*WARNING - SOME COACHES MAY FIND THIS POST CONTROVERSIAL*
If your job title is 'Coach' of any description I'm curious to know - who is YOUR coach?
Now, I'm making a bunch assumptions here, so for transparency they are:
If coaching is how you pay your bills, you clearly believe in the value that coaching provides
It's likely you have to do an element of selling these benefits to potential new clients, teams you are supporting or leaders who employ you
You know how important it is to step back from doing work in the day to day grind, talk through challenges and determine actions that will move you forward
Based on these assumptions my belief is that coaches should walk the walk, and have their own coaches that they work with to focus on their own growth and development.
Here's 7 different examples of coaches you could engage and work with.
Professional coaches - providing 1-1 conversations aimed at helping you gain clarity, insights and finding a path to where you want to go
Sports coaches - providing close observation of your physical technique, followed by corrective / improvement suggestions, followed by practice to re-enforce new movement patterns
Nutrition coaches - Providing advice and guidance on your nutritional goals, co-creating plans to help guide you in the direction you want.
Agile coaches - Working predominantly with individuals and teams in the early stages of adopting new ways of working. Sometime invited to offer interventions for problematic situations
Business coaches / mentors - Providing experience and expertise that can help refine your business strategy, vision and goals.
Marketing coaches - Experts in helping you to build your brand, create a compelling narrative and getting your message out to the masses
SME coaches / mentors - Anyone who has experience, skills in a certain area, for example if you want to write a book, you may choose to work with someone from a publishing company.
NB. These descriptions may not be perfect, but I hope they are 'good enough' for this post.
Bottom line: If you don't have a coach I urge you to find (at least) one!
In my humble opinion, there's something here about integrity for me. My personal belief is that I can't be a credible coach if I don't embrace coaching for myself. Either personally or through Humble Associates I have worked with ALL of the above examples in the last 12 months.
What about the cost? Well, this doesn't have to be a bank busting, expensive endeavour.
There are plenty of professional coaches on the path to accreditation at the moment who will happily provide pro-bono coaching in order to build up their hours (for ICF PCC you have to evidence of 500hrs of coaching).
If you're working with a decent sized organisation there may well be other coaches internally who would happily consider a reciprocal coaching arrangement.
There's a bunch of great content by coaches being published on LinkedIn on a regular basis, and whilst this is purely a passive relationship, it can still provoke interesting thoughts and experiments. I'll add some recommendations below.
Having a single session can be useful to top-up, or kick-start a change / improvement you seek.
Find a meet-up group in the area you're interested in - there's a shit tonne to choose from and most are free.
Personal recommendations for blog and contacts:
Professional coaching
Nutrition coaching
Agile Coaches
Business coaches
Marketing coaches
So, now you know who some of my coaches are let me ask again - who's your coach? 😉