Coaching and Mentoring (using one)
Once you’ve been hired to do a job, particularly if it’s a well paid and/or high-flying job, you’re supposed to know everything, be able to handle everything with ease, deal with other people’s problems and in general be super-person. Right? Well, not exactly.
There are loads of people who get hired for, or promoted to, really good jobs because of the skills and capabilities they have demonstrated. Yet six months later they are floundering and don’t appear to be up to it all.
You may be one of those people.
It’s not unusual for people, even at the beginning of their careers, to feel they are supposed to know more and be able to do more than they are currently able to. A common and recurrent nightmare is the feeling that somehow they will be ‘found out’ as not being up to the job and thrown out on their ear.
What can get left out when people are vintage triumph motorcycle parts hired for a job - wherever they are on the career ladder - is that they will need some form of guidance and support along the way. Some companies know this and part of their employee care is to have a coaching and/or mentoring programme in place. Unfortunately, many do not.
For people who do work for such a company, it may feel uncomfortable or embarrassing asking for support internally, and so cooking vacations international they go without. This is where the ‘I should know it all already’ belief kicks in, and the offers of coaching or mentoring go unheeded because:
“I’ll look weak.”
“I won’t want people to know I’ve asked for help.”
“My staff won’t respect me if they know I’m seeing someone.”
“It’s counselling isn’t it – I don’t need counselling.”
“I sample of resume of a sales lady think it’s great our company has this terrific programme, I’ll recommend it to my staff – not my kind of thing really.”
“If they thought I needed coaching I 80's for children "1980s in fashion" wouldn’t have been hired in the first place.”
“They must think I’m not doing so well if they think I need coaching.”
And so on.
Let’s take David Beckham (we know, we know, there’s plenty of us who’d like to take David Beckham), who obviously got hired for his manifest talent but also his potential. He brought a lot of his innate ability with him, but what has developed his talent has been careful, consistent and constant coaching. This has been both for his skill as a footballer and his maturity as a human being. He didn’t start out as England’s Captain, but got there through his hard work and the hard work of many others. No embarrassment there in having coaching.
See, if you were a sports person, you’d know what to do: you’d have a coach who’d work with you on your fitness, your training and eating regimens, your attitude, your goals. You’d be supported by someone who had your best interests as a priority. You wouldn’t even question that coaching was part of the deal; it would be integral to your development.
Coaches help us get red bull vending machines better at what we already do. All of us need guidance and motivation at different times in our lives: someone to ‘coach’ us into the corporate equivalent of swimming those extra laps or helping us make those crucial adjustments to our golf swing.
Good coaching is unbiased, objective support that sees and identifies the best of your qualities and abilities and helps you develop them; it sees and identifies which hurdles are hard to get over and finds ways
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