Are you coachable?
No matter how good a business coach is, success still depends on the one being coached

All businesses encounter drawbacks at one point. These challenges come in many forms, may it be financial, operational, or leadership-wise. As a business owner, there are times when you just cannot get the results that you want which may cause you to get overwhelmed while you struggle to come up with a fix. Sometimes, even when you do know what to do, you just cannot seem to do it.

That’s where a business coach like myself comes in. My job is to help you take control of the situation by highlighting the essential things and eliminating bad habits. I’m here to make sure that your time, energy and attention are in the right places.

However, it’s not about dictatorship. Much like the relationship between a psychiatrist and his patient, business coaching heavily relies on how much the client is willing to take action in order to achieve certain goals — goals that the client himself has established.

Meaning, you need to be coachable in order for anything to work. What does being coachable mean?

For one, it doesn’t start and end with allowing another person to give you directives and strategies for your business. Willingness to receive external knowledge is not enough; you have to be willing to change.

Change is fundamental in business coaching, because if no change has taken place during or after the process, then the whole thing would have been completely pointless. Owners who have been running their business for a long time may sometimes find it hard to diverge from what they have been accustomed to. And that causes goals to remain unachieved.

Remember, the first requirement is for you to be able to embrace change with a positive attitude. Once that mindset has been established, it’s time to translate that into action.

Being coachable also means you are willing to commit the time to practice and develop. Change doesn’t happen overnight; it is a process. In the world of business, that process is even longer. If you’re going to have all those sessions with your business coach, make sure that you’re devoted to apply those concepts and schemes in the real setting, otherwise you would just waste time and money.

Once you’ve started making adjustments and gradually taking steps to meet your goals, you will notice that it may require you to expand your daily duties to include additional work, as well as paying extra attention to details that would normally go unnoticed. Don’t worry — as long as you have your eyes on the goal, patience becomes second nature.

Finally, since business coaching is a process, you need to be open-minded and be receptive to feedback, whether the results are pleasant or not. The thing about coaching is there’s no universal formula to success. It’s a continuous learning process. What matters most is that you understand the relationships between factors that led to the success or failure. And through business coaching, you gain clarity of mind, helping you to strategize better and improve on the next opportunity.
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