If you feel like something in your life is plateauing, or even worse, regressing, it could be time to hire a coach.
Trying to tackle your specific weight loss, marriage, fitness, business, health or life goals on your own is tough… it's lonely… it's difficult to know if what you are doing is moving you in the right direction. This is where a coach can help. I have included ten reasons to back this up and created a quiz to help you identify whether working with a coach is a good next move.
1. A coach will help you set powerful but realistic goals. Goal setting isn't the difficult part. It's making sure that your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) that limits most people's success. A coach will make sure that your goals challenge you, make you uncomfortable, are meaningful, but most of all that they are realistic. But you have been warned… once you set a goal with your coach they are going to hold you accountable to it because they see what you do not see. They see your potential. They see that your goals are more attainable than you think they are.
2. A coach will help you prioritize you first. It isn't that your children, husband, friends or boss aren't important, it's that you have not yet realized how much you are hindering your own results by putting others needs ahead of your own. A coach can help you prioritize the things that are most important to you without compromising your most important relationships. You are not fully capable of taking care of your family unless you are taking care of yourself first. A coach will ensure "you" time is scheduled and executed.
3. A coach will hold you accountable. A coach will not only help you set powerful and realistic goals but will ask you how much progress you are making on meeting them. Your coach will ask if everything was accomplished last week. If not, why? And what are strategies for improvement? These types of questions can be uncomfortable if you haven't put in the work. A coach only holds you accountable to the things you said you would do. This can create some discomfort if they were not completed. We are excellent at breaking promises to ourselves but not so much to someone else.
4. A coach will show you a new way of doing things. Think of a coach as your own creative genius sidekick. A coach can help you create a weekly meal plan, a game plan for when you attend an upcoming social event and want to remain on track, or a fresh set of guidelines to help you get back on track after falling off the wagon, binging on sugar and feeling guilty about it. A coach is a friend. You can trust them to keep your ideas, concerns, challenges and fears a secret. But they will also tell you whether these thoughts are realistic or not by offering a fresh perspective.
5. A coach will always support you. Your coach often becomes your biggest raving fan and cheerleader because they believe you can reach your goals. It is vital to have someone like this on your team when it feels like everything is falling apart… when you just ate an entire tub of ice cream, when you bought fast food for your kids for dinner, when you drank a bottle of wine and the only thing you can think about is eating sugar. A coach recognizes that slip ups happen. They will help you accept it, move on, and then develop the habits and rituals required to support your healthy lifestyle on your own. But the reality is, in the beginning these habits and rituals are not developed yet. This is where support from your coach is paramount.
6. A coach will help you get off your butt and take action. Have you ever heard this quote? "Procrastination is the thief of time." A coach can help motivate you to take action, especially if you are continuously focused on things that are not working… trying to grocery shop with all four kids, telling yourself you will never eat sugar again for the rest of your life, writing off the entire day when you have a single bite of off track food. If these things are continuously not working, it is unlikely that they are going to magically work in the future. A coach can help you from getting stuck in your own ways and take action on things that are proven to work.
7. A coach will help you create a game plan. One of the biggest challenges of a busy lifestyle is that there is not enough hours in the day to even know where to start. Every first step seems time consuming, daunting and scary. A coach can help chunk down your priorities and create a realistic vision and action plan moving forward. They are able to offer a new perspective through a fresh set of eyes that you may have never thought about before. They have an outsider's perspective as to where you have been, where you are now and where you need to go.
8. A coach will point out your strengths but also your weaknesses. Most people focus on the bad, not the good. They try so hard to get better at those things they already suck at. This is one of my favourite quotes from Dan Sullivan, "If you only focus on improving your weaknesses all you end up with is a lot of really good weaknesses." It is so true. Instead, a coach can help you identify what you are uniquely great at and help you leverage that strength to make things easier for you. But you are warned, they will also tell you to stop focusing on your weaknesses because you aren't very good at them in the first place. A coach will be upfront with you and tell it like it is.
9. A coach will challenge you to step outside of your comfort zone. A coach will help you overcome your mental blocks and limiting beliefs that are keeping you in, what Robin Sharma likes to call, "the safe harbour of the known." Let me share an example. Everyone can do a push up. Yours may be modified… from your knees or against a wall. Everyone can do a push up, but having a personal trainer alongside you counting your reps pushes you to do far more push ups than you ever would have done on your own. A coach can push you in the same way through other roadblocks in your life.
10. A coach will help exponentially increase your confidence. Since a coach will challenge you to step outside of your comfort zone they are helping you create behaviours to start tackling some of the big road blocks in your life on your own. They believe in you before you are ready to fully believe in yourself. They know you have it in you to tackle something on your own. But on the flip side, they can also easily identify when something is a bad idea. They will steer you in a different direction so you don't end up kyboshing your confidence. Your coach cannot take action for you, but they can be a voice of reason as you develop the confidence to do it on your own.
So there you have it. Ten reasons why working with a coach is an investment in your health, your fitness, your marriage, your business or your life... why working with a coach is an investment in you.
Successful people have coaches in lots of different areas of their life. What I recommend you start with is to prioritize the part of your life you want to improve on most and then hire a coach to help you with that.
If your priority is changing your health or body we are here for you at Eat By Design Coaching. Learn more HERE.
To find out if working with a coach is the right next step for you TAKE THIS QUIZ. It will take only take you two minutes to complete.
Creative Commons Sharks Soccer by David Clow is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0