Are You Wondering How Coaching Can Help?

If your life is your most beautiful work, one of my jobs as a coach is to fill your toolbox with skills that will help you really engage your strengths while curbing your challenges.

Let’s just say you’re an artist. And you really admire the work of another artist. You study up on her work and buy exactly the same supplies that she uses. You spend time practicing the same skills and techniques that she executes so perfectly. But the brushes never really feel quite right in your hands. When you’re honset with yourself, you just prefer chunky pastels to paints. But pastels won’t give you the painting that you’re trying for. So you keep working with the paints, trying to produce a different result.

Brain tools are similar in that they are strictly tailored to your needs, and the wrong tool for you just won’t do.

Have you ever had a friend with a similar challenge, and she tells you exactly how she manages it so beautifully. And you really do try to do what she does, but it doesn’t seem to work for you at all. It might even make things worse. At best, your issue isn’t solved. At worst, you conclude that you must somehow be broken because what so obviously works for this other perfectly reasonable human being doesn’t work for you and you just can’t function like other people do.

You’re not broken though. You’re just standing there looking at a blank sheet of paper and your friend handed you her tools. Maybe for her, the brushes fit perfectly in her hands and the paint glides over the paper like a dream. But for you, those brushes make you feel as awkward as a toddler with a crayon. You can try, and it might even look like you can make it work for a moment, but ultimately it’s not going to give the results you want.

This is the advantage of gathering tools in a coaching environment. One of the basic tenets of coaching is that the people we work with are whole and unbroken. And they contain the answer within themselves. They come to coaches because they’re stuck and can’t quite put their hands on it. A coach’s job is to help the client uncover the answer, not to fix them or equip them with a bunch of tools that work for everybody else.

If your un-broken brain (and no, your brain isn’t broken either) is your tool kit, you’re rummaging around in it and haven’t put your hands on the right tool yet. Or worse, you’re looking all over the place for it, and just can’t find it. My job is to help you connect with the right tool for you through sharing knowledge and ideas, sure, but mostly through helping you figure out what’s already in there by giving you a safe space to explore.