On Wednesday, May 16, Ultimate Coach University launched its fifth cohort of coaches.  That’s said with a little sense of pride.  The bigger feeling is a sense of wonder as new coaches understand what it means to be a coach and are playing full-out in their new role.

Yesterday’s training was about thinking like a coach.  Today’s focus is on the skills of a coach: listening, curiosity, and asking open-ended questions.  Tomorrow’s topics are on acting like a coach.  We’ll update you throughout the day on Facebook and in the near future we’ll have a video or two where we give some students the opportunity to talk about their experience during the three days.

UCU continues to grow in the breadth of its offerings.  When we started last summer, we offered specialized major in life coaching, direct sales coaching, and salon coaching.  In this launch workshop we’ve added a fourth major, Quantum NLP coaching.  When we have our next Launch workshop in Dallas on September 12-14, we’ll be adding students to a new track in business coaching.  And enrollment is open.

1. What can you do and what is it worth? If the most you can earn from doing the most lucrative things in your business is $50 an hour, then you can’t hire anyone for more than that for anything.  You’d lose money. For example, ABC Widgets will pay you $50 an hour as a creative designer.  There is nothing in your skill set that will let you earn a higher wage.  If you pay Susan Doe $50 an hour to answer the phone and do office work while you are out designing, then you don’t make any money.

2. What can you hire someone to do?  Frankly, you can pay someone to do just about anything.  You just have to decide what it is you don’t want to do.

3. What criteria will you use to determine the roles that you need filled?  Just because you can hire somebody doesn’t mean you should.  Some tasks may be eliminated or saved for your down time.  You may also be able to find hidden talents with people who you already know.  Once, for example, I had an office manager who was very competent at her job.  And then I discovered she could also take dictation at meetings.  The dictation could be added into her description much cheaper than it could be outsourced.

4. How will you earn while your employees are costing you money?  Usually you want to hire someone to do the jobs that you don’t want to do.  However, that doesn’t necessarily mean you get a vacation. Make sure that you can work enough extra to cover the cost of your new hires.

5. Who will you get to improve your game?  Your success team is more than the people you can hire to do the current jobs.  One key member of your success team is a mentor or a coach that is going to support you in improving your business.  While I’ve left it for last in this list, you might want to consider finding this person first.  They will support you in answering the other questions better than you can do on your own.

What other topics pop up on your agenda for building a success team?

What you haven’t figured out is how to make yourself do it.   That’s why coaching matters.  Here are three key ideas to explore this more.

Coaching asks the hard questions. Training may ask about what do you want and what you are willing to do to get there.  When was the last time that a trainer asked questions like:

• What has prevented you from doing this before?
• What will prevent your old habits from slipping back in?
• What happened the last time you tried that?
• What’s going to be different this time?

In other words, a coach supports you in putting your focus on your mental state before you start to take action.

Coaching supports your perseverance. To truly change, you must build new habits and that requires consistent and persistent change.  The changes that you make don’t have to be giant steps; they just have to move you in the direction of your new habit.  Now imagine the scene where week after week you are paying your coach to listen to you say, “I didn’t do what I said that I would.”  One of the biggest reasons people hire a coach is to have an accountability partner.  Trainers don’t do that.

Coaching values success.  The pain of saying you failed is worse than the risk of failure; the reward for telling your coach you succeeded is higher than the reward for doing nothing.  The value of success is higher than the comfort of doing nothing and failing.  You are in it for the long-term gain. When you work with a coach, you are in a low judgment zone.  Your coach wants you to succeed on your terms and will support you on your journey.

There is a place for training.  A combination of training and coaching are often the most successful approach within a company.  The error is in not recognizing the differences between the two which results in not getting the best of either.