7 Fatal Mistakes people make when choosing a Coach

Coaching is a future-focused session to help you determine and achieve your goals. By examining what is going on in your life now, we can discover your obstacles or challenges and co-design a course of action to make your goals, ambitions, and dreams a reality. Picking your coach is just as important as picking your doctor, dentist, and hairdresser. Your future is worth the best, so here are some common mistakes I see people making when picking their coach!

Let me reveal a secret: the Coaching Industry is NOT regulated. That’s right—anyone can call themselves a coach and charge people for it. The industry is filled with dabblers with little qualification and experience. Often they have completed a workshop, read a book, and have personal experience. What they don’t know is what they don’t know. Your coach should not be teaching you from theory. A coaches effectiveness results from extensive training, mentorship, experience, and being coached themselves.

Here are tips for finding a highly trained and experienced professional coach. 

1. ASK ABOUT THEIR TRAINING

Make sure you work with someone who has invested time, effort, and money into creating a life and business designed to help YOU. Take time to interview your coach, ask about their education and experience, how many clients they have helped, and how many clients they are currently supporting. A big one, do they have a coach? If not, run!

When you are looking for a Coach, look for someone with values and who is passionate about Coaching. This is evident in the fact that they also work with a Coach themselves and are always seeking to improve what they can offer you. Their working with a Coach within their own lives is also a sign that they are probably not going to be triggered by YOUR life and can, therefore, remain objective in helping you to overcome them.

You want a coach supporting you to achieve your dreams – so work with someone who can offer you the best possible skills, strategies, and experience that you deserve (and you deserve a lot, by the way).

2. CONSIDER WHAT YOU WANT OUT OF COACHING

We all want something, but for most of us, something is holding us back from taking action or creating our vision. The role of a coach is to help you clarify what is important to you, what you want, and how you can break your fear, insecurities, patterns, and procrastinating. All you have to know is what you want, or at least a good idea. The coach will do the rest. 

Coaches often have a niche or specialty they work in. While a qualified coach can coach anyone, working with someone who specializes in what you want can be beneficial. Look for skills first, niche second.

3. DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN AN EXPERT, MENTOR, AND COACH

When your toilet is clogged, you aren’t going to ask the electrician to fix it, are you? We have many experts and mentors in our life. So why would you ask, or even expect, your trainer, nutritionist, or therapist to coach you? We have many experts in our life, our hairdresser, physician, and massage therapist these people have the expertise we don’t and provide the service we need. 

A mentor is someone who shares their knowledge, skills, and/or experience, to help another to develop and grow. A coach is someone who provides guidance to a client on their goals and helps them reach their full potential. 

When you need someone to teach you how to do something and bring best practices and expertise—You want a mentor. 

When you want someone to support you in setting goals, support you through challenges and resistance, and design actions to reach your goal—You want a coach.

Your friends are cool. That’s why you’re friends with them. But let’s take a quick reality check. You are the product of the five people you spend the most time with. This is a fact! Unless you’re friends with Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mel Robbins, and Deepak Chopra, then the people you surround yourself with will probably have similar understandings of your issues as what you do.

4. INTERVIEW AND FIND THE COACH FOR YOU

Working with a coach is like asking something to be on your team and play on the same side as you. A coach is your cheerleader and wingman, all wrapped up in one! Your coach wants you to WIN, and since they only ever have your best interests at heart, a coach WILL see through all your excuses and limiting beliefs. A coach will never judge you for your past, present, or future desires.

Working with a coach is a fun and exciting journey! Yes, there will be challenges, but if you have picked the right person for your team, you will never have to face those challenges alone.

5. LOOK FOR A COACH WHO LISTENS

If your coach spends the entire interview selling themselves and not curiously asking about your goal and asking how you want to be supported, chances are they won’t listen during coaching either. 

6. NOTICE WHAT DRAWS YOU TO THEM: THEIR STORY OR TRAINING

Most coaches start coaching because they truly want to help people who have faced similar challenges. But, their story and what they have done in their life to face their story do not make them qualified to coach you. We can easily be pulled by a story of recovery, survival, and thriving. So hear their story, and ask how they prepared themselves to be a coach.

7. LOOK AT THE RESULTS

Okay, you have picked the coach you want to work with, but you are not getting results in a reasonable or agreed-to amount of time. There could be several things happening. It could be resistance or a challenge you haven’t identified, a mismatch between coach and client. No matter what, don’t ignore this. Talk to your coach! A great coach will discuss this openly and look with you for solutions, identify hurdles, challenges and resistance, and the option of a different coach. If they don’t, if they blame you or tell you only they can help, run!