[This User’s Guide to Coaching series explains everything you need to know to successfully engage and work with a coach—a life coach, a creativity coach, an executive coach, any sort of coach. It accompanies Dr. Maisel’s latest book, The Coach’s Way, described as “the finest resource available for anyone who wants to develop or enrich their coaching abilities.” Grab your copy now!]
How you describe to yourself what’s bothering you or what you hope to achieve matters. If you name your challenge as “low energy,” that will send you in a different direction than if you name your challenge as “my day job is meaningless” or “I can’t seem to get my novel written.” All three may be true, and a dozen other difficulties may be confronting you as well. What, then?
A certain kind of conversation with yourself is needed in which you get these various challenges and goals on the table and get a tentative answer to the question, “Okay, where should I start?” You’re looking for a starting point, not a final answer. Maybe you’ll only be able to arrive at a very tentative, muddled starting place that sounds like, “I think it’s about my low energy, my not getting my novel written, my disorganization, and life in general.” If that’s as clear as you can be, then that’s your starting place.
After you’ve gotten at least that much clarity, you then need to think through what sort of helper would best understand what you’re experiencing and would be likely to provide you with the most appropriate help:
+ If you decide that the mess, chaos, and disorganization around you need to be tackled first, you might look to hire someone, maybe an organizer coach, who specializes in helping people organize their things, their time, and their life.
+ If you decide it’s the low energy, that might take you in the direction of traditional medicine or alternative medicine.
+ If it’s not getting your novel written, that might suggest a creativity coach.
+ If it’s your life in general, that might suggest a life coach, a pastoral counselor, or a psychotherapist.
If you could afford it and if you had the time to research it, you might choose a few different helpers, each with his or her particular specialty: maybe an energy medicine practitioner, a creativity coach, and a psychotherapist. Or you might say to yourself, “Let me start here,” pick one of your challenges as your starting point, and then try to decide who might help the most with that specific challenge.
Your decision may still not be an easy one, because if you say something to yourself like, “Let me focus on my life in general,” what helper is best-suited to help with that?” Are you looking for what a psychiatrist has to offer, which will likely be a psychiatric diagnosis and a chemical fix? Are you looking for what a pastoral counselor has to offer, which is bound to connect to his or her religious or spiritual belief system? Are you looking for the sort of talk a psychotherapist offers or the goal-oriented help of a coach?
You will have to think this through and muddle your way through. There is no easy answer to the question, “Who might help?” Let’s leap ahead, however, and imagine that you’ve decided that it’s a coach who might help you the most: a life coach, an executive coach, an organizer coach, a spiritual coach, a relationship coach, a health and wellness coach, a fitness coach, a mental health coach, a creativity coach. But which specific coach?
That’s the next step, choosing your coach. Let’s look at that.
***
“The Coach’s Way is possibly the finest resource available for anyone who wants to develop or enrich their coaching abilities. This new book is designed to give coaches the confidence and structure in their practice that will generate real results for their clients. Any- one who makes a living in the coaching arena will benefit from Dr. Maisel’s tremendous experience and training as a therapist, coach, and human. I’m so glad to have this book as a guide for my own coaching work and will recommend it to many others in the helping professions.”— Jacob Nordby, author of The Creative Cure: How Finding and Freeing Your Inner Artist Can Heal Your Life
**
Read Part One Here: The Coach’s Way: User’s Guide to Coaching
Read Part Two Here: Can You Tolerate the Truth?
Read Part Three Here: Can I Collaborate?
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock
