One of the biggest barriers to successful coaching is time. New clients or sponsoring companies want results right away. Personally, I do too, but guess what – success is dependent on personal readiness and working through the coaching process.

Coaching Readiness Factors

Here are a few of the personal readiness factors that I screen for when taking on a new coaching client:

  • Introspection and self-awareness
  • Reflection on the good, bad and ugly
  • Commitment to make changes and keep momentum
  • Willingness to try new things
  • Follow through on your plan

Your degree of readiness will either help or hinder your progress during the coaching process.

Think about taking a Coaching Readiness Assessment at Leadership Breakthrough to decide if you are ready to start the executive or career coaching process.

The Coaching Process

A coaching process has multiple phases. How quickly you move through the coaching process depends on:

  1. Your readiness
  2. Difficulty of the situation
  3. Hard work

Based on my work with clients, these are the phases you can expect to meet:

  1. Awareness of the problem and personal behavioral style
  2. Redefining the problem – are we working on the right problem or a symptom?
  3. Acceptance of the problem and implications
  4. Re-framing the problem to an opportunity (creating a win-win solution)
  5. Charting a course of action/behavior
  6. Committing to action/behavior
  7. Measuring action/behavior
  8. Reinforcement of action/behavior
  9. Refining action/behavior as needed

The purpose of sharing these phases is not to overwhelm you. The coaching process is a framework and it is flexible. For example, there may be times when you are working on more than one coaching phase at a time.

Accelerating Coaching Results through Homework

One of the ways I help clients to move through the coaching process faster is by giving them homework. The type of homework may involve reading, analyzing situations, practicing new skills or taking a specific action. Clients who embrace their homework are more successful in achieving their coaching goals.

How quickly can you be coached?

The coaching process is not a race to the finish line. In fact, if you skip some of the phases or do the work poorly, one of two things is likely to happen.

You will fail at making your intended change or the process will take a longer to complete because you have to go back and do the work again.

If you ready to change, let the coaching process work to your advantage and you will see lasting results. Short change the process and you short change yourself.