Tag / coach

by Nathan Coumbe

What does coaching mean to you?

I heard the best description of what a coach does this week on Michael Hyatt’s podcast, “Lead to Win”:

“I love developing people and helping [them] to see the best potential in them and call it out. And that is what coaching is all about.”

That quote is from Michele Cushatt, Chief Coaching Officer at Michael Hyatt & Company. (You can check out the episode here.)

Her definition of coaching leapt out at me… I had to listen to it at least three times. 

Most of us have an image in our head of a coach as a cheerleader… Maybe it’s someone who tells you “great job” when you finish a task or make a little progress. 

Or maybe “coach” conjures images of someone putting you through drills or practices to help you develop a skill. 

Coaches can and should do those things. But that’s not the essence of what coaching is…

A great coach sees the potential in another person and calls it out! That’s the key. They bring forth what’s already inside someone else. 

They help someone become the best person they can be. The person they are destined to become.

Do you have someone in your life doing that for you? If not, can you find someone?

Or is there someone you know who’s got tons of potential but can’t see it? Or hasn’t developed it? 

Why can’t you take the role of coach and call it out to them?

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by Nathan Coumbe

Everything is marketing. Everything is sales.

That’s the premise.

Even on the smallest scale, we are marketing and selling. It might not be products but rather ideas or ways of thinking and being. 

If I have an idea about how people can behave or change to improve their lives, to become the best possible versions of themselves, it does no one any good unless I can persuade them to adopt the ideas. That means that I have to sell to them.

“Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone.”

– Seth Godin, This Is Marketing, p. xiv

Marketing and sales are both about influence; each of us must influence others to create change (we will get into the ethics of influence in another post).

Leadership in the modern age is sales and marketing. During the Industrial Age, a leader told an employee what to do and that person either complied or left. In the Knowledge Age, a leader must influence those who follow. You can still attempt tell people what to do, but it rarely leads to enrollment and willing compliance, without which high-quality work does not occur. However, influencing them – by empathizing and understanding what they want, feel, need, and believe, and then having the courage to let them know your ideas for progress – this sort of leadership brings others willingly to your way of thinking. (It also potentially creates better ideas than either party came up with on their own.)

Every career requires sales and marketing. A psychologist is both a salesperson and a marketer. If they do not market, they do not get patients. She cannot rely on her credentials to bring people into the office.

A teacher is marketing each time she sets foot in the classroom. If she cannot get her students to come with her, if she cannot get them excited and willing to go on the learning journey, her knowledge and expertise are useless. She must influence them.

If you coach people on how to level up their careers, personal lives, or get past negative scripting from earlier life periods, you must sell them on the ideas you present. If you fail to do so, or do it poorly, you have failed to create change or the desire for it in the other person. 

Regardless of whom you seek to influence, you must always begin by understanding them, their points of view, their wants, desires, worries, fears, and problems. That is always the first step to influence, and influence is marketing.

We all must influence others to make change happen, and if everything is marketing and everything is sales, you might as well learn to do it well.

Start with this book here.

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