You don’t need to be a great leader to become a coach

Hi friends, this is Geeta again.

So how have you been dear listeners and my friends!

I thank you all for giving to me such a wonderful and overwhelming response on my maiden blog. I am grateful to all of you. Thank you so much.

I am so greatly encouraged by your enthusiasm and today I will share my views on the topic “You don’t need to be a great leader to become a coach”.

So you will naturally ask me that you thought that a leader is a coach too. No my friends that is the first wrong notion on being a coach. There is no correlation between a leader and a coach. Both can be mutually exclusive. Generally we tend to overlap both leader and a coach believing that the one follows the other.

Let me share my views on this topic. Leaders as we understand is that person who has the capability to walk like a pied piper, who leaves a trail of actions which make him a hero and rest of us follow him or her blindly because we place complete faith in him / her. A good and effective leader is that person who is among us, pushes us to achieve greater heights, pushes us to move forward, is there in our need and at times will guide us when stuck in situations. Generally we think that a leader is capable of answering all our questions and all we need to do is approach them and we get the magic potion. This may be fallacy because remember the leaders are as human as you and me. They can go wrong, act off guard, be wrong and do wrong as well. We should avoid being judgemental.

So if I am not a great leader, but have confidence, stand by my convictions, be straight and honest, can I qualify to be a coach? Why not? Why should you have the doubt? First remember all of us are human beings and we are wired to go wrong, we are not machines who are geared to do right. People exercise choices whereas machines act what they are taught. We have a mind which is a complex mass of construction and destruction as well. You need to decide what you wish to be.

I decided to become a coach at the young age of 60 years because after two decades and more of corporate experience I felt the need to explore more of the human mind and want to reach out to people when stuck.  Yes I was lucky that I was in a leader’s role as well but that was not the key. Important was from within I desired to help people, relationships etc. Guess what I recently heard that there is a young coach of 14 years who is a coach and helping his age group and younger persons in maths problem solving and giving them guidance to overcome the fear of numbers.  Is this not encouraging for all of us? If he can do it so can I?

So what do you think he did differently? To my mind he saw in his mind that he could solve numbers, help with passion others who got stuck with numbers and then he drew his own structured plan of the business. I heard that he was trained under Mr. Arfeen Khan – I don’t know much about him at the moment but I am gathering information about him. Let me know if you guys are interested to know about him and his coaching. Do write in the comments section your interest to know Mr. Khan.

So let me sum up for you what I think can make a coach:

• Any person of any age can become a coach
• A coach needs to be a good listener
• Coach should have the love to listen to other people’s stories (are we not full of them?)
• Coach should have the confidence to get others out of the messy situation
• Coach should not be our Dictaphone but through powerful questions they should be able to lead us out of the mess
• Coach should be confidential in data that they get from people. Trust is the foundation of any relationship
• Coach should have a structure while coaching people. Ask probing questions at the appropriate time
• Coach respects time and money
• Coach should be able to give value to the persons under them because that is the sticky part of any mess
• Coach should not be the emotional crutches of people, instead transferring of confidence to the person is important
• Coach should ask challenging questions and at times it is worth it that you become uncomfortable with your situation
• Coach should use coaching as a language of change and learning
• Coach should be able to maximise on your potential

The list is endless but I do believe that everybody needs somebody in life to guide you better. Once again I end my blog quoting the famous quote of Bill Gates