What is Small Business Coaching?

By Stan Mann, coaching the Detroit area in person and worldwide clients by telephone.

The New Business Coaching Profession

Coaching is based on accepting and honoring you as the expert of your life and career.  A coach realizes that you are a resourceful individual, creative, and whole.

 

Using that base, coaches must:

• Help you understand and clarify what it is you want to achieve and assist you in aligning your goals accordingly.
• Fan the flames of self-discovery.
• Encourage you to generate your own solutions and strategies.
• Hold you alone accountable and responsible for implementing discovered strategies.

Professional coaching aims to produce fulfilling results within your life – both professional and personal.  To accomplish this, an ongoing partnership is established between the coach and the ‘coached’ to motivate your learning, enhance your performance, and improve your quality of life.

 

During a coaching session, you are the source of conversation; you direct the focus.  The coach will simply contribute and ask questions that will help you clarify your points and inspire you into action.

 

You are the source of forward momentum; your ideas and strategies are at the core.  Coaching simply accelerates your progress.  Your coach focuses your thinking and makes you aware of possible choices.

 

Ultimately, coaching illuminates where you are and helps you explore what you are willing to do to get to where you want to be.

 

What Exactly Does a Small Business Coach Do?

A coach helps you understand yourself and all those that you interact with.  As your knowledge increases, you’ll understand how to generate maximum influence.

 

A coach may also lead you to adjust your surroundings (both people and things) in order to facilitate inspiration instead of hindrances.  They’ll help you set focused goals and then provide tools and support to enhance your achievement of those goals.

 

A coach who supports you and communicates well will push you into action – probably going further than you would have on your own.

 

In What Areas can Coaching Help?

Professional coaching can illuminate and help you attain dreams in different areas of your life, like:

• Career: Learn more, rise up the ranks, and earn more.
• Health: Focus on implementing everyday ways of becoming fit and healthy.
• Relationships: Learn how to develop intimacy.
• And more.

 

How is Coaching Different from Other Avenues of Support?

How is coaching better than consulting? 

• Honestly, coaching is a type of consulting, but coaches remain faithfully dedicated to your progress, whereas a consultant tells you how to improve and leaves you to it.
• How is coaching better than therapy?
• Unlike therapy which focuses on the past, coaching focuses on the present and what to do in the present to ensure your future.  Coaching treats you as if you are an emotionally stable person who has already achieved some success and want to go beyond.

 

How is coaching better than sports coaching?

• Professional coaching uses some principals taken directly from sports like goals, teamwork, and success.  Unlike sports coaching, however, professional coaching is not based on competition or on winning and losing.  Professional coaching is a win/win scenario, especially as your skills and assets are strengthened to continue improving your life.

 

How is coaching better than the advice and support of a best friend?

• While it’s true that best friends offer an exorbitant amount of support – something of incalculable worth, chances are that your friend is not giving you advice based on substantial training and experience.

 

What is Your Unique Coaching Philosophy?

I believe that you already possess the resources that you need to become great – inner resources that can be tapped using my triggering tools.  I also believe that taking the time to explore how to become greater proves that you are already are, to some degree, more advanced and poised for success than your peers.

 

For What Reasons Should I Hire a Small Business Coach?

There are several, easy-to-evaluate reasons for hiring a small business coach.

1. You have between 2 and 200 employees.
2. You desire more.
3. One of your goals is growth.
4. You want to make the process easier.

 

There it is – the simple reasons you should hire a small business coach who can help you implement strategies to reach your goals as efficiently as possible.

 

What Does the Hiring Process Look Like?

When you hire a coach, that coach will help you:

• Establish focused and effective action plans.
• Define your goals better.
• Shed the negative from your life, simultaneously opening your life to more positives through your goals and your plans to achieve your goals.
• Accelerate results.

 

When you hire a coach, you will get:

• Immediate support.
• Renewed confidence.
• A desire to make changes that bring improvement (small or big).
• A professional coach who is trained to help you improve every aspect of your life.

 

What Kind of Personal Focus is Offered?

Focus is placed where you place it.  Remember, that the discussions and topics originate with you, as do many of the suggestions and solutions.

 

Coaching typically also sprinkles in the development of personal strength, reserve increase, and value-based goal setting.  You will respond favorably as you see how smoothly the process flows and how successful you feel and become.

 

What Factors of Your Small Business Coaching Model make it Successful?

First, momentum is created by the relationship and synergy between you and your coach.

 

Second, the goals that your coach will help you make will be better defined and aligned so closely to your desires and values that you will naturally lean toward fulfilling them.

 

Third, your coach will not only show where you want to go and how to get there, but he or she will help you remove as many hindrances as possible from your path.

 

These three aspects of our coaching model equates into greater success for you.

 

Why is Coaching Becoming so Popular?

Thomas J. Leonard, a founding father of personal and business coaching, explained several reasons why coaching has become more and more popular.

 

1. Leonard insisted that people become weary of simply doing what they ‘should’ do.  He says that they may then start to wonder what special or meaningful thing they can donate the rest of their lives to.  Coaching can help a person not only understand what it is they want to do, but will also help them reorient their life around that new goal.
2. Another reason listed by Leonard, is the increasing time and resources some may have now to invest in growing as an individual and maybe pursuing their dreams.  A coach has a large toolkit available to help move your Pipedream into a Reality.
3. Leonard invokes the spiritualizing of America as another reason why coaching is becoming more and more popular.  Many coaches have a spiritual base and can help you focus more deeply on the spiritual ideals you are exploring.

 

As a note, the working definition of spirituality here is: “How connected you feel to yourself and society.”