coach is like having a GPS system to guide you to your destination along the fastest and most efficient route. A coach can also save you from suffering a great deal of frustration that arises from struggling to find your way since a good coaching match for you is someone that has already accomplished the goals you seek to accomplish that can show you the best way to get from where you are to where you want to go.
How much time would you save if you have someone to guide you from start to finish? How much frustration, stress, and anxiety would you not have to go through because you already have a proven map? How much more enjoyable would the process be? This is what having a coach is about. They can give you the best directions because they’ve already been there before. They know the best practices, and they are there to serve you if you get lost or stuck and they will keep you moving in the right direction and at a good steady pace.
- Having A Business Coach Saves You Money.
When I started my first business at about age 22, I had no idea what I was doing. I had a friend that worked with me that I thought knew how to operate the business, but in reality I still had no clue. Because I did not have a clue what I was doing, I wound up losing a lot of money and becoming very frustrated. If I had only had someone on my team that really knew how to operate the business and more importantly who would teach me how to make money and not waste money in my business, my chances of succeeding would have grown exponentially. Some years later, when I connected with one of my first coaches, what a difference it made. Then instead of floundering and wasting money, I began making money – lots of money – and I couldn’t have done it without having a coach and mentor guiding me along the way.
- Having A Life Coach or Business Coach Saves You Stress, Pain And Frustration.
Above, I mentioned how having a coach will help you avoid stress and frustration. After all why would you want to try to re-invent the wheel? Unless you are seeking to do something that has never been done before, reaching your goals will be so much easier, enjoyable and fulfilling if you can learn how to achieve them from someone that knows what they’re doing. Your stress level will go down and your enjoyment level will go up when you have someone there to guide you from point A to point B in the most effective and efficient way possible. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience; or ask someone else that has tried to do it on their own (like maybe yourself).
- A Life Coach or Business Coach Can Share Ideas and Opportunities With You That Never Knew Were Available to You.
When you are trying to go it alone, you can often wind up so focused on trying to figure something out that you get lost in the minutia. This can lead to frustration and worst yet it can interfere with your ability to create ideas and opportunities. Think about it, if you are stuck trying to figure out for example how to send someone from a link in an email to a squeeze page and from the squeeze page to a thank you page while at he same time send a confirming email in response to a person opting in on your squeeze page and then deliver a free gift to them on-line and then be able to follow-up with the person on a regular basis and get all of they done while you are sleeping, it can seem like a daunting, if not impossible, task. If you had a good internet marketing coach that could show you how to set up systems that would automate this entire process, however, in a relatively short amount of time you could not only set up such a system, but you could also learn all of the other amazing things you could do and the incredible amount of money you could make once you had the system up and running. This is just one example, but there are countless situations where an experienced coach can share ideas with you and shed light on opportunities that you may have that you would not be aware of simply because you do not have the level of experience that your coach has. The same holds true for solving problems. As Albert Einstein once said: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
6. Having a Life Coach Gives You Insights Into Yourself and Your World.
Throughout the course of my life, I’ve learned so much about myself and my world as a result of having great coaches. From my pee-wee football coach and many of my high school teachers and coaches and college professors to senior attorneys and well respected and learned judges and business and thought leaders, I have been blessed to have some amazing people come into my life and share their knowledge and wisdom with me. From them I have leaned so many valuable lessons and insights about myself, my profession and my world. When you have a good coach, you’re always getting good feedback about your performance and discovering more about yourself in the process. With the hundreds of clients I have represented over the years, I have observed patterns or behaviors that many of the clients were not aware of. Sometimes it’s a story or limiting belief that they keep telling themselves again and again, which holds them back. Other times, it’s a way they carry themselves, their body language or a subtle or sometimes not so subtle way that they’re communicating that puts people off, and thus preventing them from having success in their relationships or businesses. These patterns are often so ingrained in us, that they become unconscious. Although we do certain things, we do them unconsciously and we aren’t even aware that we have done them.
A good coach is able to objectively observe these things and point them out to us. They can help you become aware of them, so that you can change them. Sometimes it’s the little things that make a massive difference. I have witnessed incredible transformations within people just by making small changes in the way they chose to look at or react to something or the way they think about something or how they present themselves or how they think about themselves. Most of your friends and colleagues that you may be around on a daily basis won’t point these things out to you or give you feedback for fear that they may offend you, but a good coach does because he or she cares and is always honest with you.
- Having A Life Coach Gives You A Stronger Sense Of Belief And Self-Confidence.
There are so many ways that we limit and hold ourselves back from doing what we truly want to do simply because we don’t believe in ourselves or have the confidence to simply take action and do it. These limiting beliefs are built up over time based what we learned when we are little children, experiences we have as we grow up, “lesson” we learn from teachers and well meaning loved ones. Most of the time, we truly examine our fears, we find they arise from our imagination of how things “might” be, not from how they actually are. When you are working with a coach, he or she can help you examine your fears and take courageous action in spite of your fears. Your coach can also help you take note of your successes and help you build one success on top of another. Great coaches are fully present I the moment with you and they are your biggest supporters, rooting and cheering for you every baby step of the way! When you succeed, they succeed and the best coaches take great pride in working with great players. John Wooden, the head basketball coach at UCLA from 1948 to 1975 whose teams won the national championship 10 times in 12 years, including six in a row from 1967 through 1973 once said: “the key to having great teams is having great players.” Coach Wooden also said: “A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.”
