Coaching offers a number of benefits above traditional training, especially for business and sales growth. Often, business owners, sales leaders and salespeople are simply focused on hitting their target numbers. It’s natural to focus on finding ways in which to consistently hit those numbers. It’s easy to fall into the trap of making everything you do seem like it’s all about the numbers – where to find the biggest audience for your offerings, how to develop opportunities, generate leads, track the pipeline and so on.

This view tends to make people less effective. This often leads to people feeling stressed about keeping their job or their business going, and how others may view them if they fail. It becomes a downward vortex of negative mental and physical health.

Focusing on this misses one of the primary goals of coaching: Your own and your team’s personal and professional growth.

An external coach has been and is continually coached by others to ensure the overall positive mental and physical health of themselves, so they are optimally placed to help those they coach. To help reduce stress, overcome anxieties and develop rock-solid confidence.

Coaching is a particularly useful tool for helping people to find the resources inside themselves which they may be unaware already exist. Often, people going through a process of being coached can struggle with being asked to be resourceful, having worked for managers and leaders who only told them what to do and how they should do it, not to question the whys. Once unleashed, resourcefulness is a game-changer for helping people solve their own problems.

A good coach encourages people to take the initiative in their own life and work roles, to take responsibility and to be held accountable for their decisions. Through coaching, ultimately you will decide what is important to you, why it’s important, when and how you will take action. You are in control of what you learn, whilst using the Coach as a guide to help you on your undoubtedly rocky road to success*. It allows you and your team to uncover the obstacles blocking your way to success (usually these are internal blocks caused by anxiety or confidence in some form).

When working with a team or business partners, coaching allows for the development of individuals as well as the whole team. If you are a leader, allowing me to focus on individuals within your team may unlock a high performer. Allowing someone the space to find out where they fit may help you to become the best leader they’ve ever had. Of course, all good leaders want their team to succeed. With empathetic action and challenges designed to fit the individuals’ personality, coaching becomes the most effective learning tool available over time.

*Let’s be realistic here – life isn’t easy, it’s a challenge getting what you want from it, but luckily I love a challenge and love helping people to challenge themselves. I’m easily bored if I don’t set myself any goals of challenges. Plus, I fully believe in the idea that:

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone”

“If you want something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done. Staying comfortable is not part of the deal”

– Neale Donald Walsch

I can, however, help you feel comfortable in feeling uncomfortable.

Some questions to ask yourself about the coach you hire.

• Do they believe in you?

If you’ve ever had a great leader or teacher in the past, you remember those who have believed in your abilities possibly more than you did, especially during those difficult times, don’t you? They had the natural empathy to see something in you that you couldn’t and helped you unlock your own belief to show you that you are capable of more than you believed.

A great coach will be able to see the qualities in you that you don’t yet believe are there, and will help you find a way to unleash them.

• Can they see your blindspots?

Everything in the world is a delicate balance. Whilst unleashing buried qualities is a powerful force, without keeping them in check they can be a force of destructive arrogance, potentially destroying well-earned trust from those around you in your network and client base.

Surely you want someone who can easily recognise which of your beliefs need to change in order to grow safely? And you need to be able to trust them enough to provide you with alternative, healthier and balanced beliefs.

• Will they tell it to you straight?

When it comes to our own ability to succeed, it’s usually our own inner beliefs and negative thoughts which cause us to hold back from our fullest potential. When you are relying on someone to help guide you to success, and when there is limited time together, the last thing you want is for that coach to beat around the bush and be overly “fluffy” lest they upset you, the client.

A great coach will professionally tell you to stop when you are talking or thinking in destructive ways, or in ways which mean you aren’t making progress towards your goals despite best efforts to overcome those blocks.

They will let you try a hypothesised action in your world if it makes sense and seems safe. They want you to become resilient to setbacks and to learn how to learn from failure. Yet they won’t let you go too far down what seems to be the wrong path for you. They will stop you, help you reason logically why it’s not the best idea and will help get you back on the right path.

I work with open-minded, visionary clients who, in selling Business to Business (B2B), relish the idea of being challenged, who never settle.

The best performing people in every type of activity, career and goal have coaches. This includes business leaders, athletes, artists, salespeople, and entrepreneurs.

The tools I offer include everything needed for solid, reforged sales lifecycles. They are adaptable and scalable no matter whether you are setting out on your own for the first time, or if you have fully fledged teams of sales and customer engagement staff.

They include analytical tools to build strategies and processes, conversational techniques based on the psychology of communication and behavioural psychology. Plus techniques to grow a resilient, confident and positive mindset.

Three common reasons why people might resist coaching, and why it’s important to overcome them:

• They’re unwilling to make the necessary changes

Although coaching is obviously aimed at helping make positive changes in a person’s life, those being coached still need to do the work necessary to effect that change even though it means allowing you and the coach to gently push you out of your comfort zone (see the quote about this elsewhere).

• They feel it means they aren’t capable on their own

Coaching doesn’t mean that you aren’t a capable person. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have the abilities or resources within you to achieve your goals.

Even looking at hiring a Coach is an indication that you are capable. It’s evidence that someone (maybe yourself) believes that with the right additional insight and ideas from a professional coach who’s coming from a fresh, external perspective, you can perform better.

No one invests in coaching when they believe that they are hopeless. No company ever invests in coaching for people they believe are not capable of unlocking their best performance.

• They‘re afraid of being held accountable 

Some people don’t like to be held accountable. They don’t want to be asked about how they feel their performance will or has changed after the coaching finishes. They don’t want anyone asking difficult questions, or why there’s a difference between what they say and what they do.

More than anything, they don’t want to have to answer to someone – especially true of business owners and their leadership teams.

But the best performers embrace accountability. They openly investigate the lulls in their performance so they can work on ways to decrease the frequency and depth of those lulls. They look at a coach as an accountability partner. They expect tough questions, and they relish the opportunity to be guided to their own answers to help them expand what they believe is possible, to see where they are capable of going.

You think self-development is expensive? What’s really expensive is not training and coaching your people.

The real expense comes from inaction, from having resources that aren’t fully present, developed and utilised. What does cost you is the time you lose in not producing the results you are really capable of producing. The lost opportunity cost far exceeds anything you might pay for coaching, regardless of the investment in helping you and your staff to develop.