People love their coaches and swear by them... but only *after* they get the result.
During the process, it's a different story. That's because a good coach gets the person to do something they could not do alone, something too painful for them to push through without the extra motivation and attention coming from their coach.
It's not a new concept, it's the time honoured principle of "Short term pain, long term gain.", and the coach is trying to help that person get that long term gain that has been eluding them alone. But, in the moment, it can just look like the coach is trying to cause the person unnecessary pain. The complication is that if the coach is inexperienced, he might in fact be causing the person unnecessary pain, and if he is incompetent, he may actually be causing them harm, and it is difficult to know whether you can trust the coach's experience.
If you knew what worked, you would have already tried it, and you would not have that issue, you see? It can help to see whether the coach has many others vouching for them, or whether they have given you great results in the past. Then again, they may have given you great results for one area they were experienced in, but you have moved to another area where they have no experience. For all these reasons, it is hard to judge any particular exercise before you try it, the only valid judgement that can be made is by looking at the results.
So in effect, the coach is the "bad guy" pushing the person towards and through some degree of pain, and it's made worse by the fact that you don't know exactly how bad they are, or whether they actually are inexperienced or incompetent, which can raise a lot of suspicions.
So how do you spot a good "bad guy" as opposed to a bad "bad guy"? An experienced and competent coach for a particular area of performance? It's simple:
First, a good coach will commit to helping you achieve some of your goals, which you will put down in writing. If they can't commit to something specific, then they don't feel confident in their knowledge and ability. Then they will tell you straight up what exercises you will need to do to achieve those goals, including making sure you agree with the purpose of each one, and write that down. Then they will tell you what you will absolutely need to avoid while doing them, and why, and write that down as well. Then, you start doing the exercises.
If you don't complete the goal, you either broke a rule about what you needed to absolutely avoid, or you found an incompetent coach. If you completed the goal and got the reward, but didn't feel it was worth the effort, you either got an inexperienced coach, or you didn't do a great job of following the instructions in the exercise. If you complete the goal and look back and feel it was all well worth it, you got yourself a good coach.
A good coach "knows" you aren't giving things your best shot, even if it's due to some decision you made a long time ago that you've totally forgotten about. They know you are short changing yourself and could do more, and that it's your habits that are holding you back. How do we generally feel about someone who knows some deep dark secret about ourselves that we don't want anyone to find out about? It's threatening to some extent, we wonder if they will tell anyone. These types of secrets that are exposed through coaching are so dark and secret that we have even hidden them from ourselves.
A good coach should feel like someone you want to run away from, but yet you are still attracted to since you can somehow tell that they have good intentions and are competently getting results, and so you realize that the short term pain will result in long term gain, for something that you genuinely want to gain.
The good news is that while the coach may know that you aren't giving things your best shot, they shouldn't really care why, or what that secret is, and don't want to expose it to anyone, except to you, and you don't even need to tell them what it was when it becomes obvious to you. It may be as simple as realizing "Hey, for some reason, I'm not really trying." and feeling a surge of energy and suddenly you are trying much harder and getting better results... and that "secret" habit is gone, and nobody else found out about it, and maybe not even you.
And when that happens, the good "bad guy" becomes the good "good guy" once again... for a while they are awesome and incredible and so on and so forth. Then the next issue comes up that requires coaching and they will be the "bad guy" for a while again. lol.
That's not a bad thing, that's just the way we're built and how the process works.
So let me end this off with a bit of useful pain for you, as I am okay with being considered the "bad guy" for a while. YAY PAIN! If you are ready and want that and can see it's usefulness from what I described, please read on. If not, please stop reading and go watch chicken dance videos on youtube or something, those are hilarious!
Here's one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sTqJE4sdb0
Still here? Alright... don't blame me too much, you agreed... and I even tried to lure you away with chicken dances. =D
The reason that self-improvement often fails is that there is something about your self that sucks. If it didn't suck at least a little, in your own opinion, you would not want to improve it. Often that thing that sucks is preventing you from improving yourself in some other ways, which means there are going to be other parts of you that suck a bit also, right? Those other parts will often prevent you from improving that first thing that sucks, and things just stay the way they are no matter how hard you try.
So self-improvement fails sometimes... not always but sometimes, and if it fails for something important, that can be extremely dissapointing.
That said, it should be obvious that you wouldn't hire someone who sucked at something to help you with something important. Would you hire a surgeon when you had heard they sucked, to remove your appendix? I am guessing no. I think it would make even less sense to hire yourself to remove your own appendix when you had no medical training, am I right? So for some challenging yet important things, it doesn't make sense to help yourself, but to find someone competent and ask for help. Get that important issue resolved and a whole world of possibilities will open up that you couldn't tackle before.
And by the way, I'm NOT saying that YOU suck, I believe everyone is inherantly fine and awesome in their own way, I am just saying that there may be something about you that you think sucks in yourself, and it may be possible to resolve that with coaching, where self-improvement would fail.
Perhaps the only real thing that could suck about you is that you aren't able to ask for, find, and recognize competent help, and if you could, everything would get solved. I am hoping the underlined criteria I laid out earlier in my post about how to find a competent coach will prove useful for that.
All the best,
Mark
During the process, it's a different story. That's because a good coach gets the person to do something they could not do alone, something too painful for them to push through without the extra motivation and attention coming from their coach.
It's not a new concept, it's the time honoured principle of "Short term pain, long term gain.", and the coach is trying to help that person get that long term gain that has been eluding them alone. But, in the moment, it can just look like the coach is trying to cause the person unnecessary pain. The complication is that if the coach is inexperienced, he might in fact be causing the person unnecessary pain, and if he is incompetent, he may actually be causing them harm, and it is difficult to know whether you can trust the coach's experience.
If you knew what worked, you would have already tried it, and you would not have that issue, you see? It can help to see whether the coach has many others vouching for them, or whether they have given you great results in the past. Then again, they may have given you great results for one area they were experienced in, but you have moved to another area where they have no experience. For all these reasons, it is hard to judge any particular exercise before you try it, the only valid judgement that can be made is by looking at the results.
So in effect, the coach is the "bad guy" pushing the person towards and through some degree of pain, and it's made worse by the fact that you don't know exactly how bad they are, or whether they actually are inexperienced or incompetent, which can raise a lot of suspicions.
So how do you spot a good "bad guy" as opposed to a bad "bad guy"? An experienced and competent coach for a particular area of performance? It's simple:
First, a good coach will commit to helping you achieve some of your goals, which you will put down in writing. If they can't commit to something specific, then they don't feel confident in their knowledge and ability. Then they will tell you straight up what exercises you will need to do to achieve those goals, including making sure you agree with the purpose of each one, and write that down. Then they will tell you what you will absolutely need to avoid while doing them, and why, and write that down as well. Then, you start doing the exercises.
If you don't complete the goal, you either broke a rule about what you needed to absolutely avoid, or you found an incompetent coach. If you completed the goal and got the reward, but didn't feel it was worth the effort, you either got an inexperienced coach, or you didn't do a great job of following the instructions in the exercise. If you complete the goal and look back and feel it was all well worth it, you got yourself a good coach.
A good coach "knows" you aren't giving things your best shot, even if it's due to some decision you made a long time ago that you've totally forgotten about. They know you are short changing yourself and could do more, and that it's your habits that are holding you back. How do we generally feel about someone who knows some deep dark secret about ourselves that we don't want anyone to find out about? It's threatening to some extent, we wonder if they will tell anyone. These types of secrets that are exposed through coaching are so dark and secret that we have even hidden them from ourselves.
A good coach should feel like someone you want to run away from, but yet you are still attracted to since you can somehow tell that they have good intentions and are competently getting results, and so you realize that the short term pain will result in long term gain, for something that you genuinely want to gain.
The good news is that while the coach may know that you aren't giving things your best shot, they shouldn't really care why, or what that secret is, and don't want to expose it to anyone, except to you, and you don't even need to tell them what it was when it becomes obvious to you. It may be as simple as realizing "Hey, for some reason, I'm not really trying." and feeling a surge of energy and suddenly you are trying much harder and getting better results... and that "secret" habit is gone, and nobody else found out about it, and maybe not even you.
And when that happens, the good "bad guy" becomes the good "good guy" once again... for a while they are awesome and incredible and so on and so forth. Then the next issue comes up that requires coaching and they will be the "bad guy" for a while again. lol.
That's not a bad thing, that's just the way we're built and how the process works.
So let me end this off with a bit of useful pain for you, as I am okay with being considered the "bad guy" for a while. YAY PAIN! If you are ready and want that and can see it's usefulness from what I described, please read on. If not, please stop reading and go watch chicken dance videos on youtube or something, those are hilarious!
Here's one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sTqJE4sdb0
Still here? Alright... don't blame me too much, you agreed... and I even tried to lure you away with chicken dances. =D
The reason that self-improvement often fails is that there is something about your self that sucks. If it didn't suck at least a little, in your own opinion, you would not want to improve it. Often that thing that sucks is preventing you from improving yourself in some other ways, which means there are going to be other parts of you that suck a bit also, right? Those other parts will often prevent you from improving that first thing that sucks, and things just stay the way they are no matter how hard you try.
So self-improvement fails sometimes... not always but sometimes, and if it fails for something important, that can be extremely dissapointing.
That said, it should be obvious that you wouldn't hire someone who sucked at something to help you with something important. Would you hire a surgeon when you had heard they sucked, to remove your appendix? I am guessing no. I think it would make even less sense to hire yourself to remove your own appendix when you had no medical training, am I right? So for some challenging yet important things, it doesn't make sense to help yourself, but to find someone competent and ask for help. Get that important issue resolved and a whole world of possibilities will open up that you couldn't tackle before.
And by the way, I'm NOT saying that YOU suck, I believe everyone is inherantly fine and awesome in their own way, I am just saying that there may be something about you that you think sucks in yourself, and it may be possible to resolve that with coaching, where self-improvement would fail.
Perhaps the only real thing that could suck about you is that you aren't able to ask for, find, and recognize competent help, and if you could, everything would get solved. I am hoping the underlined criteria I laid out earlier in my post about how to find a competent coach will prove useful for that.
All the best,
Mark
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