What Will I Work On With A Coach?

25 Things To Work On With Your Coach.
A Guide for Clients

Please indicate the relative importance of each of these items as they relate to your goals and objectives in the coaching work we'll do together. This is one way to get started...and is designed to stretch, rather than limit, our discussions.

Your Success in Business or Career.

1. Adding Value. Adding value means that you continually give more to your customers/put more into your products/services, as a business practice and philosophy. Because of competition, all business must continually add value or they will lose business or market share. Simultaneously adding value and increasing profits is an art form worth learning.
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2. Balance. Adding balance to your life is key to long term success both personally and professionally. The only way to practice extreme self care, develop strong and long-lasting relationship, and be extraordinarily successful in business is to put daily systems in place that allow that to happen naturally.
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3. Career/Profession. Coaches can help their clients to choose, change, advance or prepare for a new career or profession. Coaches generally understand more about emerging professions and self-employment than a traditionally trained career counselor.
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4. Conditioning. Most humans don't like change or surprises; it frightens them. So, a businessperson needs to learn how to condition change (as in prepare employees, customers, colleagues to accept change more readily and with less resistance) to the point of embracing it and even accelerating it themselves. An essential skill in the 90s.
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5. Effectiveness. Effectiveness means that you're doing the right thing, well. Efficient means that you are doing what you're doing with a minimum of waste. The key here is that too much time is being spent on being efficient than on being effective. Being effective can even mean being highly inefficient and unproductive! A coach will show you the difference.
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6. Excellence. Customers don't tolerate as much as they used to, especially the most profitable customers. Excellent is simply a requirement today. It's not a good idea or even an option any longer. Any business that is delivering less than excellence is at risk.
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7. Influence. Every human being is influenced by many things, but mostly by other people. Influence means more than just controlling a person-influence is what we all do every day in every conversation, meeting or action. Some influence is better than others. Your coach can teach you the secrets of influencing others for mutual benefit (as in win-win vs manipulation).
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8. Innovation. Being innovative -- original, adaptive, imaginative and radical-is becoming an increasingly valuable skill in business where innovation is quickly becoming the currency of business and replacing the typical front-end sales department. Innovation sells the product more and more these days, not salespeople. Without continual and increasing innovation, one's business is more likely to disappear. A coach can help get you on this essential business track, which will also unlock your natural creativity and will add value to your customers each month.
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9. Investment. A key concept in business is the notion of investment-of time, money and other resources into people, (including oneself) opportunities, revenue streams, equipment, marketing, research and more. The successful executive or business owner must also be a superb investor and learn the nuances of risk, reward, leverage, potential, asset allocation, opportunity cost and timing. A coach understands these concepts and can help you become a better intra-investor.
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10. Leadership. Leadership is the art of making what's possible a reality, with the assistance of others. Leadership skills are no mystery, yet very few individuals are leaders. But they can become leaders, with the right coaching, especially by working on the skills of taking initiative, causation, vision, empowerment, attraction, modeling and directing. A coach is the perfect partner for this training because the coach can zero in on exactly which specific skills need to be developed first. All of these skills are learnable. There is no such thing as a Natural Born Leader.
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11. Legacy. At some point in one's life, they ask themselves that legacy they will be leaving for others to benefit from. If you're at the place in life where the notion of contributing to others on a small or large scale is appealing, your coach can walk you through a series of discussions which will help you to identify the legacy you wish to leave and how to orient your life around that process, whether your are 25, 50 or 75 years old. It's never too late, or too early, to have this conversation.
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12. Leverage. The ability to get more out of your time, day, staff, company, production department, opportunities, investments and resources directly affects a firm's profitability. Yet, few companies seek to double their leverage- power, which would include becoming more productive, efficient, reducing opportunity costs, becoming interdevelopmental, outsourcing, joint-ventures, company culture enhancement and expecting more from everyone. Many coaches are experts in helping their clients to leverage their strengths, opportunities, and assets.
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13. Management. There are about a dozen people- and project-management skills that the coach can teach the entrepreneur, supervisor, manager, employee or executive. These skills include resource management, planning/scheduling, personnel problems, problem-solving and more.
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14. Mastery. Being the best at what you do professionally is more than just desirable today-it's even becoming essential for the individual who wishes to develop a national reputation, retain clients longer, attract the finest clients, charge a premium fee and qualify to be included in the highest professional circles. Not to mention to be able to experience great joy from the work you do. Mastering a skill set or craft is highly rewarding and fulfilling and something that the coach understands and can support their clients in doing.
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15. Negotiation. The ability to confer/communicate well with others in order to come to terms or reach an agreement advantageous to both parties is a skill that everyone in business is expected to be proficient in. This is especially true in the age of the educated consumer and as Win-Win (you plus the other party) and Win-Win-Win (you, the other person plus the benefit to the community) emerge as the standards of effective negotiation.
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16. Network. In a world that's increasingly wired and in which people and companies are better connected, the skill of networking has become especially beneficial. Coaches work with clients to extend the client's "dance card" and professional network/community, using the Team 100 Program. There are a dozen networking skills to learn.
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17. Productivity. The straight definition of productivity is: The rate at which goods or services are produced especially output per unit of labor." In other words, how quickly and cheaply the job gets done. Sounds simple, but the trick is that one's productivity is expected to continuously increase, given competitive pressures. Most of us run out of productivity tricks after a while. Having a coach to point out the not so obvious (and even the obvious) can quickly increase one's productivity with minimum effort.
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18. Professionalism. High standards, strong character, graciousness and integrity are just several of the components of professionalism, which is quickly becoming a lost art in business. The coach can help you stand out and shine in a crowd because of the way you conduct your business affairs, treat customers and approach life.
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19. Profit. Profit is the driving force, measure of success and reward in business, and while every business focuses on profit to one degree of another, the coach helps their clients to complete reorient or, if necessary, reengineer the company around profitability, both short-term and long-term. The coach understands that profitability is more than just numbers on a page or cash in the bank. Profitability is also a culture, a way of doing business, an objective that can be measured daily with the right reporting systems. And, most importantly, sustainable, high-quality profits result from proper investment in people, equipment, research and process.
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20. Results. Some people are process-oriented (action, experimentation, discovery, feeling-oriented); others are results-oriented (measurables, deadlines, black/white, focused-oriented). First, it's important to discover which type of person you are and second, to learn the other approach so that you're cross-platform. Managers and business owners who are too results-oriented often miss out on the real opportunities because they are too busy producing-at-any-cost. Those who are too process-oriented ignore the reality that profits come from results, not just from process. A coach can strengthen your weak side.
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21. Savings. Whatever your business or personal savings rate is, the job of the coach is to assist you to increase it, preferably substantially and quickly.
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22. Systems. A system is what is constructed in order to offer consistent service or production without the originators of the idea or process having to be there. McDonalds has a system so that late founder Ray Croc didn't have to be at every franchisee watching how the burgers were being flipped. The system replaced that part of Ray's job and let others manage it. The key to profitability, consistency and a positive reputation in most companies and practices is to systematize the work being done and the company's administration and operations, both to keep the customers happy but also to free up the owners to be working on the next idea for the company. Without adequate systems, even the finest idea or company will eventually implode and chaos will reign.
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23. Team. Are you a team player? Can you manage a team? Can you coach a team? Are you well connected with strong players within your corporation or work environment? Do you know how to create a team to get a project done? These team-building and management skills are learnable quickly via your coach.
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24. Timing. Timing? Yes, a coach works with a client on the timing of when to push and when to rest, when to expand the company and when to contract it, when to trust intuition and when to trust the numbers, when to run a test and when to just go for it. Timing, according to the dictionary, is the art or operation of regulating occurrence, pace, or coordination to achieve the most desirable effects. In other words, the world has its own timing, its own ebb and flow; so does business, so do we as humans. The coach helps their clients get in touch with these various internal clocks, leading to smarter decisions, more choices and the ability to enter the all-to-brief windows of opportunity.
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25. Vision. It's a good idea to be clear on your company's mission and purpose, but what matters most is for the executive, entrepreneur or professional to be clear on their own vision. If mission is "what the company strives toward" and if purpose is "why the company is in existence," then vision is "what the company sees as possible-for customers, potential customers, the community, the world." Very few companies have developed their vision, but he ones who have, do quite well, Microsoft being an example. Their vision? It goes something like this: "A computer in every office and in every home, all running Microsoft software." A vision doesn't get any clearer than that. A coach helps to create an equally compelling, orienting and motivating vision for their clients, big or small.
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