Before you get down to business with a business coach, it’s important to understand how the entire process works and whether or not you’re ready to work with a business coach.
If you’re not ready, it’s simply not going to give you the results that you want. To have success working with a business coach, consider the following success tips.
1. Hire the Right Type of Coach – The interview process is a good way to ensure that you’re hiring the right type of coach. You want someone who is experienced in your industry and with working with people of your temperament as well as your type of business entity. Just because a particular coach is popular doesn’t mean they are right for you.
2. Use Your Free Consultation Well – Almost every single business coach will offer a free consultation before getting started. They will use this time to interview you to ensure that you’re right for their system and you will use the time to ensure that they are right for you. But, you can also get an idea of what their system is and where they see your business going, as well as a few hints about how it will all work.
3. Be Prepared for Feedback – During the coaching process and the analyzing of your business, be ready for criticism and feedback. If you’re not the type of person who can hear that your website is ugly or that you’re doing something wrong, you may not want a business coach. While a coach can also act as a cheerleader, you also want someone who acts in your best interest – more like a mother or father than someone who just tells you that everything is perfect and holds you back.
4. Be Open Minded to Change – It can be very hard to hear someone telling you that you need to change something about how you run your business. Your business feels like your baby and you want to do it your way. But sometimes your way is not the best way. You’ll need to be open minded enough to change things but also able to think critically so that you know for sure it’s the right change to make.
5. Be Honest about Who You Are – Sometimes it can be really difficult to accept our own personalities. Are you a self-starter? Are you a loner? Are you an introvert? Are you technologically challenged? Are you organised or disorganszed? What type of system helps you keep on track?
6. Know What You Want Going In – Typically how a business coach works is that they deal with one issue at a time. So you might have a 12-week coaching contract to deal with identifying your target audience, or you might have a 6-week coaching contract to help you break through some sort of block such as launching a product you’ve already created. Knowing what you want the end result to be before getting started is very important.
7. Get Ready to Roll up Your Sleeves and Work – During the time of your coaching contract, be ready to put in the extra time required to get the work done. If you don’t implement anything you and your coach work out together, you’re not going to have any results.
8. Track Your Results – If you know what you wanted the result to be, and have written and specific goals, then you will be able to know whether the coaching relationship worked the way you hoped. Without metrics to look at, you really won’t know for sure what worked and what did not work.
Working with a business coach can literally change your life. But, you must be truly ready to work with a business coach and do the work you agree to do, or it simply will not work
If you’re not ready to follow through, reconsider wasting your time and theirs.
