Are you Coachable?

The Five Steps to Coachability:

Coaching and collaborating with executives and business owners for more than 21 years has been a learning experience for which I am grateful.  I have realized that coachable people all share five distinct character traits.

1. Humility
Humility allows us the wisdom to know that no great accomplishment is achieved alone.  There are important things we need to learn that require fundamental changes in our behavior and outlook.  As August Turak says in Forbes,  “Humility requires a change of heart rather than a change of mind.”

2. Action Bias
Coachable people and leaders generally, share an action bias.  At Clarity coaching and facilitation we are all entrepreneurs and leaders who get things done.

3. Purity of Purpose
As the founder of Clarity, making money has never been a motivating factor, much to my husband’s chagrin.  We all need to feel we contribute something and make a difference in the world.  Serving leaders is an honor and we get to do that every day. 

4. A Willingness to Surrender Control
Early in my own career I realized that the more I attempted to control the less real control I had.  As I have learned to surrender control the more I learn and grow.  Mentors and coaches will realize that unless our clients are willing to surrender to the coaching process they will not get results. In a bottom line, results driven environment, many business leaders worry that they will not get results by surrendering to uncertainty.  While I understand that uncertainty is a tough sell, authentic change requires us to move through uncharted territory.   Insisting on certainty is another way we can fool others and ourselves into avoiding the discomfort of making meaningful changes.

5. Faith
It is important to have a coach that you feel you can trust and then you have to have a final trait, faith.  Many of the benefits of coaching are experienced after we have been through a change.  As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20 and that is why we often hear people exclaim, if I knew then what I know now I would have changed years ago.