“Everyone needs a coach.” ~ Bill Gates
Hard work will make you very good at what you do. Throw in some training and read a few books and you can get really good. But it is only when you work with an executive coach that you will become the very best in the world at what you do.
A professional coach will help you uncover what truly drives you, leverage emotional intelligence in the workplace, and enable you to achieve all that you want to achieve in your life. All of this will ensure you are becoming your best self.
Don't take our word for it, watch these two videos to see what others think:
Everyone needs a Coach: Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt
Want to get great at something? Get a coach | Atul Gawande
Here are some ways a leadership coach can help you:
Self-Awareness
A critical first step in the process of bettering yourself is self-awareness. Accepting the reality that we are all human and thus have strengths and weaknesses is a powerful first step. It’s nearly impossible to grow and improve without a firm grounding in reality. And the very best executive coaches are skilled at helping their clients become more self-aware.
Often times, people are not aware of how their behavior impacts others in a group or workplace until someone points it out. Even then, change can be difficult. Until you have fully accepted that you have an issue and want to make a change on your own, you will continue to fall back to these natural tendencies and proclivities. We all need a future that we are committed to in order to actually make a change.
Self-Mastery
Being emotionally aware or emotionally intelligent means that you are aware of your emotions and thus have an opportunity to make a conscious choice about which emotions are serving you well and which emotions may be tripping you up. Self-mastery is this ability to make more and more decisions consciously. For example, if you are intimidated by someone in the office, you may not realize it and react to them in a hostile way or feel uneasy around them. Once you realize this, you then have an opportunity to make a conscious decision: What could I do to address this person face to face and create a relationship that moves beyond the intimidation? What strategies could I put in place that will allow me to better handle this person? Who else might be able to help? What else could I do?
Self-awareness is the first step in attaining self-mastery, meaning that you will be able to handle these situations a lot more easily and with comfort. People with high emotional intelligence will have better self-mastery skills. Lack of these skills can really have an effect not only on your personal life but your professional and work life too. As your coach helps, you will start to see improvement in a lot of areas of your life.
Learning Empathy
Empathy is when you understand someone's emotions in a way that you can put yourself in their shoes and know what they feel. The pace of life is only accelerating which makes this particular trait relatively rare. A coach can help someone exercise their ability to be more empathetic and this is crucial in nurturing healthy relationships. Great leaders are empathetic, and people trust others who can be empathetic.
Cognitive Expansion
Broadening your emotional intelligence will expand your mind, while also bettering the way you interact with other people. You will be open to seeing new perspectives in all situations. Having a flexible mindset will boost your cognition, which can be used to improve your work life, as well as others around you.
To learn more about Growth Mindset, click here.
Increased Motivation
It’s no secret that better motivation will lead to better success. This motivation will significantly increase your ability to accomplish your goals which will make you more effective in the workplace and in life in general. Being self-aware and knowing how to create self-mastery over your emotions will help with your motivation levels as well. Discovering what you find important and what you are willing to do to reach that point will increase your motivation, which is crucial for success.
Social Intelligence
Social skills are important in having successful relationships. And relationships are the root of all effective teamwork and building effective relationships rooted in trust is the most important skill of any great leader.
Being a Better Leader
Overall, a coach can help you become a better leader, a better manager and a better coach with good self-mastery, emotional intelligence, strong motivation, a growth mindset and empathy. All these traits are important to become a successful, more reliable leader to your peers.
Phoenix Perform provides executive coaching & team building consulting for enterprises, get in touch today to see how we can help.
PHOENIX SUMMARY
Core Idea:
Working on bettering yourself with an executive coach will help improve your workplace's self awareness, regulation, learning empathy, cognitive expansion, motivation, social intelligence & help improve your leadership skills.
Key take away:
Working on being more aware of your own faults when working with others, can bring improved overall happiness into your company.
About the author(s):
Tom Willis is a Co-Founder and Partner with Phoenix Performance Partners. He had the great honor of serving as CEO for Cornerstone; a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers; and an engineer with the Intel Corporation. His life is all about helping others uncover their talents so they can reach their unlimited potential and their organization can thrive.
| Linkedin: Tom
Brad Zimmerman is a Co-Founder and Partner with Phoenix Performance Partners. Zimmerman turned to organizational coaching more than 26 years ago following a successful career in sales and operations. Today, he helps businesses, nonprofits and other organizations develop cultures that transform work environments so people grow and the organizations thrive.
| Linkedin: Brad