Having put myself through the paces of researching and developing a different approach to coaching, I am ready to offer a more concrete coaching program.  I’m one of those people who needs to hear, see and do something (sometimes several times) before I “get” whatever it is that I need to learn so I don’t know why I thought coming up with a new way of coaching (for my clients) would be any different.  For awhile now, I’ve been interested in the idea of coaching people who understood what they wanted to achieve or at least what their end goals was for having hiring a Coach (i.e. figuring out what career path they could/should take).  I also wondered if these same people would be interested in divvying up their coaching sessions from the traditional one 40 minute session every other week (i.e. 3 sessions/month) to 20 minutes of laser coaching M-F or MWF 2-3 weeks in a row depending on their coaching plan.  For new clients, or people that I don’t know and who obviously don’t know me, there would be an initial 45 minute coaching session at the beginning which would allow us to get all our ducks in a row.

As blessings would have it, one of my close coaching friends who I’ve been in a Master Mind group with for going on eleven years, heard my plea that I loved coaching but wanted to come up with a way of offering my services that better suited who I was and how I showed up at the table.  This friend of mine and I began doing some R&D on this method less than a week ago and already I “know” this is the direction that I will take.  Additionally, my parents (mom and step-dad) have also stepped into this laboratory to help support me in the coaching program that I am in the midst of creating.  I hadn’t realized how important asking and receiving the support I needed for redesigning and expanding my coaching business was to me but now that I’ve received it, I’m completely off and running.  I’m in the process of putting together an R&D team for further research and already people who want to be coached this way are stepping out of the wood work.

The purpose of this blog isn’t necessarily to advertise or market myself as a Coach (though any inquiries are greatly accepted) but to share some immediate examples of how asking for what you need and being receptive to receiving the support you need is a partnership for you to get what you need.  I think for those of us who are pretty resourceful and tend to be the kind of people who land on our feet, asking for what we need and then allowing people to give us that support is a very difficult thing for us to do because we are admitting that we are not one hundred percent in control (which, by the way is an illusion anyway) and we’re in at least some capacity, vulnerable. For those of us who have taken all kind of classes and seminars on leadership, the good ones usually tell us that a powerful leader is one who is willing to show their humanity.  I know that for me, I have always trusted those leaders who were willing to show me that although they were very good at what they did, that they were, after all,  human.  That took all the guess work out of the picture for me when I would usually  sit there and have this inner dialogue with myself while they were talking and I wondered what their imperfections were instead of paying attention to what they had to teach me.  A leader who could ask for what they needed and then gratefully receive that support always became someone who I wanted to pay close attention to because I trusted them.

Admitting that we need some support in an area of our lives is usually fraught with fear for most of us, but when we are willing to relinquish at least some of our control over the situation, the steady warmth of receiving what we asked for seems to be just what we need to bolster up our courage to carry our vision through.

Where, how and who will you ask for support today?