To be the best you need the best | The Importance of having a Coach

I have come from a space where I didn’t like reading. It was only in 2011 when I was challenged by my former line-manager who said: “You never know what you could find out if you read…” Funnily enough around the same time, I had been listening to Will Smith on YouTube and came across his speech at the 2005 Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards saying

“…there’s no problem you can have that someone hasn’t already solved and wrote about it in a book.“

This encouraged me to read my first real book which was The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. My mind was blown by what I had read and realized that books can confirm what you may have thought privately, or open new avenues of thought. From then on, I began reading a book a month, picking up bits of knowledge here and there. These authors eventually became my mentors and coaches for life. As an avid reader, I naturally became even more ambitious in achieving bigger and bolder goals. Eventually, I started looking into business ventures and paid for information from top coaches and mentors in the world of business, primarily in property investing. Taking their coaching for granted cost me a high price and a huge debt. It taught me a lot of lessons, one of them being, don’t get specialist help unless you truly understand what it is you need.

I then ventured into network marketing for a year, and even in a world where on the surface it appears untrustworthy, I learned a lot about the need for a coach and a strong system for success. Realising network marketing was not for me, I kept the skills of coaching and mentorship. I began coaching my own clients, primarily in Career and Business Development, as well as Personal Branding. Throughout time I began to understand a coaching culture and themes that were required for effective and useful coaching. As a person who is a coachee and a coach, here are some reasons why you may need coaching now:

1. Accountability

Being accountable to another human being is the best thing that anyone can do. A coach is usually paid for their services so this increases another layer of accountability to the coachee. Accountability creates a sense of practical pressure and serves as a reminder that positions you to achieve what you said you were going to achieve in the given conditions. A coach is fantastic for this because one of their main aims is to hold you to account for your word. They want you to succeed because it looks good on them and can be used as an example to others, but more importantly, you get great value and get closer to your ambitions

2. Peak performance

In order to maximise your actions as much as possible, you need to be aware of what you are currently doing, and what you are not doing in order to effectively achieve your goals in life. This means that a second observer can help you tweak certain habits and characteristics in order for you to be at your best as much as much as you can. Peak performance requires you to be deliberate and strategic with your actions so that you can get the best out of most situations.

3. A Plan to stick to

This ties hand in hand with a coach holding you to account, and usually, this is making sure you stick to a plan. When an individual creates a plan it needs to follow a step-by-step logic of actions that need to be taken, in addition to the conditions and strategies that need to be employed in order to enhance the quality outcomes. Working against plan can help highlight whether your intentions and actions deviate or align with them, helping you know how well you are doing.

4. Motivation to Succeed

We as humans primarily take action invoked by our internal motivations. However, those internal motivations when cultivated can be expired by forms of external motivation. Knowing this means that we can strategically place external forms of motivation in our environments to help us succeed in our endeavours. A coach is a great source of external motivation and is usually well read in the realms of leadership, emotional intelligence, psychology and self-help (I am at least anyway!). A coach will push you, remind you and facilitate you towards getting closer to your destination, and that is with pure, shear and genuine motivation!

5. Prioritisation

The art of focus is easy to abandon in a society full of increased social integration via technology, and every marketing information to you in any shape conceivable. A coach can help you pick out the points of importance that you need, based on the information you have provided, and help you prioritize what is required and what isn’t. I want to make this very clear, a coach helps you prioritize what you need based on what you have said. There are things you may want, but your actions may not show that is the case. Sometimes there is a discord between how we express our wants, and how they translate into needs observed via our daily habits and actions.

6. Improved Confidence

Coaching gives a person the opportunity to develop a new found confidence that was really buried underneath a blanket of fear and perceived judgments. By allowing you to realize your strengths and weaknesses, you can realize what you need to focus on and how you can provide value to your given environments. Confidence is King in all that we do and being able to get more of that via regularly meeting with a coach is a huge contributing factor to achieving success.

7. Developing Leadership

And finally, a coach can give you the pillars of leadership by highlighting the characteristics of high acclaimed leaders. This is important because in society if you are able to differentiate yourself in a positive way, people are more likely going to polarise towards you, creating a market and platform for you to exchange value for value. In other words, you become more effective, influential and persuasive as a person, which is key to really marking a mark in an industry.

This should give you a firm footing as to why you definitely need a coach and how it can make you way more effective in your pursuit of greatness. A lot of people, especially in certain communities do not want to pay for coaching, that my friends is a poor mentally to have. We have bills to pay but if you’re not going to manage them, then don’t complain life is not working for you. To give you a basic reason as to why it is poor you need to understand this: If there is no exchange of products or service, there is a lack of seriousness from one or more of the parties. This is a natural law my friends that you need to get familiar with, and the more you try to cheapen quality products or services, the less you win. I’m a believer in measured frugality, but I’m a strong believer in investing wisely in yourself and other resources. The alternatives are YouTube, books, family and friends which are still valuable but not as effective as regular human interactions with trained or experienced people. If you want to find out more about coaching, email me via this link info@michaeltabirade.com

If you want coaching in a book, check out my self-published book Understand Reach Expand: 15 Super Effective ways to Manage your Mind.