Working with an executive coach can help you accomplish both organizational goals as well as your own professional career goals. When you hire an executive coach, it helps to know your overall goals and the areas on which to focus. Be prepared for challenges and change, action steps that will stretch you, and some inner work that may be a bit uncomfortable. Although an executive coach can primarily tackle issues from a business standpoint, there can still be much personal exploration that occurs. In any case, a great coach will support you so that you’re never left feeling stuck
Finding Personal Clarity
Working with an executive coach can open you up to new observations about yourself and what you want. Ideally, you’ll learn about your personality traits that either help or hinder your ability to make sound decisions in your business and your life. New studies show that most of us can’t see ourselves very objectively. A self-aware leader is a highly effective leader, and a great executive coach will help diminish blind spots and bring awareness to areas of opportunity that you’re not even aware of.
Taking Confident Steps
Your coach may push you to explore outside of your comfort zone. When you stay in your same old routine, you risk limiting your potential opportunities with narrow-minded, shortsighted goals. Working with a coach is not just about getting better results for the sake of your company, but for your personal, long-term ambitions too.
Since coaches are experts in recognizing a client’s strengths or weaknesses, they can challenge their clients to take bigger risks and make confident steps to reap greater benefits for themselves and their business.
Expanding Your Influence
While It is natural for leaders to stay within their comfort zones, this may limit their influence in the workplace. Leaders may subconsciously develop relationships with certain kinds of people – generally, those that are like themselves in background, race, gender, beliefs, personality, or work style.
A coach can help you identify these inclinations, question the limiting assumptions you make about people who aren’t like you, and expand your comfort zone, allowing you to repair or create vital working relationships with a broader variety of people.
Finding Your Professional Calling
By the time a typical working person reaches the age of 50, they’ll have changed jobs an average of 12 times. That means that, if you began working at the age of 18, you’d change jobs every two and a half years. That’s a lot of turnaround in a person’s career. Coaches are imperative in closing the gap between the career aspirations you started with fresh out of college to being established in the working world. The best thing you can do for your future is to find out what kind of position will be the most beneficial for you, thereby making you a more effective employee or leader on someone’s team.
Do the Work, Reap the Rewards
When you’re fully invested, you’ll reap the greatest rewards from your coaching, as coaching can only be effective if you’re willing to learn, if you can be honest with yourself about any shortcomings you need to work through, and if you have the patience to let new practices take over. Don’t waste your money by brushing off your commitments to yourself or becoming lackadaisical about implementing new strategies. It is action and implementation that will gradually rewire your brain to new thought patterns and behaviors.
Coaching for Your Organization
Diversity Coaches through CoachDiversity Institute can also help your organization reach strategic goals, support your leaders in navigating tough periods of change, prepare them for difficult interactions, and help them develop their skill set to lead change in your workplace and in your community. In addition, our coaches are specifically trained to manage topics of race, equity, power, inclusion, belonging, and more. They can help your teams uncover hidden biases in the workplace and break free of them.
CoachDiversity Institute believes in the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Our Certified Diversity Coaches can help your leaders meet personal and professional goals with one-on-one coaching support. Contact us today to learn more.
